AI Projects

MetaNet: A Multilingual Metaphor Repository

Researchers from ICSI, UC San Diego, University of Southern California, Stanford, and UC Merced are building a system capable of understanding metaphors used in American English, Iranian Persian, Russian as spoken in Russia, and Mexican Spanish. The team includes computer scientists, linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.

California Connects

California Connects is a state-level program administered by the Foundation for California Community Colleges that seeks to advance digital opportunity for underserved communities by promoting and enabling digital competency. Among other services, the program provides laptops to community college students, who in return teach people in their communities how to use computers and the Internet. The program also provides free classes in low-income Central Valley communities. The California Connects team at ICSI provides research support for the initiative, evaluating the program's structure and effectiveness in the context of its target population and making recommendations for its future.

BFOIT

BFOIT (the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology) supports historically underrepresented ethnic minorities and women in their desire to become leaders in the fields of computer science, engineering, and information technology. The intent is to provide youth with knowledge, resources, practical programming skills, and guidance in their pursuit of higher education and production of technology. For more information, visit the BFOIT Web site.

Color, Language, and Thought

In 1978 The World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data in 110 unwritten languages from around the world. The ICSI WCS staff (Paul Kay and Richard Cook of ICSI, Terry Regier of University of Chicago) put these data into a single database, available to the scientific community. Several outside laboratories have already used this database for studies.

NTL

The NTL (Neural Theory of Language) project of the AI Group works in collaboration with other units on the UC Berkeley campus and elsewhere. It combines basic research in several disciplines with applications to natural language processing systems. Basic efforts include studies in the computational, linguistic, neurobiological, and cognitive bases for language and thought and continues to yield a variety of theoretical and practical findings.

Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web is an exciting vision for the evolution of the World Wide Web. Adding semantics enables structured information to be interpreted unambiguously. Precise interpretation is a necessary prerequisite for automatic Web search, discovery, and use. Services are a particularly important component of the Semantic Web. A semantic service description language can enable a qualitative advance in the quality and quantity of e-commerce transactions on the Web. The OWL Services Coalition, under the guise of OWL-S, has taken some important first steps in this direction.

AQUAINT

Researchers in ICSI's AI Group are participating in a project to study deep inferencing techniques and corpus-based techniques for deriving the conceptual semantics needed to achieve this. This research is a collaboration with Stanford University and the University of Texas at Dallas, and is sponsored by the ARDA AQUAINT Program. Our effort is being intergrated into an ambitious overall program to significantly advance the automated analysis of information.

FrameNet

The FrameNet project is building a semantically-rich lexicon of English and a corresponding set of annotated texts, based on more than 600 semantic frames and 130,000 sentences. Comparable FrameNet projects are underway for Spanish, German, and other languages. By providing a layered semantic representation of text, FrameNet delivers a key component of next-generation question answering, machine translation, and other natural language processing applications. Learn more on the FrameNet Web site.