I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like:

“When humans own horses, humans groom and ride horses.” http://tinyurl.com/ydvf7vg

The TinyURL expands out to an address like: http://openmind.media.mit.edu/en/assertion/143313/

The aim of the site is to build a large repository of common-sense knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge that humans take for granted and never write down as statements for a computer to understand.  Currently it tracks over 1,026,553 statements.

Using the link you can vote on the concept.  Vote up if the concept is solid (i.e. something a human would say is ‘right’) or down if it is wrong, silly or erroneous.  The site supports OpenID which makes starting a touch easier.

My goal with this bot is to remind people every day to vote on the concepts and to add new knowledge.  If a concept has many votes then we can have faith that it is ‘common-sense knowledge’.  If a concept is voted down enough then we can have faith that it is ‘unhelpful or wrong’.

You’ll find a searchable list of Concepts and some random examples on the English homepage.  For good examples see all the information that ConceptNet knows about humans, chess and girls.

Details:

I’ve written the bot in Python using PyYAML, Python-tinyurl and Python-twitter.  It runs every day via a cron job.  It works by guessing a random id for a raw_assertion and checking to see if a concept lives at the URL.  See this XML example for id 143313, I extract the .yaml version via PyYAML but the .xml version renders nicely in your browser if you want a peek.

ConceptNet’s web API is well documented.  ConceptNet itself is written in Python using Django but I’m not using the downloaded version here, just the web API.

My first Twitter bot – @BrightonJobDoom:

Just in case you live here in Brighton you might want to track @BrightonJobDoom to see how healthy (or…not) the job market is in the UK during this rather wobbly recession   I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 5k coding competition.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

On Wednesday night we ran our music-themed £5 App Xmas Special (fivepoundapp.com).

It was fab!  John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – it seems that many others did too.  I particularly like:

“I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and is more rewarding for all as a result. Here with @ribot & @lastminute teams” – ribotminimus

“Home from #fivepoundapp, letting the awesomeness sink in.” – j4mie

Get to the end of the very last video and you’ll hear a special £5 App rendition of Jingle Bells.

Note: I want photos!  Email me links to flickr’d images please.  I also want your blog write-ups, mail them to me or comment down below.

Particular thanks for our sponsors Alan Newman (Sensible Development) and Paul Silver (PaulSilver.co.uk) along with John (psychicorigami) and my ProCasts for putting up cash to fund a few hours of free beer.  Also super-huge thanks to the Ribots for supplying piles of mince pies (yummy!) and John for baking a batch of crunchy cookies.

The event was organised through Philip and Declan of PlayGroup, they use Hector’s House for arts and science gigs (thanks BuildBrighton for the connection!).  Cheers chaps, it was exactly the space we needed!

“Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career”

Seb spoke on the highs and lows of forming a band, showed previously-unseen footage and generally gave the lowdown on how it all works. Rick-rolling was included.  Seb has his own write-up.

Sadly Seb’s hard-drive died after the talk taking all his transcoded footage but on the flip-side Seb inspired Simon to share footage from his old cover band.

Here’s the 60 minute video of Seb’s talk:

£5 App #20 “Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career” for the 2009 Xmas Special from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

We were absolutely honoured that Seb and Jenny unveiled their new Xmas song tonight, see it here and share it around:

“Toby Cole – Zero to Theremin in 20 days” (with demo)

Toby Cole shows the ThereThing constructed through BuildBrighton and unveiled at a live gig the previous month.

Paul Silver took a video of the ThereThing in action:

Sadly the ThereThing is slightly out of shot during the video of the talk but you can hear Toby and see the screen just fine (and the ThereThing link shows it in detail).

£5 App #20 “Toby Cole – Zero to Theremin in 20 days” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

“Jim – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar-mounted iPhone ableton live interface”

Jim Purbrick showed Mrmr, the LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone Ableton live interface.  Jim’s also the head of Second Life (UK) and is known for building robots.

£5 App #20 “Jim Purbrick – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted ableton live interface” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

“Lastminute.com Lab’s with Bottle-Rock-It” (with an additional proper demo video)

Richard, Sam and Mathias (LastMinute.com Labs) came down from London (thanks guys!) to demo Bottle-Rock-It, a group iPhone musical instrument.

The background talk gives loads of detail, sadly the demo went a bit sideways so we sang Jingle Bells as a loud (and slightly tipsy) group instead.

Check this BBC News story to see Bottle Rock It in action.

£5 App #20 “Lastminute.com’s Bottle-Rock-It” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

100 Robots (band)

After the talks finished Jim Purbrick and Max went on to play live n’loud as 100 Robots.

2010 and beyond…

If you want to keep in touch with future £5 App events then join the £5 App Google Group – it is very low volume and is mostly there just for the announces.

We’ll probably run some more competitions next year, the 5k competition went very well and John wants to do more around that idea and I want to play with some open-source A.I. kits.  Details to follow.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

John and I are very pleased to announce our upcoming music-themed £5 App Christmas Special on Wednesday 2nd December, 8-11pm at Hector’s House in collaboration with the lovely Playgroup guys.  Please do the usual – sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to brew for you all.  If you don’t know what this is then see last year’s Xmas Special write-up and details of all the previous events (with videos).

We want 40-60 of you along this year so please spread the word – Tweets and blog posts would be hugely appreciated!

Outline:

• Seb Lee-Delisle – “My life as a wannabe rock star at the birth of the internet music boom” – full description below
• Toby Cole – “Zero to Theremin in 20 days” – How BuildBrighton built a feature rich, ultrasonic, laser etched MIDI controller in under three weeks”
• Tom Hume – “You’re all an orchestra, get over it” – Bluetooth devices will interact with the audience to create changing ambient music, created by Future Platforms for a Music Hack Day
• Jim Purbrick – “A short talk on the Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone ableton live interface by the head of Second Life Europe and later a demo with 100Robots”
• lastminute.com labs – Bottle-Rock-It, a music game for n iPhones where (with any luck) n > 3 (Richard, Russ, Sam, Mathias)
• 100Robots – Jim and Max Williams play live and loud for us

Seb has the main talk, his full blurb is:

“Before Seb Lee-Delisle was peddling his digital creations, he had an entirely different life. He spent most of his 20s setting up Solar Records and promoting his band Stargirl (later Laine). Investing over £50,000 of their own money, they released their own CDs, made it onto the radio and TV, played in front of 30,000 people, recorded at George Martin’s Air Studios and had full page spreads in the nationals.

They were at the forefront internet music boom of the late 90s. The future was looking rosy for this group of dynamic 20-somethings. So come and find out what it was like, how the hell they got the £50K, and why their plans didn’t quite reach fruition…”

Beer – several of us who are doing well this year will put up some bar-money (Alan of SensibleDevelopment, Paul Silver of Brighton Farm and my ProCasts so far, several more to come, get in contact if you want to share the love).

Food – maybe nibbles.

Next, please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to provide and tweet/post about the event to help us spread the word.  Cheers!

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Last night’s £5 App went very well, below are the videos for Tony the electronics inventor, Seb the guaranteed-to-lose-money website creator for IWillPayYourParkingTicket and Rosie the flash-mob-tester via SoftwareTestingClub.

£5 App #19 Tony Ellis as Electronics Inventor from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

£5 App #19 Seb and Jamie with I Will Pay Your Parking Ticket from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

£5 App #19 Rosie on FlashMobTesting from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Tomorrow night’s £5 App is all set.

The 19th £5 App will feature a new fab speaker talking about his career as inventor, followed by Seb and Raul.  This will be our last £5 App for probably 2 months (due to conferences and John’s wedding), we’ll probably return in November.

Hope to see you there!

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

The 19th £5 App will feature a new fab speaker talking about his career as inventor, followed by Seb and Raul.  This will be our last £5 App for probably 2 months (due to conferences and John’s wedding), we’ll probably return in November.

The next event is Toy Maker – from Employee to Inventor, it’ll run on Tuesday 11th August at The Skiff, from 8pm until late. Please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.

I’ll copy the blurb from the site:

Tony Ellis will be speaking about moving from being an employee to an inventor, successfully licensing 45 electronic inventions. Tony spoke at an earlier RobotBrighton on his robots and toys, now he’ll give the story about how he jumped from a career in electronics to running his own company, figuring everything out on his journey to licensing 45 toys and games to large distributors like Mattel and Radica.

Next Seb – Flash Guru and previous 5K App winner – will be talking about a new project called IWillPayYourParkingTicket he is working on with Jamie Matthews.

Finally Raul will give a talk titled “Language and design: we write too much, we design too predictably”.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Next week’s £5 App night is shaping up nicely, we’re mixing A.I., clean energy production, geo-urls and a safety-training start-up in 3 talks by new speakers.  I’ve cribbed the following from the 18th event description, sign-up on Upcoming to give us an idea of numbers please:

Allister Furey will be talking about applying ‘bio-inspired’ AI techniques to the next generation of wind energy technology which uses tethered wings (that’s kites to you and me) to drive electrical generators. He’ll show some:

… examples of where these techniques; genetic algorithms and neural networks, have been used in other applications, sometimes in combination with physics simulation. Hopefully demystifying some of these techniques and show how they can be relatively simple to implement, including how to program a genetic algorithm in one line of code and how to let a physics model build itself.

Next up there’ll be Jamie Matthews on hereit.is:

a simple web app which lets you create and share short urls for geographical locations. As well as explaining what it is and how it works, he’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of MVC architectures, REST APIs, CSS3 magic, the Google Maps API, and anything else he can squeeze into twenty minutes.

Finally David Hawes will discuss how a knee operation in July 2008 and hence an unexpected chunk of “down time” allowed him to finish a decent version of www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk, through the haze of various painkillers, in time for a launch at the Focus on First Aid conference:

The launch was well received and so he decided to quit his safe job at Avanade, in the depths of the recession, to pursue his own ideas full-time. Eight months later he released the first subscriptions for www.trainingcoursebooker.com enabling small Safety Training Providers to manage their businesses and sell courses. David will talk about what he has learnt and why he is glad he has done it after working at large companies for the last 5 years.

You might also want to see videos from last month’s event which include Darren Fell on Crunch, ChatBadge, Taykt and a human memory hack.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

We had a fab £5 App last night – sorry to those who tuned in looking for the live broadcast.  We had some itty-bitty bandwidth issues and uStream wouldn’t play ball so I had to record off-line.  Vimeo serves the videos just fine now.  Thanks to Jon and The Skiff for hosting us.  See photos here.

We had:

1. Darren Fell telling the story of Pure360’s birth and sale followed by his second start-up Crunch.co.uk
2. Andy Gill on the launch of ChatBadge.com – see Andy’s write-up
3. Richard Dallaway on the launch of Taykt.com
4. Ben Sauer on the super-memory techniques used in Anki

Five Pound App #17 – Darren Fell on Crunch from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Andy Gill on ChatBadge from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Richard Dallaway (taykt.com) and Ben Sauer (Anki) from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

All going well we’ll be broadcasting tonight’s £5 App event via this uStream page.  Any last minute changes will be posted here.

I gave details last week for the 3 speakers (possibly 4 now with Ben), we’re starting from 8pm @ The Skiff in the North Laines.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Our next £5 App night is next Thursday 8pm at The Skiff.  For our 17th event we have three speakers each talking about their new start-ups.  As usual beer and cake are provided, beer is now kindly provided by Jon and The Skiff rather than out of my pocket, co-founder John will bake the cake.

Darren Fell will be talking about founding Pure and his new venture Crunch, which is a web service that offers: “Ridiculously Easy Accounting for Freelancers, Contractors and Consultants”

Andrew Gill will also be along to talk about ChatBadge: “… a new web-based chat service purpose-built to help convert website visitors into customers and support existing customers better”

Richard Dallaway will be talking about Taykt, a web site that let’s you use SMS short codes for…well, whatever you like, really. He’ll explain what it is, why it was built, and what they’ve discovered from building a product for themselves, rather than a client.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.