Personal Introduction

[Tennessee]

Hi all,

I currently work for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology working on a
system which performs automatic weather report generation. My system
produces a first-cut of (almost) all Victorian weather reports, which
are then edited as necessary by human weather forecasters. Typically,
days 1 and 2 are frequently edited, and later days are left fairly
much untouched. http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/vic/maps/vic-forecast-map-7-day.shtml
shows a page where example forecasts can be seen.

The system is based on the GFE system produced by the US national
weather service. Getting the system up and running here in Australia
has been a 3.5 year project.

The system I work on has many features of AI, such as goal-directed
logic and natural language generation behaviours. I believe that
extending the capabilities of this system will mostly come from more
powerful abilities to express high-level goals, express competing
goals and get good behaviour from partial problem specifications.

I also have a more general interest in AI. I'd love to work on putting
together a system which is broader in scope, and I have a number of
concrete ideas for how to begin such a task. However, I have
relatively little time on my hands outside of work hours, so I'm not
sure how to go ahead unless others start to share my ideas :)

I'm very interested in increasing my connection with the AI community
to better inform my professional work, and also to discuss general
topics in AI with like-minded people.

Other stuff about me includes being co-chief editor of The Python
Papers, having presented at OSDC 06 and 08, and generally being
involved in the Python community to the extent I'm able to.

Regards,
-Tennessee