[NetBehaviour] Common Sense and Intelligent User Interfaces 2009

[marc garrett]

Common Sense and Intelligent User Interfaces 2009: Story Understanding 
and Generation for Context-Aware Interface Design.

February 8th, 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida

"Knowlege is stories" - Roger Schank

While much work in AI has represented simple knowledge about everyday 
life and activities at the word, sentence, and logical assertion level, 
we see a growing need to understand it at a larger granularity, that of 
stories. A story is a short, focused description of people and events 
occurring over time, that has a "point" -- to inform, teach, question, 
entertain, educate, illustrate or amuse.

Capturing common sense knowledge often involves uncovering the implicit, 
unstated assumptions behind communication, often best expressed through 
stories. Work in story representations dates back to Schank-style 
scripts and other efforts in the 80s, but recent developments have 
unleashed new potential in this area. The maturity of common sense 
knowledge bases such as Cyc, Open Mind and ThoughtTreasure; statistical 
and corpora-based natural language understanding techniques; the 
explosion of participatory knowledge collection over the Web; progress 
in cognitive science; the popularity of Web-based storytelling media 
such as blogs; and new common sense reasoning techniques are all 
enablers of the new generation of work on common sense stories.

Topics include, but are by no means limited to:

    * Story understanding and natural language understanding
    * Extraction of common sense knowledge from stories
    * A cognitive modeling based understanding of stories
    * Common sense knowledge bases to facilitate story understanding and 
story generation
    * Acquiring story knowledge from users or from the internet
    * Representation and reasoning with story knowledge
    * Blogs and nonlinear fiction and nonfiction media as a source of 
stories or as a domain
    * Interfaces to facilitate storytelling by users in text, audio, 
pictures, and video media

http://csc.media.mit.edu/iuiStories/