This is a chatbot I created should is not based on any sort of real artificial intelligence. The responses should be completely random if the bot does not understand exactly what you say. You can interact with my bot at http://pandorabots.com - Chris AI Version 5 is in the Clubhouse.

Does Cortana have a future in the workplace? We want to hear your thoughts. Late last month, Amazon unveiled "Alexa for Business" – the company's latest foray into digital assistant space. Targeting the workplace, the new version of Alexa is tailored for businesses looking to automate the office, with commands for starting conference calls, handling appointments and hooking directly into other enterprise services. This announcement follows an earlier partnership between Amazon and Microsoft, where plans were outlined to merge the company's two rival assistants in select scenarios, covering a wider range of skills.

In an annual survey of the most popular jobs among preschoolers and elementary schoolers, the "scientist and scholar" job category clinched the top spot among Japanese boys for the first time in 15 years, following the recent Nobel Prize awards to Japanese scientists, Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. has said. Among girls, "working at a food shop" was the most popular occupation for the 21st straight year, followed by "nurse" and "preschool teacher." Among those who wanted to work with food, working in a cake shop was the most popular choice, with one respondent saying she wants to "make sweets that even people suffering from illness can eat with joy." The survey, released Thursday, showed that "baseball player" was in second place for boys, topping "soccer player," which came in third for the first time in eight years. In the survey, boys who said they wanted to become a scientist or scholar cited reasons such as wanting to "completely cure cancer" or "make a robot to play with."

Sophia the robot has been on a roll lately. Earlier in the year, its creator David Hanson told Jimmy Fallon that the bot is "basically alive." At the beginning of October, it showed up at the United Nations, announcing to delegates: "I am here to help humanity create the future." And just last week, Sophia was awarded an honorary citizenship by Saudi Arabia. "Sophia the robot becomes first humanoid Saudi citizen."

He married Patricia Enderson in 1950, and they raised five children. He received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1954 from the University of Southern California. His dissertation was entitled "The Prediction of Accident Rates from Basic Design Features of USAF Aircraft." His first job after graduation was with Douglas Aircraft Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he developed computerized methods for statistical forecasting of labor costs for building newly designed airplanes. He began work in 1955 at RAND Corporation and continued in 1957 at its offshoot, the System Development Corporation (SDC), also in Santa Monica, where he was head of the Language Processing Research Program until 1968.

Definition 2. An agent's knowledge is the set of all statements that the agent knows (i.e., the set [s: the agent knows s]). An agent's problem-solving behavior is

The events of the Ninth AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 August 2000, included the popular Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? and Challenge events as well as a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. Here, I describe these events as well as the exhibition and the concluding workshop. This year's event brought six contest teams and nine exhibition teams from the United States and Canada. The Robot Contest and Exhibition brings together teams from universities and other laboratories to compete and demonstrate state-ofthe-art research in robotics and AI (figure 1). The contest and exhibit have several goals: (1) encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, (2) increase awareness of the field, and (3) foster the sharing of research ideas and technology. The competition and exhibition is actually made up of multiple events: several contests, a challenge event, an exhibit, and a final workshop for all participants. Descriptions of previous years events can be found in Dean and Bonasso (1993); Konolige (1994); Simmons (1995); Hinkle, Kortenkamp and Miller (1996); Kortenkamp, Nourbakhsh, and Hinkle (1997); Arkin (1998); and Meeden et al. (2000). The competition this year consisted of two events: Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? and a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. The event stresses human-robot interaction, as well as mobility, and each contestant is required to explicitly and unambiguously demonstrate interaction with the spectators. The fourth year for this popular event, the robots are judged while they serve finger foods to attendees at the AI Festival. Unlike other contests over the years, there were no artificial walls or constraints in this event--the robots had to interact with regular conference participants, and no attempt was made to limit the number of people interacting with each robot. Robots were judged on the quality of their interactions, coverage, and ability to refill their trays (such as detecting when they needed a refill and navigating to a refill station). In January 2000, a suggestion was made to introduce a new contest, Urban Search and Rescue (USAR).

We have decided to give an award for the silliest arguments against AI published each year. The Simon Newcomb Awards, as they are called, will be announced here in the AI Magazine. Winners will be presented with a small statue (informally referred to as a'Simon') in a short ceremony at a suitable national gathering. We invite nominations for future awards. He combined a solid confidence in his own reasoning with a disdain for practical experiments. In many ways his arguments are similar to recent attacks on AI. They are short, elegant, convincing to his contemporaries, utterly wrong, and wonderfully silly, displaying an appealing mixture of partial insight with a failure to really comprehend what he was talking about. For example, there was the Stopping Problem argument. "Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane," suggested Newcomb sarcastically, "darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second! It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?" (Newcomb, 1901). Newcomb intended his question rhetorically, but as everyone now knows, it has a perfectly good answer: "Very carefully." The Simon Newcomb Award will be given in recognition of a similarly silly published argument against AI, especially when the writer's confidence in his views seems to arise from his ignorance of the subject. The ideal candidate is an eminent scientist or scholar in some other field -- for example, a philosopher, sociologist or mathematician -- who clearly fails to grok some basic idea of computer science. While any published argument may be nominated for the prize, the committee gives highest credit to arguments which are not just idiotic, but which use some technical issue in a way that displays some, but not enough, insight. Some argument forms are already judged unacceptable, includthan they are now, or that people would be somehow reduced in status. The award is to be given for a specific argument, so that (just as with the Academy awards) a true star might receive a'Simon' for each of several outstanding performances. We also expect to award the occasional'Lifetime Achievement Award' in recognition of an entire career of silly attacks on the subject. Popular nominees (those supported by several submissions) will be announced at the same time as the Award winners. Those who are nominated but not selected for an Award may take solace in knowing that the nomination itself is a high honor. The nominees for the first Simon Newcomb Award were, Selmer Bringsjord, Harry Collins, Hubert Dreyfus, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, Roger Penrose, Joseph Rychlak, John Searle, and Maurice Wilkes. In the future, only one award will normally be made each year, but for this inaugural occasion, we are proud to announce four winners, in alphabetical order.

Dear Editor: ... May I also take this opportunity to praise the staff of the AI Magazine for a most informative and professional journal, and one which I find increasingly important for acquainting me with the latest progress in American research. I look forward to the continuing success of the Association in all its activities. Dear Sir, Yours sincerely, Marten E. Bennett Gzllingham, Kent, UK I would like to comment on something disturbing that appeared to be revealed at the recent I J C AI conference at Karlsruhe. The background to it is the "Marietta affair." At the industrial exhibition associated with the conference a Germany company, Marietta, was due to mount an exhibit.

Genetic Epistemology Editor: In his recent article in AI Magazine, "AI prepares for 2001," Nils Nilsson put forward a paradigm of AI based on a declarative representation of knowledge with semantic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. The author discussed various research strategies for AI and specifically a computer-individual project was introduced as an efficient way of stimulating research and advances in the basic science of AI The undertaking of such a project immediately raises some classical psychological questions. Besides the deductive versus inductive or declarative versus procedural controversials, problems related to knowledge representation and evolution in an interactive environment must be considered. I would like to present some ideas and concepts stemming from current research in Genetic Epistemology (GE), initiated by Jean Piaget, as possible contributions to AI research fields. Knowledge is a common preoccupation for GE and AI.