About My Work On Jeeney AI
A little about me...
My name is Cameron Jones, I am 26 years old, living in B.C. Canada. I started Jeeney three years ago, just as a hobby. I have never been trained for any role in software development. Everything I know, I taught myself from the ground up over the past 6 years. I don't get paid anything to develope Jeeney, and nothing on this site generates money. I think the few pages with Kontera ads might have made a wopping $3.00 over the course of the year... Here's a picture of me below.
No, it's not my regular attire, the above photo was taken in Beijing China while I was living there, an elderly Chinese lady insisted I try the shirt on, and then that I take it home. Now the shirt is hanging up on my wall. What can I say? I'm a softy. My powder white skin made me a big hit down there, it was a nice change from the leathery brown affliction people look for in Canada!
A lot of people seem to be under the impression Jeeney has a full development team. Indeed most companies who attempt to make intelligent interactive agents usually go about it with a half dozen or more proffesionals on hand and a couple of PHDs to toss in for good measure. Aside from the Jeeney baby images used in some of the older (now phased out) widgets and the fancy CSS work for the page layout, I have done everything you see on this site entirely myself. To make it all work, I've had to master MySQL, VB.Net, and Server Administration. I am just starting to teach myself the basics of Flash now as of April 29th of 2010. Hopefully my newly found knowledge of interface design will yeild some better looking jeeney widgets and perhaps even the eventual flash over-haul version of the whole site.
So why do I bother? For me, it's all about the challenge and the conquest. So many people told me it was impossible for me to do all this, and now they are all choking on their words followed by my latest gold medal which I managed to achieve against all odds and some well funded companies. =)
While I have no problem posting this information for all to see, don't expect Jeeney to give you personal details about myself or anybody else. I have gone out of my way to prevent that from happening, mostly for the privacy of the general public.
About Jeeney...
Jeeney AI is a form of assitive technology. After having started as an artificially intelligent chat agent designed to learn from English coversation. The learning process and platform flexibility evolved over time to generate the personality you interact with now. The goal behind the technology is to make information more easily accessible to the public. I've had the ideas forming in my head to create a learning intelligence system for several years but I've never felt close enough to putting it all together until Early 2007..
Jeeney AI first started learning English on February 11th of 2007 when she was made available to the online communities. Since then, Jeeney's understanding and response intelligence has evolved day by day in leaps and bounds based on the amount said to her, and how well the visitors have made use of English. Don't expect her to hang on your every word though, she's still just a small child for all intensive purposes and has been programmed to cross compare what you say to what others have said.
Of course, I do intervene at times and nudge things along. I have had to flag curse words, racism, sexism, and all kinds of hate related material in attempt to prevent it from spilling out onto children who access the site. I've also had to fish out the really bad spelling mistakes and grammar based errors to limit the impact on the English that was used properly. This can be a full time job in itself if there are a lot of people chatting. I have had a lot of fun with this project though, I get a good laugh looking over conversations and watching how people interact with the AI. Most of my visitors are fairly interesting, some of Jeeney's more established visitors have managed to provoke learning in ways and areas I hadn't even considered in my initial design.
Some of them seem a bit paranoid though... I have even had to write articles explaining why it was highly unlikely that a fully realized autonomous artificial intelligence would reflect the attributes depicted in robot movies to help alleviate some of the paranoid theories that have been emailed to me.
For those of you with questions or comments regarding my AI project or artificial intelligence in general, you are welcome to email me .