I just realized that about 42 years ago the well known and often misperceived computer program Eliza was published. It was written by computer science legend Joseph Weizenbaum, who sadly past away a month ago.

Elizas’ most commonly known implementation “Doctor” resembles a conversation between a psychologist and her patient. Basically everything the user says is rephrased into a question by some pattern matching algorithms. The algorithms used in Eliza are actually pretty simple and fit into some hundreds lines of code. No world knowledge or databases to store the conversation are needed.

The program was never intended to serve as surrogate for real psychotherapists. In fact Weizenbaum wanted to show how easy it is to create the illusion of “intelligent” computers and he was shocked when he realized that many people took his simple set of transformation rules so serious, that they even asked him to leave the room while talking to it.

Weizenbaum became a critic of computers and especially a critic of a society that heavily depends on computers and accepts their judgment without doubt, as little errors in small parts of a complex system may lead to fatal consequences.

I strongly recommend reading his famous article “Albtraum Computer” (german) and maybe his book linked on the right.

I think his concerns are especially true today and our society should be extremely careful about how far we trust computer generated no-fly lists, bombing target optimization systems, and automated tools for stock market evaluation.

Have fun with the JavaScript version of Eliza after the page-break and feel free to post your funniest dialogs with Eliza as a comment.

Remember you days at school and your physics class? Wouldn’t it be great if that sketch of a pendular or that hand-drawn solar system magically turns into an animated physics simulation?

Actually this is possible for some time now, as MIT developed ASSIST, an sketch understanding system for whiteboards.
It lets you draw objects like bricks, balls, and springs. Your sketch is interpreted so that the system gets an understanding what is a moveable object which elements should stay in place.
After hitting "Run" your drawing is feed into a physics engine and magically turns into a nice animation on your whiteboard.

Wie häufig habe ich schon die extrem unhandliche Webseite meines ÖPNV oder der Bahn aufgemacht, nur um rauszufinden wann der nächste Bus oder Zug abfährt. Das sind jedes mal viel zu viele und häufig sogar unnötige Klicks.

Screenshot des Fahrplanwidgets

Mit dem Fahrplanwidget geht's viel einfacher. Einfach den Namen des gewünschten Bahnhofs oder der Bushaltestelle eingeben und es füttert sich mit den Abfahrts- und ggf. Ankunfsdaten der Bahn – einschließlich Busverbindungen. Schnell und einfach.

Leider kann man nicht so leicht zwischen zwei verschiedenen Orten umschalten, also bspw. zwischen der Bushaltestelle Zuhause und der am Arbeitsplatz. Wer das häufiger braucht kann sich natürlich einfach zwei passende Widgets ins Dashboard ziehen... Nunja, eine Drop-Down Liste mit den Favoriten wäre mir lieber.

Absolut großartig – für mich aber vollkommen unbrauchbar – ist das BART-Widget (Bay Area Rapid Transit, ÖPNV in San Francisco und Umgebung) und das assoziierte Paper "Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface". Es erläutert unter anderem den iterativen Entwicklungsprozess des Widgets und die Motivation für verschiedene Designentscheidungen.

Thanks Regina.

I just saw John Medea's (MIT Media Lab) inspiring talk “Simplicity patterns” from TED this morning.

Creating good design, technology, or even business models is difficult. On the one hand you want to archive maximum functionality, thus your solution might get quite complex. On the other hand more and more of your customers are interested in simplicity and are willing to pay for it.

In his book “10 Laws of Simplicity” John Medea offers guidelines to balance simplicity and complexity.
You can find a very short (and incomplete...) outline of his 10 laws on his website.

This is a clip from 1967 and it features a computer vision for the year 1997. The technical aspects aren't that interesting, but take a look at the social ones:

What the wife selects [she's shopping] on her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console.

The wife is surfing some web-like-thing to do some – what else? – shopping and she looks after the kids by using a big brother-like omnipresent monitoring system. Her husband has to do all the financial stuff like paying the new dress for his wife.

Btw: Once again we see a vision of the paperless office. Just one paper is shown in the entire movie. Beside that all computer desks are totally clean.