Splash Biography

You're the host of a party where everyone is spontaneously turning into chickens. You're a film director with a time machine. You're a row of dominoes contemplating their purpose in life. Act accordingly. In improv acting, you and a few other people are given an odd, open-ended situation, and together you act out a scene on the spot. If you've seen "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", you know the general idea. Improv is easier than you think! You don't need any acting or improv experience. We'll start with some games that get you thinking on your toes and building on each other's creativity. You'd be surprised what kind of scenes you can create.

When people communicate with each other, their conversation relies on many basic, unspoken assumptions. We often learn the basis behind these assumptions long before we can write at all, making them difficult for computers to learn. These assumptions underlie all forms of human communication from teaching, to giving directions, to ordering dinner at a restaurant. A user who interacts with a computer interface, however, can become frustrated because the computer does not understand their goals and motivations. For human-computer interaction to become as fluent as communication between humans, computers need to be able to understand the user’s basic, unspoken assumptions. These assumptions form the body of knowledge known as “common sense” and we’ll be discussing how it is collected and used by the AI research community.