Labs

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So, time to build your intelligent agent? There is an increasing number of sophisticated ways to build software agents. We will take a gentle approach. This collection of labs leads you through the process of designing, writing and testing your own software product, your agent. You will experience that it "takes many hats" to create good computer programs these days: the artists, the writers, the managers, the programmers, and many others.

Part I -- Agents in a New Land
In Part I, we learn to move around within networks, how to transfer files across those nets, how to use a state-of-the-art library, how to serve data and files from web servers and view a packet or two of data going by. We cover a suite of applications we'll need later to build our agents and in the meantime cover some of the core computing skills that you will need in the next four years.

Intro to Photoshop,
networks, Fetch and WS-FTP
  • learn to crop yourself into another picture and get it in shape to move to your web space.
  • Hmmm, what are the complexities of a world with image/video/reality manipulation?
Wed., Sept. 11
Room 103 Academic Computing
Using Word wisely,
homepages and web servers,
more Fetch and WS-FTP
  • Writing professionally, serving globally.
  • Servers on your person.
Wed., Sept. 18
csLab (bottom floor of science center, Math and Computer Science area)
Smart Searching in the Library
Wallace Library
  • We want you to find your favorite spots in the library; it is a great place!
  • Gloria Barker, our library help-with-anything, teaches us the serious ropes for researching your topic:
  • Finding books and more: ELIZA
  • Finding journals: InfoTrac and others
  • Finding newspaper articles: Lexus/Nexus
  • Smart searching on the web: google.com
 Mon., Sept. 23
Wallace Library, Electronic classroom.
Finding, filtering and reporting your personal news
  • How to handle the "soon to be available" realtime access to your biological, economic, family, news, and entertainment data?
  • bioAgent: if i am correct, your DNA gene regulatory sequences show a serious long-term defect. (case 0x3FF)

    Resources:
    HTML: http://www.gettingstarted.net/
    A community of web professionals named Project Cool has pages of tutorials.

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, HTML Primer.

 Wed., Oct. 2
csLab

Part II -- Software
We introduce web pages and how to script (or program) your pages to make decisions. We'll ignore as much of the HTML as we can and focus on programming using the scripting language called JavaScript. We could have picked from a number of other programming languages, e.g., Visual Basic, Java, Perl, or C++.
Intro to JavaScript
  • working with dates
  • so what was Y2K?
 Wed., Oct. 09
csLab
Making Decisions: if-else
  • generating pseudo-random numbers,
    "like totally random"
Wed., Oct. 23
csLab
<forms> and functions
  • Text input for a ChatterBot.
  • (1) Getting the input is trivial. (2) Now what does it mean? (3) How should your bot respond?
  • Grrrr, is this a hard problem or what?
 Wed., Oct. 30
csLab

Part III -- Your Intelligent Agent
We'll take a look at the enormous complexities of getting machines to understand natural language. We'll also play with some cool applications and media that agents can and will use in the future.

Natural Language Processing - Part I, ELIZA Wed., Nov. 6
csLab
Natural Language Processing - Part II Wed., Nov. 13
csLab
Pure Voice - using your own voice with your Bot Wed., Nov. 20
Language Lab
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    Maintained by: Mark LeBlanc
    Dept of Math & Computer Science
    Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts