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Where's the AI part? The video clip talked about learning -- what's to learn? For the sharing of calendars, why is that necessary? So, my software sends you

by graycat 12y ago

Where's the AI part? The video clip talked about learning -- what's to learn? For the sharing of calendars, why is that necessary? So, my software sends you and three other people e-mail asking for a meeting with all of us somewhere in NYC Midtown next week. So, each of you sends back some candidate times. If you have the same software, it grabs the e-mail (say, from some tag in the header lines) and sends back to my e-mail some candidate times. My software answers, and there is a negotiation. If each person invited has the same software, then the software can negotiate, very soon, when all the software agents can be available to negotiate with my software agent, and then the negotiation can go really fast. Sure, if your software proposes several times and my software won't accept any of those, then someone looking at the e-mail flows could find times when I was busy. A biggie? Maybe not. Once all the agents are available, they could negotiate how to communicate peer to peer, that is, faster than e-mail, and really extensive negotiations could be done in less than a second. And the peer to peer traffic could be encrypted and, really, not easily available otherwise, that is, relatively secure. My agent could have my appointments already and know when I will be at a meeting in NJ and consider my travel time to NYC Midtown to know when I could be available at Midtown. What else to do? What's wrong with that outline? Where's the AI or the learning needed? Yes, there could be some high push for virality and a network effect. But, then, still, there's no very good barrier to entry. I.e., it's awfully easy to program, and if the scheduling software of some one company wants to schedule only with other copies of their software, then a disrupting company could offer to have open communications and be willing to schedule with other software. Then this little idea would go for nearly a freebie, and no one would make any money. Ah, but encrypted communications and communicating with other software combine to yield a security problem -- anyone could write fake software that would report the unencrypted data. More generally, does look hackable so that there would be security risks. Maybe a must-have for some people, but if they are meeting outside their office then there's a lot of travel likely. In that case, maybe use video conferencing. I don't see much of a business opportunity there.

fchollet 12y ago
> Where's the AI needed? Marketing, I assume. Giving people their very own Jarvis to interact with could be a selling point (even if it's less efficient than a GUI-based scheduling solution), and the "AI" buzzword will certainly draw more attention to the product than a scheduling app would normally get.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  Building a conversation model which can negotiate with multiple guests on behalf of the host in plain english is not easy (for us). This includes simple social concepts such as "compromise" - say, when to push for one location over another. The information extraction problem alone is a major challenge. No buzzwords needed, we are just trying to do some good work, and if we succeed, we think many people would like it: https://twitter.com/search?q=xdotai https://twitter.com/search?q=xdotai
  - fchollet 12y ago
    Good luck with your company, I wish you succeed. NLP is certainly no piece of cake.
  - graycat 12y ago
    > plain English Gads. That's tough to do well, and as a user I'd always wonder if the software got it right unless I just kept checking. And why try with plain English? Heck, long ago I commonly wrote Fortran programs with very easy to use input: Start with a file that asks for all the data. Each line of that file starts with some character to indicate that the line is such a request and with, say, a number, to indicate what request it is. Then a user just types in their data after each such request. It's dirt simple to implement and for users to use. So, for human readable input, just do it that way. Natural language understanding -- f'get about it. Once I programmed something where the human input was a lot like XML -- really simple to use.
    - xerophyte12932 12y ago
      Well the scheduling program works as your PA, and is expected to deal with other humans who want to schedule meetings with you. So not only does it have to understand their correspondence, it also has to negotiate with them. This requires NLP
      - graycat 12y ago
        I can't agree. In short, the communications can be done with forms, on a smartphone, Web site, or similar.
fezz 12y ago
AI is the new hip cool thing to get VCs excited about the same old same old. Algorithm != AI
- sushirain 12y ago
  From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect : AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
  - graycat 12y ago
    > "Oh, that's just a computation." He expected something else?

by graycat 12y ago

fchollet 12y ago

> Where's the AI needed? Marketing, I assume. Giving people their very own Jarvis to interact with could be a selling point (even if it's less efficient than a GUI-based scheduling solution), and the "AI" buzzword will certainly draw more attention to the product than a scheduling app would normally get.

dmortensen 12y ago
Building a conversation model which can negotiate with multiple guests on behalf of the host in plain english is not easy (for us). This includes simple social concepts such as "compromise" - say, when to push for one location over another. The information extraction problem alone is a major challenge. No buzzwords needed, we are just trying to do some good work, and if we succeed, we think many people would like it: https://twitter.com/search?q=xdotai https://twitter.com/search?q=xdotai
- fchollet 12y ago
  Good luck with your company, I wish you succeed. NLP is certainly no piece of cake.
- graycat 12y ago
  > plain English Gads. That's tough to do well, and as a user I'd always wonder if the software got it right unless I just kept checking. And why try with plain English? Heck, long ago I commonly wrote Fortran programs with very easy to use input: Start with a file that asks for all the data. Each line of that file starts with some character to indicate that the line is such a request and with, say, a number, to indicate what request it is. Then a user just types in their data after each such request. It's dirt simple to implement and for users to use. So, for human readable input, just do it that way. Natural language understanding -- f'get about it. Once I programmed something where the human input was a lot like XML -- really simple to use.
  - xerophyte12932 12y ago
    Well the scheduling program works as your PA, and is expected to deal with other humans who want to schedule meetings with you. So not only does it have to understand their correspondence, it also has to negotiate with them. This requires NLP
    - graycat 12y ago
      I can't agree. In short, the communications can be done with forms, on a smartphone, Web site, or similar.

fezz 12y ago

AI is the new hip cool thing to get VCs excited about the same old same old. Algorithm != AI

sushirain 12y ago
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect : AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
- graycat 12y ago
  > "Oh, that's just a computation." He expected something else?