Memories for Life


	Home > Network > Core Members > Yorick Wilks		Yorick Wilks is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield and Director of ILASH, the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing, since 1993. During the period 1985-93 he was the first Director of the Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, which became a major US centre for research in artificial intelligence and its applications to natural language processing. He was a researcher at Stanford AI Laboratory, a SERC Senior Fellow at Edinburgh University, and then Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Essex. He has published numerous articles and six books in that area of artificial intelligence, of which the most recent are Artificial Believers (1991 with Afzal Ballim) from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings (1996 with Brian Slator and Louise Guthrie) from MIT Press. He has also produced recent edited collections Machine Conversations (2000, Kluwer) and Readings in Machine Translation (2003 with Sergei Nirenburg and Harold Somers). He is also a Fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the EPSRC College of Computing, a member of the UK Computing Research Council and on the boards of some fifteen AI-related journals. He designed CONVERSE, the dialogue system that won the Loebner prize in New York in 1998. WWW home page Email this Member

	My interest is twofold: first, because ##I believe that the huge torrent of information that a whole life will be, in digital terms, will be unmanageable for almost everyone. They will need some form of intelligent, persistent and personalized agent to help them organize their digital lives, so they can have some kind of control of it, so it can be THEIR life, or autobiography.## I think there are independent grounds why people will need such agents to handle the Internet as it becomes more complex, but this "organization" of the self-as-data is a major one, and it will be most acute for those like the old, with the most data and the least technical ability. Details of suggestions along these lines can be found in the Companions area of my WWW home page. Secondly, I am interested in particular in how one can impose time coherence on such life-as-data, and this means some cognitive model of time for life events on the Internet - not everyone has a strong model of this kind. The same kind of representational technology needed to impose such a coherence is also that required to disambiguate alternative lives on the Internet--the identity ambiguity problem when we try to retrieve a George Bush, US President, and find there are two.