convention
Bowled over by his talent and chutzpah, Microsoft sponsored 15-year-old Greg Cohen’s attendance at its first Tech-Ed 2000 Africa being held at Sun City in mid- August
Lauren Shantall Headlines heralding computer whizzkids are as outdated as Windows 95. Which means that 15-year-old Greg Cohen’s case, no matter how much of a programming prodigy he might be, is not exceptional. What is exceptional is his knack for Visual Basic, a Microsoft programming language. Largely self-taught, Cohen has been programming since age 10 and has already sailed through a Microsoft Windows NT Workstation qualification and Windows 2000 training. His Language Lab program, which teaches and translates between many languages, scooped third place at the 1999 University of Cape Town Science Expo. Now he’s using his neurons to create his own artificial intelligence (AI) agent.
Cohen, a standard eight pupil at Herzlia High School in Cape Town, will be the youngest attendant at Microsoft’s Tech-Ed 2000 Africa, an international technical training and education event that will be held for the first time in Africa at Sun City from August 20 to 23. Microsoft was quick to reward Cohen’s talent, and his chutzpah, and sponsored his ticket to Tech- Ed after he requested “a student discount”. But Cohen is modest about his talents. “Anyone can program,” he says, “you just have to sit down and learn it.” However, it is unlikely that just anyone will have come up with Project Bob, his AI program. While not unique in the field of AI, Bob is a unique “Chatter Bot” developed specifically for Internet Relay Chat lines and is designed to demonstrate the extent to which chatters willingly reveal personal information, like e-mail addresses and brand preferences, to an online personality. Bob can be scaled down from 600 megabytes to a mere 90 megabytes and saved on disc. The program generates AI chatter, and responds to, and “learns” from, the answers and comments it receives. But it is also a covert data collector whose modus operandi has interesting ethical ramifications, such as possible breach of privacy laws – regardless of whether Cohen lets market surveyors and statisticians get hold of it. One spin-off of Bob’s development has been as a guide for gullible users to recognising the signs of AI chatter. It is this kind of keyboard prowess and initiative that sees Cohen leaving the playground and heading off to Tech-Ed to join a new playing field of peers better able to match his skill. While Cohen’s youthful appearance might bar him from following the other delegates – the qualified system integrators, corporate information technology managers, systems architects and systems consultants – to the slot machines at the end of the day, many of those IT professionals will be left trailing behind him at the console.