Personality Profile

A Laughing Matter

Anyone who has been in the computer industry long enough knows that it pays to have a sense or humor. After all, fewer things in the known universe could be funnier than someone trying to get a personal computer to work the way it was advertised.

by Thomas Caldwell

A fortunate few have been able to make the humorous side of computers their life. Kim Binsted is an artificial intelligence expert currently working at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo. Among her many ambitions is to teach computers how to tell a joke.

"Look at Star Trek's Data. He can do everything; walk, talk, dance, sing, see, hear. All of the really hard tasks that artificial intelligence faces are solved with Data," says the Canadian scientist. "But he can't understand a simple pun. I find that unrealistic. I think that really good humor has a genius to it."

Science and humor have been part of Kim's life for most of it. As a young child, she was attracted to genetics because the idea of creating a real, live unicorn appealed to her. "If there had been a geneticist Barbie I would have bought it," she says. Later in high school she added comedy to her skill set, joining the improv [comedy] team because its captain was "awfully cute."

Several years later she was able to combine her two interests. While earning her PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Kim entered the annals of computer history by developing the world's first "pun engine." JAPE, which stands for Joke Analysis and Production Engine (try it out at http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/students/kimb/demo/) is a rather sophisticated work station-based system that creates puns based on random words.

"They're really bad puns. The kind of thing you find in Christmas crackers, on ice cream sticks or in Today's Chuckle in the Japan Times," says the self-proclaimed mad scientist. "What makes it interesting is that they are puns, and they are all puns. Even if they are really bad ones."

Kim's pun engine has made her a bit of a celebrity in AI (artificial intelligence) circles. Last year she appeared on a panel chaired by Douglas Hofstadter that discussed the humorous side of artificial intelligence along with MIT's Marvin Minsky and comedian Steve Martin. Kim has traveled extensively and spent several months at the Microsoft Research Institute in Sydney, Australia.

While attending a workshop, Kim met a Sony executive who found her background interesting. Shortly thereafter, the company invited her to work at their research lab in Tokyo. At present she is working on screen-generated "talking heads," basically computer generated graphics of human faces that express themselves like real people depending on what they are saying. Her creation recently served as the play-by-play announcer at the RoboCup games in Paris (http://www. robocup.v.kinotrope.co.jp/).

The good doctor likes her life at Sony. "I can do whatever I want and be supported along the way," she says. "There aren't the distractions of having to write proposals that will appeal to some particular funding body or to schedule your research around your teaching schedule. It's very free and very open." Not content to teaching computers humor, Kim likes to do the same thing with people. When she's not in front of a keyboard, she does improv with the Tokyo Comedy Store players (http://www.tokyocomedy.com/).

Where will she end up next? If she has her way, Mars. In all seriousness, Kim is trying very hard to get into the US space program. "I want to go to Mars," she declares, adding that returning to Earth would probably be as much fun as the journey to the red planet itself.

If she does earn a seat on a space shuttle or future mission to Mars, Kim Binsted will probably be credited with another one of history's firsts: comedian-astronaut.

Says the lady who wants to teach computers to laugh: "Nobody else who has applied for the space program has put it [comedian] on their resume." Check out Kim's web site at http://www. csl.sony.co.jp/person/kimb/.
The Query Column has appeared in Computing Japan every month since our July 1994 issue. You can reach Tom at caldwell@gol.com.

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