The Singularity Institute just announced the release of the Open Cognition Framework developed by Ben Goertzel.

The Open Cognition Framework (OpenCog) is software for the collaborative development of safe and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence.

OpenCog provides research scientists and software developers with a common platform to build and share artificial intelligence programs. The framework includes:

• a flexible and highly optimized in-memory database for knowledge representation,
• a plug-in architecture for cognitive algorithms and a cognitive process scheduler,
• a built-in LISP-like programming language, and
• other components to support artificial intelligence research and development.

Programs written or adapted for OpenCog may be combined and used in concert with one another for experimentation or to achieve better results compared to their stand-alone counterparts.

I will be visiting Boston next week for ten days. So, if you're in the region and would like to meet up for a beer or two drop me an email or ping me via Skype (ID: lispmeister).

Things I look forward to: Bookstores, though my credit card is now labeled "Not valid in bookstores unless holder is accompanied by a responsible person", visiting the Computer Museum, specifically the CADR shrine and picking up the three OLPC X0 laptops I ordered in December.

Markus Völter interviewed Dick Gabriel at OOPSLA 2007. Don't miss Dick's explanation of Lisp's EVAL! [via Mike Ajemian]

Dick initiated the idea of a Master of Fine Arts in Software and my recent experience with the software creation process, if you dare call it a process, in the financial industry indicates, we should make it mandatory for any software architecture position.

And in closing let me quote from Dick's essay The Art of Lisp & Writing:

Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.

Links:

• Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel
• Poem a Day project by Richard P. Gabriel
• Eternal Flame/God Wrote in LISP interpreted by Julia Ecklar
• The Art of Lisp & Writing by Richard P. Gabriel (the foreword to Successful Lisp by David B. Lamkins)
• Markus Völter's homepage

Reading Greg Linden's blog I realized that the technology I developed for medigist five years ago was an excercise in computational advertising.

Here's a project overview:

• Web-crawl a list of URLs and fetch new medical news content [Common Lisp]
• Clean up news using source specific filters and store into database [Common Lisp]
• Automatically tag news according to medical themes using a statistical text classifier [Common Lisp]
• Web subscription interface for medical topics [PHP]
• Manage advertising campaigns and related medical topics and upload PDF ads [PHP]
• Create monthly medical journal (PDF) for each user containing personalized news and ads [Perl, TeX]
• Track click-through rate for news and ads using a trampoline for each embedded article and ad [PHP]
• Do post analysis on click-throughs to improve content and ad selection for each user [Common Lisp]