Links - S11 Language and Computers

Overview Day

Look at the L&C course from Spring 2010 to see what was covered then and grab some of the resources.
Search for HAL 9000 on YouTube to look at some clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Check out the webpage for the course on lego robots at Saarland University. See videos of the lego robot bartender we saw in class.
Check out the CoSy webpage, which is the project that works on the mobile robot we saw a couple of videos of in class.
See the How to say NO to a robot video.
Watch the humanoid robocup final that we saw the start of in class.
Watch the first soccer match between man and machine.
Check out the Geekipedia by WIRED magazine.
Learn everything you ever wanted to know about leet and pwn.
Learn about Lolcats. You can even read the lolcat Bible.
Create cool word clouds with Wordle

Browse the world of writing systems at Omniglot.
Get to know the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Language Log explains what is great about Hangul.
Read about the Tengwar writing system Tolkein devised for languages of Middle Earth.
Check out the Hanzi Smatter blog to see why you should know your Chinese before getting tattoos with Chinese characters.

Text-to-speech systems: IBM and AT&T
Hear the Radiolab episode about music and language. (We listened to the segment on Chinese tones.)
Check out The Happiness Project, an interesting take on the connection between music and language.
Check out a tutorial on speech.
See a page containing 2D and waterfall spectrograms for the syllable 'ka'.
Hear what a cat looks like!
Read or listen to the Skeptoid episode on reverse speech and sound pareidolia (Also, check out visual pareidolia with seeing faces in all sorts of places.)

Spam and anti-spam: What Nigeria spam is and how people have tricked the tricksters
The infinite monkey theorem and monkeys typing made concrete.
Scientific American: Stopping Spam, by Joshua Goodman, David Heckerman and Robert Rounthwaite.

The Wikipedia page on question answering has a nice overview.
Edinburgh's QuALiM question answering system (uses Wikipedia).
ISI's Textmap System. In particular, check out the question representation after you ask a question.
MIT CSAIL's START QA system.
Wikipedia: presuppositions.

Talk to ELIZA.
Talk to A.L.I.C.E.
Talk to Jabberwacky chatbots.
Jabberwacky chats with A.L.I.C.E – quite amusing!
Terry Winograd's page about the SHRDLU system.
Watch the Saturday Night Live skit about a blind date with a dialog system.
A big list of links related to dialog systems.
The COMIC project: Conversational Multimodal Interaction with Computers.
The CoSy project: dialog systems and cognitive architectures for robots.
Check out the webpage for the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT media lab.
The WITAS project: multi-modal conversational interfaces (including autonomous (simulated) helicopter).
The NICE project: dialog system for edutainment.
Wikipedia: the Chinese room.
Terry Brisson's meaty reply to the Chinese room.
Radiolab episode on emergence.
Wikipedia: emergence.
Wikipedia: homunculus.
Tux Droid: talking penguin.

Wikipedia: Cryptography Portal.
Wikipedia: the Vigenere cipher.
The Code Book website.
The cipher of Mary Queen of Scots.
Wikipedia: the Enigma machine used by the Germans in WWII.
Wikipedia: The Navajo code talkers who provided secure communication for the USA during WWII.
Wikipedia: The Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Wikipedia: the Voynich manuscript.
Check out this interesting new theory about the Voynich manuscript.
Wikipedia: Zipf's law.

Try out Google's online machine translation system.
Have a Translation Party: put an English phrase in and then it gets translated back-and-forth between English and Japanese until it reaches equilibrium.
Watch a video of a story which was written in English, translated to French, then to German, then back to French, then back to English: A Wicked Deception.

The Suicide Machine systematically removes you from the social network of your choice.

The Urban Dictionary has a lot of great new words, or new meanings for old words. Great for multislacking!

It can be difficult to say no to a robot... (warning: explicit language) Or, to put it differently: Today's speech recognition systems get in trouble when the utterance is short.

Learn more about how computers are being used to read lips for a variety of applications.

Would you like to have captions for your telephone? Warning: a human operator is in the loop…

Check out how rise and fall in the news media (mainstream press and blogs) over time with MemeTracker.

Crowdsourcing example: Phrase Detectives is a game in which the user annotates corpora while playing, the project description can be found here

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