Reflections on Sessions 10 and 11

Looks like all of the students have survived the final double-session week. Next they need to focus on the group project and individual paper. Less than a month to go! We are coming up on the home stretch!

In Session 10, about half of the students seemed fascinated with ALICE while others were unimpressed. I guess it depends on their expectations and what they have seen in the past. My first contact with AI was a computer program called AI Doctor. You, "the patient," would converse with a virtual doctor to help diagnose your ailment and come up with a treatment. It worked on the same principle as ALICE where words from the "patient" were parsed, processed and linked with pre-programmed responses. We have come far from AI Doctor with the use of the XML dialect, Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. This is a significant leap forward compared to when I used GW-BASIC many years ago to program my AI Doctor program.

BTW, I much prefer conversing with ALICE the bot compared to that obnoxious paperclip bot Microsoft used in their Office products.



In Session 11, I am glad that most of the students were exposed to a powerful OLAP tool. They are seeing a Cognos product formerly called PowerPlay, but there are other companies such as BusinessObjects, Microsoft, Oracle, who can produce similar cubes and interfaces. These tools are certainly easier to use than pivot tables and spreadsheets. I am always impressed when I see the insightful trends and relationships students identified and the derived strategies based on these findings.

I was a bit perplexed that a handful of students did not use Fedscope but instead did research using the OPM site. The whole point of the assignment was to gain experience with the use of data cube. Can't figure that one out.