Hi everyone,

I’d like to hear from anyone who would be interested in joining a video call (hangout) on Google+ to talk about chatbots and artificial intelligence. Please contact me on Google+ via the link below, or if you don’t do Google+ post below to at least register your interest. Maybe Skype or some other online video conferencing service would be an option at another time.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/109082642101323914548/posts

Cheers,
Andrew Smith

Could be fun to do sometime. I added you to a circle, but to be honest, I’m not really sure on how to go about contacting people on Google+.

On a similar vein, I’ve thought about getting myself organized with a one-man journal club to get a better grasp of the current research in NLP and machine learning. If anyone else would be interested in participating in this, it would be helpful to have more people involved. I’m thinking a bi-weekly or monthly meeting to discuss a pre-chosen paper. Maybe with one person taking charge each time to present background research on the paper, etc. (I’d be willing to help with getting past journal subscription walls—I’ve got two academic affiliations, one of which is bound to provide access..I hope.)

Any takers?

Having a discussion group which meets regularly via video conferencing would be a great way to catch up on current research. I’ve been collecting research papers as I go but even the task of organising them is a daunting one, never mind reading them all.

http://www.mendeley.com/ was starting to look like it might help but now that it has been purchased by one of the large publishing houses I’m not sure if it has a future.

I’d certainly be interested in talking about parsing algorithms. There are a number of papers that would be worth discussing from that domain.

If you do this I’d love to join as well.

Practically, all this takes would be a date, time and the host posting a link to the hangout here I assume?

(I had a great experience with our prof at a Coursera.org course doing this weekly, it was a wonderful way to connect with fellow students across the world)

The response to this thread has been very good and I’ve had the pleasure of spending quite a bit of time in video calls with various chatbots enthusiasts and forum members since making the original post.

While small groups are interesting, fun and entertaining, I’m still hoping to get the kind of synergy going that only happens when a whole bunch of like minded individuals get together. Some members are lucky enough to be able to attend conferences and competitions in person, but many of us are geographically or financially constrained and unable to do so. Fortunately there is no longer any reason why we can’t benefit too.

To help get this off the ground I’ve set up a Google+ community called chatbots.org as a means of coordinating video conferencing among members of the group. I just sent out an invitation to this community to everyone who I’ve circled on Google+ who is connected with chatbots.org and natural language processing. You can also request an invitation directly from the community page which is here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117236447102577073584

Comments, cautions and criticisms are welcome and of course you are still encouraged to circle me directly via the link in the first post of this thread. Note that for those of you who aren’t habitual users of Google’s online services, you may need to log in to your gmail or google+ account from time to time to see any notifications that you’ve been sent.