USCIIIII GLOBAL

January 6 2007: First Ever www Publication.

The inventor's drafted private website is posted on the GettysList.com website, and is viewable to a limited yet growing number of people who visited this while it is kept on the www as part of the basis for formation of the institute for future generations.

May 1st 2007: Information Published by SD Times.

Editorials and Opinions
Industry Watch: You're Speaking My Language
You're Speaking My Language

By: David Rubinstein

May 1, 2007 - I think I woke Ami Cohen from a sleep when I called him in mid-April to discuss an idea he has for giving machines the ability understand vocal cues at a high level.

If I did wake him, Cohen is one of those people who doesn't take a long time to clear his mind and regain his bearings-he was off on a 90-minute monologue that careened in a number of directions within seconds of exchanging greetings with me.

Let me back up a bit. Cohen reached out to me last month to talk with him about his ideas for an EchoLogical Machine, which executes business process management for distributed manufacturing by robots. An Israeli by birth, Cohen has lived in British Columbia since 1966. He says he has a background in marine engineering, and has worked in real estate and other businesses before committing to his flying sailboat project. (The boat doesn't actually "fly"-it rises up to ride on top of the water, leaving no wake.)

He has a vision for In-Cell Nomadic Intelligent Manufacturing and Management Factories, which will include the robots for forming the Rigid-Hulls necessary for the flying boat project, and ultimately becoming part of his FlexibleFINS project, as the fins attach to the hulls of his boats. For this kind of work, Cohen sees the need "to have a machine I can talk to like I'm talking to you," he said.

At this point in our conversation, Cohen started talking about upgrading natural languages, the creation of USCIIIIII (which we'll get into in more detail later on), and teaching machines elements of speech.

All of this is in his head for now. The concepts are quite interesting, to say the least, and Cohen is looking for partners to help him build out the ideas. Read on, and let me know what you think of Cohen's efforts.

"Machines need to recognize more than identity," he said. "Speech is not a monotone thing. Talking is like singing. The goal is to have a thinking and singing machine."

Cohen sees a future in which we can teach machines all the ways to say the letter a, for example: a, aye, ay, ah; or b, which could be buh, bee, bih, beh. "You can give it a true voiceprint," he said.

To do so, he's created something called the Universal Standard Code for Internationally Intelligent Intensively Interactive Information Interchange (the aforementioned USCIIIIII). "This will be the operating font that can recognize multiple languages, to have accurate voiceprint recognition," Cohen claimed.

Only with something like USCIIIIII can machines begin to share a culture with the human it is interfacing with, Cohen stated. The Echological Machine that Cohen has devised in his mind is the logic mechanism that describes how to instruct a machine in binary to understand speech. By adding super-vowels, or diacritics, to English, Cohen is creating an extra layer of instruction for the machine-the symbolic instruction code that has the logic about sentences, so the machine will know the difference between "Go to the bank and make a deposit" and "The river bank is muddy" and "The airplane is banking."

Perhaps because of his Israeli upbringing, Cohen believes Hebrew can be the model for upgrading natural languages because Hebrew is a structured language that has a root system of single-letter words and double-letter words that are the root of all other words. "In English, you have architect, and architecture, but then it goes off to build, building, then brick, bricklaying. They aren't true roots," Cohen said.

Believing that this all can be done takes faith, and Cohen has no shortage of that. In fact, he says the Hebrew language is the true vocal signature of nature, where communications can be seen and heard by listening to all sounds around us at all times. "It is a language of God, for simple people," he says.

Cohen speaks at 110 miles an hour, changing topics the way impatient drivers change lanes. Following him can be difficult. But it seems to me there are some very valid points in all that he says, and Cohen said he's looking for partners to help bring his visions to fruition.

In an e-mail follow-up to our phone conversation, Cohen wrote he would like to open doors "to teams already advanced in the art of universal natural logic and languages' powers in automation and for computing as well as remotely operated intelligent universal robotics."

You've heard what Ami Cohen thinks. We want to hear what you think.

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.
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