Your PC just might talk back!
Coming soon to a desktop near you, or make that your office, bedroom, classroom.....your personal computer will be programmed to work with you, behave the way you do, talk with you, be your peer...your companion?!
I must have been living under a rock! I'm seeing this for the first time and it's old news! In perusing the Chicago Flame, the independent newspaper of the University of Illinois , I read that Associate Professor of Computer Science, Barbara Di Eugenio, received a three-year grant in the amount of $520,000 from the National Science Foundation to produce a program called a "dialog agent". She is going to share this award with a couple of her peers who will assist her in developing a program that will speak, think and react like a college student!
So basically this program will be an interactive one. The one thing that amazed me about this story when I read it though was the big question that was asked, "....can this computer student "peer" find acceptance among female undergraduates, whose enrollment numbers in computer science are on the decline?"
Let's leave the enrollment part alone for now, but why I wonder, wouldn't the program be accepted by female undergraduates? Would it be too complicated? Would they consider it to be biased if they didn't 'get it'? Or would the female undergraduates just chalk the PC Companion down to being just like a guy...hard to decipher and even harder to compute? It just wouldn't understand them?!
I think Professor Di Eugenio might be underestimating the power of the female mind. It is said that there are less female students taking Computer Science, perhaps it's just a subject that just doesn't appeal enough somehow? Then again, I'm selling my girls short by thinking that way! We are women hear us roar!
Well, whatever the outcome, and I'll have to see if I can find more info about the status of this personal computer blind date, I'm sure the ladies of Computer Science should have no problem at all with it! Women are known to change a guy to their way of thinking and grooming him into what they want him to be you know, why should an interactive PC program be any different?!
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