Question: How long have you been developing your research?

Huma Shah answered on 9 Nov 2016:

Gosh Isobel, I’m going to have to ‘think aloud’ to find out!

I guess once I started doing my final year honours project in my BSc degree, and by that time the first Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence had already been held in the US, in 1991 (please see this link: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html ), I guess I knew I either wanted to do a Masters or a PhD exploring the Turing test further.

The Loebner Prize came to the UK for the first time in 2001 – it was held at the Science Museum in London, I didn’t go (was experiencing sad life problems at the time), and again in 2003 at the University of Surrey. I had already been contacting Professor Kevin Warwick, because he’d been conducting his cyborg chip implants and he was one of the judges at the Science Museum Loebner Prize. So after the 2003 Loebner Prize I contacted its Sponsor, Dr Hugh Loebner and asked if I could help him organise another of his AI contests based on the Turing test in the UK. He agreed, and with Professor Kevin Warwick’s support – I’d started my PhD at Reading University in June 2006 part-time supervised by Prof Warwick, I co-organised the 16th Loebner Prize at University College London in 2006:
http://loebner.net/Prizef/2006_Contest/loebner-prize-2006.html

Observing the 2006 contest closer than the 2003 Loebner contest at University of Surrey, I felt Hugh Loebner’s interpretation of Alan Turing’s ideas for machine thinking were not the same as mine – the 2003 contest had some good techniques but the experiment needed tweaking, I disagreed with the 2006 format, which was different from the one Hugh staged in 2003. So I asked Hugh Loebner if I could again organise his AI contest but this time designing the Turing test experiment myself. He agreed and I organised the 18th Loebner Prize for AI as part of my PhD experiments at Reading University: http://loebner.net/Prizef/2008_Contest/loebner-prize-2008.html

Since 2008 I’ve conducted two more major public experiments independently of Hugh Loebner’s contest. I’ve tweaked the experiment each time due to the results and findings from previous experiments to focus on slightly different things. I’ve implemented the last two Turing test experiments at Bletchley Park in 2012, and at The Royal Society London in 2014.

This means the short answer is: I’ve been developing my research for a long time, about 20 years!!! Apologies for the long answer – the question was great and helped me to think about what I’ve been doing and why 🙂

However, if you want to read more, please see my co-authored paper, ‘From the Buzzing in Turing’s Head to Machine Intelligence Contests’ available for download from this link:
https://www.academia.edu/226311/From_the_Buzzing_in_Turings_Head_to_Machine_Intelligence_Contests

Thanks for the question, and sorry again for the long answer 🙂

Huma