We had a really lively discussion on whether data mining constituted invasion of privacy. My thoughts are posted at the end of the discussion thread. Some of you may disagree but you need to separate the technology from its application.
My first contact with bots was a computer program called AI Doctor. You, "the patient," would converse with a virtual doctor to help diagnose your ailment and come up with a treatment. It worked on the same principle as ALICE where words from the "patient" were parsed, processed and linked with pre-programmed responses. We have come far from AI Doctor with the use of the XML dialect, Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. This is a significant leap forward compared to when I used GW-BASIC many years ago to program my AI Doctor program.
For the session's mini-project, most students were quite unimpressed with their interactions with the chat bots. I guess it is because of their expectations, the current wave of video games, and what they have seen in the past.
Little do my students know that...I....AM....A....CHAT BOT!
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
I certainly fooled yo
(::Transmission ending due to technical issues technical issuestechnical issuestechnical issuestechnical issues
Session 11
Regarding Fedscope, I am glad that most of the students were exposed to a powerful OLAP tool. They are seeing a Cognos (now IBM) product formerly called PowerPlay, but there are other companies such as BusinessObjects, Microsoft, Oracle, who can produce similar cubes and interfaces. These tools are certainly easier to use than pivot tables in spreadsheets. I am always impressed when I see the insightful trends and relationships students identified and the derived strategies based on these findings.
Although almost everyone wanted to recruit and hire more staff, some of the strategies focused on social inequities such as the lack of diversity in various dimensions (gender, race, age, etc.) I am glad this class is cognizant of these social issues. Too bad the cubes did not contain any "green" information. I'm sure that a student would try to fix that!
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