I haven't written a blog post in nearly a year; hoping to change that in the new year. To get the ball rolling here are a few recent beginnings of new projects and updates on old ones.

Donald Trump was elected president and was sworn into office last Friday. Since then I have been using GitHub to keep a running list of what happens in government everyday.

Another project you can find on GitHub is my first attempt at a chat-bot, CocoaEliza. This is of course the beginning of yet another Eliza clone. We all have to start somewhere learning something new and why not with a classic? Hopefully this effort will eventually evolve into a new project in development, bot.dating. For a historical reference, the original Eliza chat-bot was by Joseph Weizenbaum who also wrote an excellent book titled “Computer Power and Human Reason” which covers his philosophy on what AI should and shouldn't do; an important read for anyone working in this field. You can also easily find an online version of Eliza to talk to.

Also on the topic of bots, though I did not take time to write about it at the time, last year I gave a talk about TVCommentBot and the future of television at Bot Summit in London. It was a wonderful conference and you can watch all of the presentations online. One of my related spin-off bots, TVFaceBot has recently reached 3000 followers. Though I've made several other small bots the only other one worth mention here was TheSoundOfBot created in memory of Pauline Oliveros, one of my teachers from RPI who passed away recently.

More to follow in the coming days, stay tuned!