Teach a little computer today

Want to teach? Bored with mindless browsing on the web? Why not help educate a computer today?

There are quite a few research projects these days where you can help increase the world of "knowledge" that can be recorded and used in AI, IR, Knowledge Management tasks. One of these is the Open Mind Commonsense Project at MIT. This consists of people contributing various everyday facts that are taken for granted, used commonly to establish context and hence never usually articulated explicitly. For e.g., if you saw a statement "the batsman scored a century", implicit information such as "this is about the game of cricket" or "a century refers to 100 runs" are never expressed openly. But a simple computer would never know the mass of such "commonsense" learnt by experience. This project aims to collect as many such facts as it can, and the collection is used by several research efforts and tools for various nefarious ends.

To contribute, one needs to sign up and can plunge into various actions like describing a picture in simple words, elaborating a few things that a particular verb is used to describe, filling in context for an event and so on. It's a lot of fun and definitely recommended if you have 15 minutes to kill.

More information about the project at Ray Kurzweil's website here and a sample of contributions.