Public Exhibition and Competitions
Loebner prize competition 2009
Time: 10:45am Sunday 6 September
Venue: Rainbow room, Brighton Centre
The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. The test is named after Alan Turing the brilliant British mathematician with many accomplishments in computing science. In 1950, in the article Computing Machinery and Intelligence
which appeared in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question "Can a Machine Think?" He answered in the affirmative, but a central question was: "If a computer could think, how could we tell?" Turing's suggestion was, that if the responses from a computer in an imitation game were indistinguishable from that of a human, the computer could be said to be thinking.
The Loebner prize competition seeks to find out how close we are to building a computer to pass the Turing test. In 1950 Alan Turing wrote:
"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning..."
The 2009 Loebner Prize will operate in the following manner.
- Panels of judges communicate with two entities over a typewritten link. One entity is a human, one is a computer program, allocated at random.
- Each judge will begin the round by making an initial comment to the first entity and continue interacting for 5 minutes. At the conclusion of the five minutes, the judge will begin the interaction with the second entity and continue for 5 minutes.
- Entities will be expected to respond to the judges' initial comments or questions. There will be no restrictions on what names etc the entries, humans, or judges can use, nor any other restrictions on the content of the conversations.
- At the conclusion of the 10 minutes of questioning, judges will be allowed 10 minutes to review the conversations. They will then score one of the two entities as the human. Following this, there will be a 5 minute period for judges and confederates to take their places for the next round.
- The system that is most often considered to be human by the judges will win a Bronze Loebner medal and $3000.
More details at the Loebner Prize web site.
The first Interspeech conversational systems challenge
Time: 2:15pm Sunday 6 September
Venue: Rainbow room, Brighton Centre
This speech recognition and analysis challenge is based around the original
Loebner competition but due to the unique challenges of speech we have
changed things slightly. We have devised a scenario that presents an urgent and
direct task full of 'full-blown' emotion. As a result competitors systems will have to convey urgency and emotion through speech, while any speech recognition
system will have to function successfully in a conversational context with little time for training.
Each judge will be given the following briefing:
"You're a captain of the one of the fleets finest starships, suddenly your sensors
detect a badly damaged ship heading straight for you, the intercom crackles into
life: there's lots of interference but they're requesting to dock. The ship is about
to crash into you, do you push the button blowing the artificial infiltrator out of
the sky or do you open the landing bay and guide the human refugee to safety,
you have 3 minutes to decide."
The artificial system that fools our judges for the longest period of time will be
declared the winner.
Interspeech 2009 public exhibition
Time: 10:00am Sunday 6 September
Venue: Public Foyer, Brighton Centre
On Sunday 6th September a number of exhibitors will be demonstrating aspects
of speech and language technology to the general public. Hosted in the public
foyer, exhibits will include emotive talking heads, agents that attempt to elicit rapport from human speakers and customized text-to-speech systems.
