FredTrek may remind you of some of your friends, but SigArt's Artificial Person (SAAP) will be entirely artificial, based on current AI techniques and psychological theories of word, sentence and topic recognition. The development of SAAP will be in 3 rough stages. The first stage of SAAP's development will be teaching him/her (we don't know which it will be yet!) to recognize certain words when being "spoken" to through typed text. As such, SigArt is developing SAAP for a useful purpose: being able to spot obscenities. Although SigArt may seem to be recreating Beavis, Butthead, or an extreme right-wing politician, SAAP will have a useful life monitoring SigArch's Scrolling Sign in front of 1225 DCL. Anybody can send messages for display on the sign by mailing to acmsign@acm.uiuc.edu, and they are broadcast without comment. Because the sign represents ACM and SigArch, anything blasphemous or naughty could mean big big trouble for our good ol' student chapter.
So, SAAP only wants to help us out. And isn't that what an artificial being should want? However, SigArt needs your help in making SAAP a reality. SigArt is looking for members to help in SAAP's development and coding. In addition, we need people to help teach SAAP what's naughty and what's nice! In other words, SigArt needs to build a database of obscenities that SAAP can draw upon. Watch soon for SigArt's Big Blasphemy Drive to be held at our web page http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigart.
The most creative and outrageous obscenities will be posted regularly, with a prize to the contest winner. Our meetings are every Tuesday night at 7:30 pm in room 1225 DCL. New members are encouraged to attend as we set out on the new project. For questions or comments (NO OBSCENITIES YET PLEASE!) email sigart@uiuc.edu.