Behold the Amma, South India’s famous hugging mother! After a brief appearance, we see the grandeur of the ceremony and the miles of people assembled to pay their respects to the woman who hugs for a living. Some freaky dances and costumes, and even a few bands perform too. And the twist at the ending, the outside…

Downloads HERE.

This video shows a PETA (People For Ethical Treatment Of Animals) demonstration in Ahmedabad, India, with a grim Reaper trying to kill a cow with his sickle of death. Leather is murder, the onlookers are told.

Dowloads HERE.

The Box Maker, as you will realise after watching this film, is not a human being at all! It is a humanoid box-making machine that sits and makes boxes all day. Kindly notice that the speed of his hands is not a special effect by Soumyadeep Paul, the film-maker. The shot is presented to you as-is and wondrous! Download here.

Salvador Dali used to say that his moustache was antennae for alien signals, the way he recieved messages from outerspace. Check out this video clip to see the longest, coolest, funkiest, hairiest moustaches on the blue-green-gold planette!

A film by Soumyadeep Paul. Download HERE.

This film is a montage of footage shot in Pushkar, Rajasthan.With no particular focus the film shows you images you might otherwise miss in the crowded streets…

A film by Soumyadeep Paul. Downloads HERE.

Durga, the Hindu Goddess, according to the Wikipedia:

Durga was created as an warrior goddess to fight the demon Mahisashur who had unleashed a realm of terror on earth, heaven and the nether worlds. Mahisa means buffalo, Mahisasur emerged out of the form of a water buffalo.

Durga is worshipped every year in West Bengal and the rest of India with great fervour, and this includes a long tradition of artists and sculptors. This breathtaking digital video trailer is their story…

A Film by Soumyadeep Paul. Download or stream the video in various formats HERE.

A film by Soumyadeep Paul: The annual cattle-horse-camel fair of Pushkar, Rajasthan (the western desert-state of India touching Pakistan) was meant to be just a weeklong animal market. Now, it is known as the most colorful festive extravaganza in Rajasthan, drawing tourists, backpackers, villagers, and filmmakers alike. This clip is a glimpse of a competition unlike any other… – A horse dancing competition!

Downloads in various formats available HERE.

Brief Storyline: Three students who share an apartment find themselves in a fix when a thief breaks in…

Duration: 12:43
Language: Hindi (English Subtitles)
Writing, Editing, Cinematography and Direction: Soumyadeep Paul
Projected Image Productions
Produced by: Saurabh Nishant

Various download options (in MPEG2, MPEG4, Streaming) [HERE]

CSF Vlog, as you can see, has been launched. This is a loud call from the Dog without Borders to all Vloggers, especially from South East Asia, to come forward and vlog here. There are several places where you can put your videos for free, for instance radio.indymedia.org will gladly put up 100MB files for you, honest souls that they are. Once you do that, vlog it for the world to lap it up, link it up, here.

Let’s bark and bite… bitch!

Michael Mateas
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
michaelm (AT) cs (DOT) cmu (DOT) edu

Phoebe Sengers
Media Arts Research Studies
Institut fuer Medienkommunikation
GMD
Schloss Birlinghoven
D-53754 Sankt Augustin Germany
phoebe (AT) viswiz (DOT) gmd (DOT) de

The paper sketches out work done in Narrative Intelligence and Automatic Story generation in the AI community since the time when Roger Schank’s group started working on natural language.

Roger Schank’s group at Yale – started off in trying to understand the processes that human should have to understand natural language. Since a sentence makes sense only in a particular context (past and future sentences) and experience, the group refocused on studying narratives. The work that came out of the group include:

a. SAM (story understanding system) – Cullingford 1981
b. PAM (story understanding system) – Wilensky 1981
c. TAIL-SPIN (story generation system) – Meehan 1977
d. Ideologically based understanding – Carbonell 1979
e. Use of themes to capture aspects of stories – Dyer 1983
f. Model of Narrative memory and reminding – Kolodner, 1984
g. Model of daydreaming – Mueller, 1990
h. Model of storytelling – Turner, 1992

Problems with the group: Intensely knowledge based, hence to make the system more general, one has to go through an infeasible knowledge engineering process.

Chronologically, further happenings….

2. AI died – Expert Systems – engineering model
3. Use of narratives in GUI design
4. Rebirth of NI – MIT Media Lab – Michael Travers and Marc Davis
5. Important reads: (Bolter and Joyce 1987), (Bates 1992, Murray 1998).
6. Use of NI in
a. Art: Domike 1999, Mateas 1999.
b. Psychology: (Bruner 1990, Bruner 1991).
c. Cultural Studies: Using narratives to understand the world and hence remodel AI practices (by studying story of AI progress): (Agre 1997, Sack 1992, Sengers 1998).
d. Literary Studies: Story generation and Story understanding: (Propp 1969), (Meehan 1977, Turner 1992, Weyhrauch 1997).
e. Drama: (Laurel 1991, Bates 1992, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber, 1997).
f. Humanistic AI

Research Summary

1. Narrative Interfaces – Don 1990, Laurel 1991
2. Narrative Agent Design – Sengers 1999, Lester and Stone 1997
3. Agents that use Narrative Structure – Schank 1990, Dautenhahn and Nehaniv, 1998
4. Support for Human Storytelling – Storymat (Ryokai and Cassell 1999), SAGE (Marina Umaschi Bers)
5. Story Database System – Schank 1997
6. Story-Understanding Systems – Cox 1996
7. Storytelling Systems – Tail-Spin (Meehan, 1977), Ani (Kahn, 1979), Rumelhart 1978, Bailey, Lang, Elliot 1998
8. Interactive Fiction and Drama – Oz Project, Façade
9. Narrative for Meta-analysis

This survey paper is of utmost importance for anyone trying to get an overall idea of the ongoing research going on in AI.