Subject: a beginner's questions

From: Candide Kemmler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 12:58:16 +0100

Hi,

I'm Candide Kemmler and I'm new to this list. I've been lurking for one 
week to see what kind of discussions were held here and it seems that 
it's ok to ask general questions.

BTW, I learned about lojban from Björn Gohla who's been developing a 
lojban vocabulary quiz for GNUstep, which is a platform I'm also playing 
with (and it's on my TODO list to port it to Mac OS X, if it isn't 
already done). My interest for lojban stems from my motivation for 
getting acquainted with logic concepts "at a low cost". I'm more a 
literary type of guy than a math type of guy (studied latin-greek at 
school), so the formal way of expressing things isn't very attractive to 
me; learning a new language is.

However, being a programmer, I'm sure that logic programming is the 
future, and every effort at making humans and machines communicate in a 
more natural way catches my attention. In general, while we certainly 
have lots to do to make machines more human, I think humanity will also 
have to cope with its creature's way of thinking. And lojban also 
interests me in that respect.

That being said, I'm very curious about what drives other lojbanists' 
motivation. In particular I'd like to know about possible projects 
involving human-machine communication. Here's a list of things I'd like 
to explore with lojban, things that are possibly being explored by 
others here (in the style of the recent "What are you doing now ?" 
thread):

- build a lojban voice synthesizer (there's an open source C and Java 
implementation of a voice synthesizer that seems low-level enough to 
build what they call "voices" for new languages:
-> http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html).

- build a lojban voice recognition framework (there's a sourceforge 
project on voice recognition (not much yet though):
-> http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/).

- couple the lojban lexer/parser with logic engines to store/analyse 
facts and construct some kind of weltanshauung (not sure of the 
spelling);

- use lojban in Reputation Calculation Engines (see:
-> http://www.openprivacy.org)

- use lojban in cunjuntion with the semantic web initiative;

I've decided to animate a workshop every fortnight here in Brussels in 
which I've invited several friends to participate. It will be about 
human-machine communication and the first meeting introduced lojban 
already: we did lessons 1-4 of a set of 7 and the 3 that remain are on 
the program. I'd be glad if some of you could be virtually present by 
then (I mean, using IM or IRC). Next meeting is Monday 7/1/02 at 7 PM 
GMT+1.

Cheers,

Candide

PS: there's no "an" (like "France") sound in lojban, and without it my 
name is sounding ridiculous to me :-) too bad !