Tim Berners-Lee at AAAI
I’ve also spent the week at AAAI, heard Tim’s talk and Peter Norvig’s question (Peter and I have known each other for more than 20 years now, he’s a good friend). Here’s some stuff people might be interested to know - Peter and Tim talked more after, Peter invited Tim to come visit Google (and I’ll be there next week for the first Google Faculty Summit).
Tim also had lunch and some later discussion with Eric Horvitz, President-elect of AAAI and a high level manager at Microsoft Research. I leave reporting on that conversation to the participants, but note that Tim ended up being invited to talk to the AI folks at Microsoft Research as well. I also enjoyed seeing Tim talking with one of AI’s founding fathers, John McCarthy, during the morning break on Wednesday.
I wasn’t impolite enough to eavesdrop (especially as I couldn’t get close enough 
), I hope Tim will blog that sometime.
My personal favorite fall-out from Tim’s talk was that at the end of the AAAI meeting on Thursday, Nils Nilsson (author of the first AI textbook, designer of Shakey the robot, and one of the nicest people in the AI field) came over to me to ask about Semantic Web, he was intriqued by Tim’s talk and wanted to know more. Jeff Heflin and I got on the Web and showed him around the Semantic Web (portals, documents, etc.) He said this was something he would definitely have to check out.
In short, I think Tim did well to come and talk, and the AI community is definitely showing interest
-Jim H.
p.s. Oh yeah, Tim Finin was demoing Swoogle and some other Sem Web stuff, and his demo was mobbed constantly — another good sign of interest.
