As you probably know, Oded defends his thesis today. What you probably don't know is that he wasn't actually supposed to graduate for another two years (no one can graduate more quickly than Charles). But lately, Oded has become... well, a bit of a liability.

After his latest attack on the well-respected programs of the Media Lab, the Corporation has decided that Oded must graduate and reveal his research program.

Oded's real research has been top secret until now. He's been telling people that his thesis title is something like "Ambiguous Learning for Fun and Profit." As we've just discovered, his actual thesis title is "Automatic Generation of Sarcastic Wit from Ambiguous Examples."

Oded has written a program that reads talk announcements and other e-mail, then generates new prose in the form of a GSB message. His statistical method looks at messages as "positive bags" and "negative bags." A positive bag is one message that has some content that made Oded laugh. Negative bags consist of messages that have no content that Oded found funny. By plotting features of the messages into a high dimensional space, his program is able to generate new text using a random walk.

In the early days, his program wrote a message about marshmallow fluff when presented with a Media Lab talk announcement as an example. It wrote a message about cooking graduate students to feed to other graduate students using Numberical Recipes in C when shown a GSL announcement. And who could forget the Martha Stewart message? That was produced from a party announcement written by Carlin.

Obviously, the program still needed tweaking and many hours of computation time. Many people at the lab recall Oded's overuse of their desktop machine. It was a huge effort. Each GSB message took hundreds of hours of computation time.

In the last months, you've seen the results of his latest research. Some think the program is too good and are seeking to silence it. They think that the research will die as soon as Oded leaves since most thesis code bit rots when a student leaves. But we will carry on with Oded's GSB tradition.

Come discuss code maintenance at this week's

    G  I  R  L     S  C  O  U  T     B  E  N  E  F  I  T

Friday, 8 May 5:30pm 7th floor playroom