Why Chabots 3.x?

Artificial intelligence chat bots, also known as chatterbots or conversational agents, developed in a series of three stages over the past 60 years.

The First Wave

Alan Turing conceived of the talking computer in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. For his famous test, Turing imagined an artificial intelligence that communicates in natural language through a text based medium, such as a teletype.

In 1966 MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum became the first botmaster, or chat bot author, when he created the famous ELIZA prorgam. ELIZA was the first A.I. to apply the concept of stimulus-response pattern recognition to natural language understanding. ELIZA was also the first bot to employ conversational logging as a means for the botmaster to review and refine the bot.

Dr. Hugh Loebner began sponsoring the first real-world Turing Test in 1991. To the surpise of many, the winner of the first contest was based on the ELIZA psychiatrist program.

In 1994, Michael Mauldin created a bot named Julia in an online MUD environment. He coined the term “chatterbot” to describe his conversational programs.

The Second Wave

The advent of the world wide web marked the beginning of widespreaed access to chatterbots. By exposing their bots on the web, botmasters collected a huge amount of conversational log data to help them improve the quality of the bots. Better and faster computers led to the development of large knowledge bases for bots.

Dr. Richard Wallace launched the free software ALICE project in 1995. ALICE led to the development of the open AIML standard for creating chat bots.  An alphabet soup of AIML interpreters and servers appeared.

The first commercial chat bot companies, Neuromedia and Virtual Personalities, were launched in the heady early days of the dot-com boom.

In the late 90’s, two prominent web sites emerged to provide to index and promote chat bot projects and companies. These were the Simon Laven page, and Marcus Zillman’s Botspot.com.

The Third Wave

Today chatterbots have been adapted to nearly every ecological niche on the internet. Bots appear on web pages, in instant messaging, and respond to email and forum posts. They can be found in Second Life, in online games, and in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.   Bots support marketing and advertising and are used in education.

New technologies for automated learning have appeared which vastly reduce the time and effort needed to create convincing bots. At the same time, a series of new commercial opportunities have opened for bots and their botmasters.  In particular, the launch of Siri in 2011 unleashed a new wave of intelligent, voice-activated mobile apps.

We’re experiencing the beginning of a new era. The time has come to gather together the leading experts in chat bot technology to share our ideas and discoveries.

Chatbots 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2

Last year's Chatbots 3.2 conference and the earlier Chatbots 3.0 conference in 2010 and 3.1 conference in 2011.  were huge successes. We had about 25 attendees each year around a dozen high quality presentations. The presentations were recorded and published on the Youtube aimlinstructor channel, where they have been watched by a worldwide audience.

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Ameneties

The conference will be held in a first class conference facility in downtown Philadelphia, close to City Hall. Beverage service will be provided including coffee, tea, soda, juice and water. Free wifi is available.

Accommodation

Downtown Philadelphia has a wide variety of hotel options. We recommend using Kayak.com to find the best deals and locations.

 

Public Transportation

Philadelphia has excellent public transportation and the downtown area is accessible by subway, bus, and trolley. The local transit agency SEPTA provides transit info, also available on Google transit.

Air and Rail

Philadelphia is accessible by Amtrak rail at 30th Street Station, and Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). Philadelphia is 90 miles (145km) from New York City. Several intercity bus companies also serve Philadelphia: Greyhound, Megabus, Boltbus, Eastern Travel, New Century and Apexbus.

Parking

There are numerous indoor and outdoor parking lots in the vicinity.

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