Working for opencog

[sree hari]

Hi,

I came across opencog through a google search on "open source ai projects that I can contribute". After going through your website, I now have developed a keen interest in volunteering to work for you. But the only thing stopping me is that being a second year masters student in a University in India, I am required to pursue an internship in an external organisation for a period of four months starting from now.All of my fellow batch matches are now interns in various startups in India, where they will mostly be calling tensorflow, pytorch libraries to do the already done things. I did not find them interesting at all. In contrast, the work which you guys are doing seems so original and cutting edge. I greatly wish to contribute to your work, but the institute I study has a rule that the in the organisation where I will be interning, somebody should be supervising. They have also laid down many other requirements and tasks for this supervisor, most of which will not be followed by anyone. In essence, they just need a name from me. Name of a person who is associated with this external org.

I am not making any claims on being an expert in anything. I am nothing but a beginner in AI. I have until now, coded up some Machine learning and Deep learning Applications and has now lined my bookshelf with about ten newly bought books which I will be going through in the coming weeks to get a through understanding of the theory behind the code. I don't have many achievements to list out and did not have my education from the top ten colleges in India.Therefore I will try  to sell myself by declaring that I am possibly suffering from Obsessive Disorder. While this is having a bad effect on my life, it does have its merits such as allowing me to say with certainty that once I start getting obsessed about making a contribution to opencog, I will be contributing like hell.

So, is there any way you can save me from this internship torture, my institute is inflicting upon me now?

With Regards,

SREEHARI P V

[Nil Geisweiller]

Hi Sreehari,

your interest is very much appreciated.

If all you need is a name, that seems possible to find someone willing
to mentor you during these 6 months. Just keep in mind that we tend to
be busy but if you can work semi-autonomously that could be doable.

What are your areas of interests? Or parts of OpenCog you would be the
most interested in?

Nil

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[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 12:37 AM sree hari <sreehar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Therefore I will try  to sell myself by declaring that I am possibly suffering from Obsessive Disorder. While this is having a bad effect on my life,

Obsessiveness is only a disorder if you let it be one. Certainly, if you obsessively smoke cigarettes  and video-game, that will result in unhappy life outcomes. Equally certainly, the finest software artisans are obsessive about their work (the highest achievers in any field tend to be obsessive). It can be controlled and channeled.

Nil asked you to talk more about your interests. There's a menu of possibilities: if you are interested in bio or genomics, there is an opencog project to datamine genetic and proteomic data. If you have access to robotics gear, there could be some utility to provide/improve access to motors and sensory equipment, (via ROS). If you like pure mathematics/logic/reasoning, there's perhaps something to be done there, as well.  There are other possibilities I'm not mentioning. Depends on your abilities and interests.

Before you get too excited, you might want to make sure that you are able to download, compile, install all the code and run the unit tests.

--linas

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[sree hari]

Thanks Nil and Linas.

Yes Nil, I am willing to work semi-autonomously and I am almost sure that it is mostly about a name..I will get it clarified in the coming days. As for my interest, I thought about it and I realized that I do have a keen interest in bio informatics related projects.

Now because linas talked about obsessiveness  in his reply, I  would like to elaborate on it a little. One of the serious problems I face with my obsession is that I wash my hands excessively using soap and takes longer time to bath after using public transport or being in public places. I believe this particular habit began sometime back, when Kerala, the state in India where I live witnessed an outbreak of the deadly Nipah Virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_Kerala . I am pretty sure that I developed a phobia of viruses and germs after that. Ever since I started my journey into AI, I have often blindly believed that a lot of huge problems faced by mankind such as the one mentioned above can be solved through AI.While I am not certain about my belief being proved correct in near future when AI powered technologies will keep viruses from harming humans,  I always had a desire to work on such problems.

I was not sure about opencog actively pursuing any bio informatics related project right now, until linas mentioned it in his reply. I would definitely like to give it a shot.Thanks Linas and I will try to do the installation and testing asap.

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[sree hari]

Hi Linas,

This is the page where I can see all projects, right?https://wiki.opencog.org/w/Suggested_Projects and I assume that you were talking about the bio-ai project given here under small projects which is contained in this repo https://github.com/opencog/agi-bio

[Nil Geisweiller]

On 1/15/20 7:16 AM, sree hari wrote:
> Hi Linas,
> This is the page where I can see all projects,
> right?https://wiki.opencog.org/w/Suggested_Projects and I assume that

Sreehari, this page needs some serious work, it's seems rather outdated.

I think the first steps for you is to study and play with OpenCog

1. Read the (sometimes outdated, sorry) wiki
2. Try the (mostly up-to-date) examples in the various repositories
(look for the examples folder under the root folder of various repos,
such as atomspace, ure, miner, etc).
3. Identify the most exciting thing for you to work on.

Nil

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[sree hari]

thanks Nil,

I will do that and post an update once I am done

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