Cassandra: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 16:18, 13 February 2017

Cassandra
Creator	Lucia Dossin
Year	2015
Bio	Lucia Dossin (BR/NL) has a background in architecture and webdesign. She works at the intersection of art and design, currently focusing on the interactions between humans and computers and their implications in subjectivity, language and politics.
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Website	http://www.luciadossin.net

Cassandra is a voice-operated chatbot, aimed at making psychological profiles during the conversations. These profiles are shown as pie charts where personality aspects are represented by a color. The graphics are accompanied by a short analysis and a list of companies possibly interested in the profile. In this sense, the bot provides data that can act as a mediator in services like job-seeking and dating.The profile then becomes a digital representation of the user and can be used as a kind of digital key to personalize every gadget in the near future of the Internet of Things. Make your life easier, let Cassandra make a digital copy of you.

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 |Creator=Lucia Dossin
 |Date=2015
-|Thumbnail=3legs.jpg
+|Bio=Lucia Dossin (BR/NL) has a background in architecture and webdesign. She works at the intersection of art and design, currently focusing on the interactions between humans and computers and their implications in subjectivity, language and politics.
-|Website=www.example.com
+|Thumbnail=Cassandra-thumbnail.png
-|Description=Mina is a smart chat bot, a commercial project designed by a promising startup to fulfill humans' need of talking to someone else in a world where communication has become almost completely mediated by social media services. To keep the illusion alive, the software aims to be invisible.
+|Website=http://www.luciadossin.net
+|Description=Cassandra is a voice-operated chatbot, aimed at making psychological profiles during the conversations. These profiles are shown as pie charts where personality aspects are  represented by a color. The graphics are accompanied by a short analysis and a list of companies possibly interested in the profile. In this sense, the bot provides data that can act as a mediator in services like job-seeking and dating.The profile then becomes a digital representation of the user and can be used as a kind of digital key to personalize every gadget in the near future of the Internet of Things. Make your life easier, let Cassandra make a digital copy of you.
+|Catalog-Text1=[[File:Netpict-lowres.png]]<br>
+[[File:Cassandra-card.png]]
+|Catalog-Text2=[CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION - 158 words]
-The invisibility of technology is not spontaneous. It is a deliberate and difficult goal to achieve, being simultaneously beneficial and prejudicial. The pros have been celebrated for ages. The cons are usually swept under the rug.
+Cassandra is a voice-operated chatbot, aimed at making psychological profiles during the conversations. These profiles are shown as pie charts where personality aspects are  represented by a color. The graphics are accompanied by a short analysis and a list of companies possibly interested in the profile. In this sense, the bot provides data that can act as a mediator in services like job-seeking and dating. The profile then becomes a digital representation of the user and if loaded onto a card it can be used as a kind of digital key to personalize every gadget in the near future of the Internet of Things.
-The project is an interactive installation in the form of a popup/trade fair stand, comprising 2 or 3 computers (according to the available space). Each one of the computers will display the product website, which promotes the software features and shows the subscription prices. Besides that, the website will also contain a DEMO button, which will allow the exhibition visitor to talk with the bot. (149 words)
+By knowing you, Cassandra can decide what kind of music you prefer, what books you should read, what fashion brand you should wear and who will be your romantic partner so that you are free from the hassle of having to choose and can focus on what matters most: enjoying your life.
-}}
--> thumbnail is TEMPORARY (since it is mandatory to have a thumbnail for making this page, I used a temporary placeholder).
-<h3>"free text - short version"</h3>
-In a future not so far away, most humans were deprived from communicating with other humans through voice. Increased intolerance to raw subjective matters combined to a competitive labour market that practically forced every adult to work 12 to 16 hours everyday resulted in that most of human communication happened through written text messages or images using online social media services. As a side effect, the complexity of human conversation decreased to a level in which computers and people could understand each other reasonably well (an issue of Artificial Intelligence solved in an unexpectedly simple way, after many decades and much money spent on Natural Language research). Children were trained from early age to perform well in this environment. However, a parcel of the population still had the need to engage in conversation using their voices, like humans used to do 'in the good old times' (that's what they read somewhere online). Within this group, a few actually met other humans to talk. Others did not manage to find time or energy, despite their longings. With this group of people in mind, a promising startup company launched Mina, a chat bot that was able to fulfill this need for voice interaction remarkably well. (203 words)
+---
+[CATALOGUE LONG TEXT - ignore the table of contents, please]
+With a background in webdesign, things like interface design and user-friendliness are my daily concerns. During these 2 years at Piet Zwart Institute I have been researching the relationship between user-friendliness and the invisibility of technology. My graduation project, Cassandra, is built upon 3 main aspects: '''user data''' as content, '''voice''' as interface and '''ELIZA''' (Joseph Weizenbaum's program, written in 1964/1966) as engine.
+===User Data===
+Interaction is a relationship between at least two parts. Whenever only one part has access to information, we can say there is a power asymmetry. This is one of my points of interest in this research.
+User generated data is the common input format to feed smart technologies, a substitute for direct user interaction or input – something I will call passive interaction. I argue that the shift from active to passive interaction provides not only the advertised ease of use but also an experience where the user loses power. There is certainly a trade-off, I am just not sure if the price in the long-term is clear to the user.
+===Voice===
+Besides the symbolic importance of the voice as a personal and embodied human asset, a voice interface is also a good reference to the illusion of the 'no-interface' (widely understood as non-visual). I call it an illusion because in fact not only it does not remove but actually it adds one more mediation layer between humans and machines, since the speech recognition translates the spoken words into text (a layer that does not exist when the user is directly typing or clicking buttons, for example). This became very clear when during the project development I moved from typed chat to spoken chat: there was much more misunderstanding when the user talked than when the user typed.
+===ELIZA===
+I saw in Eliza a good oportunity to make a humble tribute to Weizenbaum's 'Against the Imperialism of Intrumental Reason' (Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976, Chapter 10) and the essential difference between decision and choice. Also, I was curious to see whether a 50-year-old program involving (psychological) interaction between human and computer would still be up-to-date.
+===The market for code and emotions===
+There is a reasonably high number of similar products and services on the market as of now. They offer commercial or personal advice, simulate relationships, and in different ways intertwine code and emotions.
+I hereby assume a cynical position and portray the user as a pie chart – colorful and unique, but still a pie chart. By doing that, I believe to be exercising 'playful critique' to practices like this.
-<h3>"free text - full version"</h3>
+===The pie chart===
-In a future not so far away, most humans were deprived from communicating with other humans through voice. Increased intolerance to raw subjective matters combined to a competitive labour market that practically forced every adult to work 12 to 16 hours everyday resulted in that most of human communication happened through written text messages or images using online social media services. As a side effect, the complexity of human conversation decreased to a level in which computers and people could understand each other reasonably well (an issue of Artificial Intelligence solved in an unexpectedly simple way, after many decades and much money spent on Natural Language research). Children were trained from early age to perform well in this environment. However, a parcel of the population still had the need to engage in conversation using their voices, like humans used to do 'in the good old times' (that's what they read somewhere online). Within this group, a few actually met other humans to talk. Others did not manage to find time or energy, despite their longings. With this group of people in mind, a promising startup company launched Mina, a chat bot that was able to fulfill this need for voice interaction remarkably well. //IF A SHORT VERSION IS NEEDED, STOP HERE = 203 words :) // Mina was presented as high technology, a product of years of research done by the brightest minds in the tech world. But in fact, it was a very old program, written in the infancy of digital electronic computing. This program worked quite well, since humans did not communicate too complex ideas anymore. But admitting the re-use of something old was completely out of question. Recycling was highly encouraged in matters like packaging, for example, but unthinkable for products and ideas. (That was regarded as  not creative.) So, Mina was presented as a contemporary creation.
+The graphic resulting from the conversation is composed of 6 colors – each one representing one personality attribute. The one closer to the center is based on the frequency in which the user says certain words and represents the degree of self-confidence. The other 5 colors are based on answers to yes-no questions, triggered during the conversation every time certain keywords are detected.
-Mina was a program that managed natural language in a quite rudimentary fashion. When the program was initiated, it loaded a script. This script contained a specific set of instructions for a conversation. It was able to identify some language patterns and according to these patterns, it chose a response that would sound plausible. But in order for the program to have the desired effect, these scripts would have to contain changes in the responses on a regular basis. These changes would keep alive the illusion of talking to another human being. Without them, subscribers would probably notice they were talking to a robot and would cancel their subscriptions. Also, scripts would be changed according to the calendar and the news - and would count on social media profile data to increase the (sanitized) subjectivity rate of the conversation. So for example, on Christmas season, the scripts would be almost completely different than scripts loaded along the year. For some subscribers, according to their profile data, Christmas scripts would contain emotional and inspiring words in a frequency higher than usual. For others, they would transmit the subscriber a sense of belonging to a group that hates Christmas.
+These keywords were defined through free association by a group of friendly volunteers. They were presented one word (which was taken from a psychological profile questionaire and related to a certain personality attribute) and made the free association. For example: they were presented the word 'pacifists', which can be found in the questionaire relating to Social and Political Attitudes. Several connections were made to this word and they are all used to trigger questions that will evaluate Social and Political Attitudes during the conversation with the user.
+}}
-From time to time, the words database that was used to feed the scripts was attacked and the connections between words were switched or corrupted. That caused the script to reply using weird language constructs, and in many cases Mina's talk would not only unmask the robot but could also ignite a self-reflection process in the subscriber. Some would use this wake-up chance to try to find a way of having actual human contact back in their lives, others would instead sue the company and ask the subscription fee back. Nobody never found out if the ones responsible for these attacks were hackers or a business competitor. (601 words)
+<gallery>
+File:Cassandra-thumbnail.png
+File:Netpict-lowres.png
+File:Cassandra-card.png
+</gallery>