Shoechicken: AI Learning Agent 2
In the previous post I mentiond that I will be working on a side project called shoechicken. I was invited by my friend,James Horsley, to work on the project.
Background:
James Horsley and Mike Wootten (He has not setup his blog yet) started the project on Source Forge in 2005. The first implementation of the project was written in Java. They also wrote a paper on the concept of shoechicken with the assistance of a professor at University of West Florida that specializes in artificial intelligence. The paper was presented at the International Society for Computers and Their Applications in 2006. If you are interested, the paper can be found here.
What is Shoechicken?
As posted on shoechicken's website...
Shoechicken is an intelligent system for rating RSS and Atom news content based on user preferences. The system builds a user profile implicitly by observing user interactions with news content. Shoechicken rates incoming content based on user preferences, and adapts to both long term and short term changes in preferences. The system is interoperable such that it can supply rated content for use by any news aggregator.
Where is Shoechicken going?
Instead of continuing the implementation in Java, we are going try to do it in Ruby using Rails. This also means we will be starting from the ground up. Why Ruby? None of us have done much in Ruby so this gives us an opportunity to learn a new language. Oh yeah, this application is meant to conquer the world ;)

What's with the ";)"? You don't think it could conquer the world?? ;)
I was trying to be modest.