Catherine Havasi: Digital Intuition through Natural Language Processing

ConceptNet Map describing
relationships between concepts

20110221

As my faithful readers will know, I have recently become very interested in data processing.  This season's ATLAS lecture series has been excellent so far, and I couldn't pass this one up.  Catherine Havasi conducts research at the MIT Media Lab in the field of Natural Language Processing or NLP.  This is the field that is defining the way  we use computers to analyze data, specifically in the linguistic realm.  For the past 12 years, she has been working on  a research project, Open Mind Common Sense, which shifts the focus towards Natural Language Understanding.  Using assumptions about how things work and the connections between objects and concepts, conclusions can be made about very large data sets.  She presents these conclusions in a three dimensional vector space known as AnalogySpace (built in Processing) and a database known as ConceptNet.

Ian Bogost: The Material Constraints of Art and Programming

Double Plus Good... I was planning on attending this lecture, and then was asked to work the event.  Score.  I got to get paid to go, and had a few extra moments to speak with Ian.  Not only that, it was amazing.

Ian Bogost at ATL&S' Black Box Theater

Ian Bogost is a media philosopher and designer who focuses particularly on video games.  He is a professor at Georgia Tech and accomplished author.  This afternoon Ian gave an excellent presentation about the evolution of not only video game media, but also some of the theory behind material constraints.  For example, he programs for an Atari system, but is limited not only by the amount of RAM he can use, but also the number of addressable sprites and objects is 'limited'.  These boundaries, Ian poses, help to define the creativity that goes into the utilization of these types of tools.  This goes for older systems like Atari, or even newer platforms like like the XBox360 or PS3.