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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days starting January 30th, 2008. I'm Steve

Mercky. This week, an anniversary celebration with Carl Raggio, formerly of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

and some funny stuff with a couple of researchers teaching computers to recognize jokes. Why

teach a computer to get jokes? To get to the other side of the interface. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news.

Lawrence Mazelak is the director of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

at the University of Cincinnati.

Julia Taylor is the graduate student who has been trying to develop ways for computers to understand humor

at a very basic level of wordplay and knock-knock jokes. I called

them at the lab in Cincinnati. Professor Maislag, Ms. Taylor, good to talk to you today.

Hi, Steve. Hello, Steve. You have research going on that, well, it's really serious business,

but you're trying to teach computers to get jokes.

And right away, that's kind of a funny idea, but there's obviously a serious reason to do it.

Why do you do that?

Well, we're interested in sociable computing, which means that we like computers to be able to naturally interact with human beings without a lot of formal problems between them, a lot of formal walls.

And the best way to do this, or at least from the human's point of view, is using normal language or natural language, but it probably needs to be informal language,

which means that it can't be precise step by step by step.

...