Fluke



The learner Fluke


The learner Fluke


The performer Fluke
Fluke


In the recent past, the increase in the usage and hence the importance of Internet, has also increased the requirement of Web robots. Web Robots are software agents that traverse the World Wide Web and retrieve web documents by standard HTTP protocol. They form an important part of the search engines. But the behaviour of these robots does not change in an adaptive and proactive manner in response to and in anticipation of changes in the environment, user characteristics and goals. Keeping in mind the above requirements, CRCS designed and created a software robot called Fluke. Fluke is an ebot (evolving software robot) that is capable of limited conversation in a natural language (English in this case) but its performance and effectiveness changes with the amount of conversation it conducts.

Computers usually respond with whatever they are programmed to say but Fluke is the world’s first adaptive software bot that is capable of free flowing conversation. It can also retrieve and index the information. It takes a sentence as an input, and gives back a sentence as a response to that input. Fluke has been written as an emergent program, which learns responses over time. Fluke operates in two modes, as a "Learner" which is trained and as a "Performer" with whom the user interacts and gets responses.

The trainer(s) trains the Learner Fluke by storing an input sentence with keywords. Subsequently, the user specifies the response(s) to be given when the keywords are encountered. In the Performer mode, Fluke takes the input sentence during the interaction with the user, searches for the keywords, appropriately collects all the responses linked to all possible keywords, and displays a response based on a few rules. The response could be audio or simple text.

Fluke often results in surprising responses, as it gives different outputs for the same input. This is because of the randomness and unpredictability as can be expected from a "moody person". It can be personalised and designed to respond in the way as the trainer does i.e., over time, it attains the personality of the trainer. Fluke can also attain a collective personality if it has multiple trainers.

Fluke can be used for a number of applications all of which involve a conversational recall of unorganised or unrelated data. Some possible applications can be:
  • Counselling: Provide useful information such as admission guidelines in educational institutions, job profiles, regulations etc.

  • Tutoring: Provide learning materials, definitions, test items and other useful educational inputs, act as automated assistants to human totors

  • Frequently Asked Questions: Provide conversational interface with the FAQ list

  • Automatic e-mail: Handle e-mail queries

This project reflects the efforts of CRCS in the area of Self-organizing systems.


For more details contact: Karuna Batra