Language
A big glaring example of the ways in which my brain has suffered is in the way I speak. And think! All absolutes and no degree of separation between the extremes. Which usually means, swearing - and a lot of it! Natural Language Processing is my area of expertise in AI. I love the way we can express ourselves any which way and end up making sense to others. My dad was my first example for observing language in life. He was a fuzzy speaker. His instructions usually went like this:"Get me that thing I kept somewhere in that room a few days ago!". I never stopped being bewildered, then irritated with his communication style. But my mom, who lived very happily with him, always got whatever it was he was trying to convey. My stated goal, as in my statement of purpose to Cornell's NLP Team, was to tackle statements like his and make a HMI understand and react correctly. NLP is mainstream now but like all AI, we have strategies that deal with a specific problem, but not re...