Submissions

Teammate 1

Name
Andrew Dougherty (LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, Kaggle, Personal website)
Age
38
Location
Michigan, United States
Gender
Male
What's your background?

I come from a mathematics and chess background. So I'm interested in using logic to solve planning problems. I proved a result early in college that showed that successful Artificial Intelligence programs would ultimately need to be larger. This motivated collecting and packaging as much software as practical.

Describe your professional status

I am unemployed, working out of a room with 20+ performant computers.

What would your friends say makes you interesting?

Highly logical, abstract thinker, humanitarian. Dedicated to this project for so long, never known anyone so dedicated to anything so long in my entire life. Especially after all the adversities, all the times you've lost it and started over.

Who is someone you personally know that will have an incredible impact on the world one day?

Douglas Miles, he is the author of PrologMUD. I admire his A.I. philanthropy and ingenuity in creating PrologMUD.

What is a group or organization that you left or were kicked out of? Why?

I failed to complete my 4th year of college due to a "perfect storm" of detrimental factors entirely unrelated to academics, which had a negative domino effect.

What books, movies, or music do you like?

Books - any text on logic, computer science or artificial intelligence. Movies - animated kids movies, fantasy and sci-fi. Music - Irish music, classical music.

Who is a public figure you think you’re most like? Why?

I've been called the Richard Stallman of the Midwest, probably for stark morality and adherence to the principles of Free Software.

What do you want to get out of Pioneer?

The ability to achieve the fruition of my project to aid the vulnerable through Free Software A.I. logistics.

Project

What is your project?

This project contains planning software to help the vulnerable; including meals, finances, transport, and long and short term life planning.

What's new about this?

This software uses state of the art PDDL-based planning technology to plan at multiple levels of granularity. Additionally, the FRDCSA project collects, packages and applies related software. Everything is served through both a responsive website and Alexa interfaces.

Why did you decide to work on this?

Because I went homeless and did not know about resources and I want to save others in comparably difficult circumstances from having to go through that.

Project details

This project has two prongs, the software collection and packaging, and the free life planner social services. The packaging is rather straightfoward - simply collect and integrate relevant software into our Debian-based eco system. The Free Life Planner and associated systems avail themselves of the collected software, and custom written software to provide a range of dynamic social services. An example of this is given in this use-case document: https://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/homeless-story.html

Our services are intended to act as a life vest for those in difficult circumstances. Having experienced such circumstances myself, I know that things that most people take for granted can become extremely difficult, such as eating, getting from place to place, etc. By collating service information, and eliciting from the user - through risk-aware dialog, fact extraction from questionnaires, social media analysis, and other modes - their present circumstances, we can use logic programming and A.I. planning to develop a plan skein that interactively aids the user to resolve their problems.

A longer overview of this process is given here, but please note the technology has progressed since this was written:

https://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/News-Challenge-2.html

Project website
One day, this project could become...
A non-profit
What are the most similar organizations to your project?

211, PrologMUD, Cyc, Sourceforge, Debian, V'ger

What do you plan to accomplish over the next 4 weeks?

I am currently working on bytelibrary.com, a website that helps with the software retrieval and packaging. I am also going to work more on the inventory manager to complete the meal planner. However, the project scope is very large, so I'll be working on many smaller tasks.

What do you plan to accomplish by Presentation Day?

With the help of funding and advisors, I would like to be well on the way to achieving non-profit status, and will reveal video demonstrations of the full present capabilities of the Free Life Planner, including completed financial and meal planning.

What is the #1 thing slowing you down?

Lack of funds.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Security
How did you hear about Pioneer?

From a follow up email from aigrant.org.

What are you building, in a sentence?

AI to help the poor, ill, disabled and/or homeless with managing finances, transportation, shopping, meals, communications, medications, etc

How was the last week? What did you accomplish?

Last week was stressful. Wrote rough drafts of 2 research papers & a presentation about FLP for a conference I'm planning to attend, generated the first 6-month financial plan, enabled simultaneous meal planning, enabled AJAX inventory update, etc. See: https://frdcsa.org/wk1

What about that demonstrates rapid progress?

The scope and quality of the work, plus the fact that the meal and financial planners are complex applications and yet I was able to achieve some long-standing goals pertaining to them.

What is the #1 thing slowing you down?

Lack of resources resulting in many other problems, such as running out of food at the end of the month.

What do you want to have done by the end of next week?

I want to have the inventory manager accurately representing our actual inventory, and have meal plans generated from this. This is an ambitious proposition but I'm taking a risk by committing to it to maximize the benefit of participating in the tournament.

What did you learn about yourself this week?

That I truly need help to accomplish my goals because of the scope of the problems they address.

What is something you learned this week that's unrelated to your project?

Honestly I did not learn much else since I was focused on making good progress, so that's something I learned just now, to take more time to learn other things.

Optional photo/video link
What is the #1 way Pioneer can help you?

By helping me to start an open source company or nonprofit to further the capabilities of the Free Life Planner and provide customer support to future users of the system.

What are you building, in a sentence?

This project contains planning software to help the vulnerable; including meals, finances, transport, and long and short term life planning.

How was the last week? What did you accomplish?

+ Landing page https://dev.freelifeplanner.org/
+ Added two leading AI/Semantic Web coders to create a highly responsive website to solve the problems of homelessness in real-time
+ Got in touch with startup incubator
+ Added a medication mgt coding specialist
+ Added a PR person

What about that demonstrates rapid progress?

+ Getting our team together!
+ Progress on: http://frdcsa.org/hl
+ Our new lead AI developer not only knows the system we're using, he wrote the system!
+ Dev has enhanced clone of Cyc (http://cycorp.com) world's longest running AI project
+ Team members have proven track records

What is the #1 thing slowing you down?

Our team's attitude is exemplary. Yet we still have the potential to be 10 times better this week than the last, even to be the best possible versions of ourselves! People are depending on us to be there for them when no one else is, and no one else has anything like our tech.

What do you want to have done by the end of next week?

We want good teamwork so we can achieve good marketing, the Linux Journal article, self-examination, reading up on startups, getting set up with the incubator, the basic site live, good progress on the intake system, user interface, meal and medication planners and a new backend.

What did you learn about yourself this week?

I really care about and have the drive to help the marginalized. Having been homeless, I know how to survive, and how to help others to survive. We are going to get them the information and resources I didn't get. My past has actually been positive because it brought me here.

What is something you learned this week that's unrelated to your project?

That cats have a different name for each person in their house, and will often greet them with it.

Optional photo/video link

What is the #1 way Pioneer can help you?

It already has, placing 5th made me realize people actually believe in the project. When our rank fell, it taught me coding isn't enough - I have to keep adapting, improving and continue being resilient.

What are you building, in a sentence?

A free software AI to help the marginalized with logistics of daily life, since poverty etc takes a toll on the respective required skills.

How was the last week? What did you accomplish?

Last week was like the last 18 years, steady progress on the system. Started writing integration for PrologMUD, held technical discussions with lead AI developer, began a new version of the life planner, began work on taking over the CMU AI repo, worked on positional analysis.

What about that demonstrates rapid progress?

FRDCSA, like PrologMUD, has been running for around 20 years. A life planner is not some one-off solution that can be coded in a weekend. It is a ***life*** planner, it's complex. We have demonstrated steady technical progress, more got done than we could explain.

What is the #1 thing slowing you down?

Lack of funds to purchase system infrastructure and pay for electricity, and to hire additional developers who would bring skills like UX and C++ which we don't possess to the requisite degree.

What do you want to have done by the end of next week?

I want to have better integration of PrologMUD. Implement much of the ACL Emacs debugging interface. Also progress on cyc-mode-2. Integration of all search and documentation for Cyc. A release of SxxMachine. Other sundry tasks too numerous to particularize.

What did you learn about yourself this week?

I learned that if I wasn't working for free no one could afford me. I made $500 for sending in 2 URLs to a think tank. If the work I did ever was rewarded financially and fairly, I would be very well off. But I work for free because there is no money to be made off the poor.

What is something you learned this week that's unrelated to your project?

My project is an AI and a life planner, and as such, I am hard pressed to think of things that are not related to it. I don't think there is anything unrelated to it honestly. I learned Feferman's completeness theorem, which vindicates the project's design.

Optional photo/video link
What is the #1 way Pioneer can help you?

Well I've noticed that the design of Pioneer rewards projects which are shorter-term, instead of longer-term research projects. If they made better accounting of longer-term projects, that could help.

What are you building, in a sentence?

This project contains planning software to help the vulnerable; including meals, finances, transport, and long and short term life planning.

How was the last week? What did you accomplish?

installed latest PrologMUD
basic reminders working
++intake system
toy life domain
search tools for PrologMUD
organized CYC materials
++converting IRC to dossiers
new FLP version
IE for metasites to KBs
discussions with devs
new laptop with FLP
updated a search analysis tool

What do you want to have done by the end of next week?

++reminder system
business cards and flyers for homeless
intake system
OpenWiFiMap integration
++productivity requirements
++Inform7 in Prolog + BDI?
++world state monitor
++positional eval function
nth DOW recurrences
upgrade main SSD?
factored planning?
PrologMUD tutorial
++UX

Request constructive feedback from the Pioneer community.

Yes

1-minute video about you & your project