[Fwd] Questions for Bill Joy at CMU symposium

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 19:50:19 MDT


This was a posting to sci.crypt earlier this week:

: Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science is holding a 1-day
: symposium on Oct 19 to mark the opening of Newell Simon Hall, its
: newest building (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~earthware). The theme is:
: A Good World in 2050: Will Computers Help or Hinder?
:
: Bill Joy (chief scientist of Sun Microsystems) will appear via CMU's
: "synthetic interview" technology (the other speakers will appear in
: person). Joy will be interviewed for several hours beforehand with
: prepared questions. The recordings are then re-structered to allow
: questions during the symposium, which are then automatically matched
: to relevant answers. This synthetic interview will later be placed on
: the web for all to access.
:
: According to deja.com, this newsgroup had some discussions of a Joy
: article in Wired (cited on the above URL). This mail asks you to take
: part by contributing serious questions that may be pertinent to the
: symposium topic, or may be broader. Please email to me directly.
:
: Raul Valdes-Perez
: CMU Comp Sci Dept
: valdes@cs.cmu.edu
: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sci-disc

That's an interesting methodology. Apparently people ask questions
during the symposium, and Joy's interview is stored on disk, indexed
somehow so that a relevant answer can be found almost instantly to any
(likely) question. As long as no one asks, "what is the capital of
North Dakota," they should be okay.

So you can send in your questions, but then even if Joy answers them,
apparently you are dependent on someone asking a similar question during
the symposium in order for the response to make it into the "synthetic
interview". Odd.

Hal



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