Who: Botmasters, bot businesses, bot enthusiasts, bot hobbyists, scientists, students, and the press are invited.

What: Chatbots 3.0 Conference

When: Saturday, March 27, 2010 9am-6pm

Where: Suite 3200 (32nd Floor) Liberty Place, 50 S. 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, USA

Why:  Bring together botmasters for a meeting IRL to share ideas and garner some publicity.  The conference is not limited to AIML, but takes a “big tent” approach to invite people working on all bot technologies and companies.  Similar meetings we’ve hosted in San Francisco in 2003 and Guildford, UK in 2005 proved to be a great success.

How much: Free admission.

There is a preliminary conference site up at
http://chatbots3.eventbrite.com/

There are one or two slots open for prospective speakers (Erwin Van Lun is one of the speakers).  Please contact me if you are interested in giving a 30 minute presentation at Chatbots 3.0

Contact:
Dr. Richard Wallace

+1-609-379-2552
Skype: dr.wallace
drwallace@alicebot.org

Why Chatbots 3.0?

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 web marked the beginning of widespread 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.

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.

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.

Look forward to meet you @Chatbots 3.0!

Erwin Van Lun

CEO, founder Chatbots.org

Advancing the Chatbot Industry WorldWide

Amsterdam, The Netherlands:

+31 621 567 657 (GMT + 1, 24h/day)

Sydney, Australia:

+61 2 8007 4744 (GMT + 10, 24h/day)

W www.chatbots.org

E erwin.van.lun@chatbots.org

Skype: erwinvanlun

Twitter: chatbots

Personal info about futurist and keynote speaker Erwin Van Lun on

www.erwinvanlun.com

Users tell Xiam/TNS they would increase time spent each week accessing mobile content by over an hour (a 55 percent jump) and monthly spending by $8 (a 148 percent increase) if their content was personalized. Weather is the type of content most commonly accessed via mobile device, with 67 percent of subscribers now embracing weather-related apps and services followed by maps (55 percent), social networking (52 percent) and games (also 52 percent).

Users reporting problems accessing data

Across the board, some 80 percent of all users report some type of problem accessing or using data and websites on their mobile phones.

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Slow or hard to find information

The biggest culprit is slow or hard to find information. In all cases, more than 61 percent of users reported this issue.

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Phone or interface issues

Phone or interface issues rank second for users. Well over half reported problems.

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Irrelevant content

Of lesser importance, but still an issue to users, was receiving irrelevant content when trying to access or purchase content.

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Payment issues

In the United States, more than one in 10 users reported payment and billing issues as problem areas. It was only slightly worse in the United Kingdom, where 13 percent of users cited it as an issue.

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Effectiveness of methods for finding content

Users found that going to favorites or bookmarks were the most effective ways to navigate when searching for content. URLs, search engines and desktop icons followed as favorites, in that order.

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Least effective methods of finding mobile content

Consumers said they are least favorite way to find the mobile content they want actually is by clicking on ads or banners at their wireless service provider’s store or portal. They were nearly as dissatisfied with their handset manufacturers store or portal.

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Percent of attempts to access or purchase mobile content that are unsuccessful

In what should be worrisome to content providers, users say they are unsuccessful in accessing the mobile content they want 27 percent of the time. In the U.S., that number falls to 24 percent of the time.

This is where Alabot’s AI/NLP based engine helps in content access and discovery for both operators and content aggregators and portals. To know more about how Alabot can make this happen you can write to me at sidhartha.bezbora at alabot dot com

Source : WirelessDuniya

He is also the author of the popular Mobile Blog Wireless Duniya..

Sidhartha has been with the MVAS vertical for a long time and was till recently Sr Manager – VAS for Cellucom Group in  Dubai heading the Middle East & African Markets.

His Linkedin profile

Do read the entire article if you are interested in the mobile space.  The link is here

Excerpt

“A welcome addition to the list is Alabot, a mobile search provider based out of Pune, India, with offices in Kuala Lumpur and London. I first met Akshat Shrivastava, Alabot founder, at a mobile search conference, where I had the pleasure of presenting him with the Bronze in the category Best Technology Innovation – Software. Earlier this week Akshat sent me a DM via Twitter (@peggyanne) with the great news: Alabot has secured funding from a global innovation fund and sealed a deal with a Malaysian mobile operator to develop a multi-lingual (English, Bahasa, Chinese Tamil) mobile content vertical search service.

The text search service will start off serving up ringtones and wallpapers from the operator’s online content stock, “low hanging fruit” Akshat tells me is just the beginning. As he put it: “Content services that require a syntax or Internet access aren’t getting traction [in that region] because they are not intuitive or interactive.” Moving forward, Akshat tells me plans are to extend the service to other content verticals and expand reach via deals with several OEMs. Rock On!”

I beleive that going forward content on the mobile will be easier to reach. This content could  be wallpapers, ringtones etc or complex queries for local search, mcommerce and other verticals.

Technology and user need will drive companies and operators to launch intelligent, interactive and most important of all “relevant” services on their networks.

TIECON:

This is Mr. Sameer Saigal (sameer.saigal@alabot.com), our point man in Malaysia. He is sitting at the Alabot booth at the recently held TieCon in Kuala Lumpur.(http://tiemalaysia.org/).

The conference was for 3 days with some excellent speakers. The Alabot team met up with a lot of potential customers and just being there has helped us a lot.

MORE: A partnership with one of the regions largest telecom operators has been inked. They will use the Alabot engine to enhance their ringtone, callback tones, wallpapers and game download vertical. This application is going to substantially increase their downloads and will be available in 4 languages.

A hectic but extremely fruitful trip.