Announcement: Fiona Artificial Mind Project

http://www.sparkingtogether.com/
This should be of interest to people here. It is currently going into beta, so you can register. basically, the idea seems to be to let people build basic artificial minds by adding attributes to a base character.
They say it 'is an online platform to create the next generation of virtual avatars that are smarter, more interactive, and striking.'

A closer look at Fiona

The dream of creating an artificial mind and reveal the mystery of human intelligence has fascinated humans for centuries. Many researchers and scientists have been working in this field even before the term Artificial Intelligence was created in the mid-50s.

The truth is that to understand and mimic human emotions and intelligence is a much more difficult task than we think, and it requires many different disciplines to complete the puzzle and build a true artificial mind. Each discipline and research group is devoted to create a small piece of that puzzle. But if those pieces do not come together, research groups will hardly match their developments and advances in order to unify them and work together to build the puzzle.

In order to put together those pieces, we are creating Fiona. Fiona is a tool that allows people from around the world to contribute to this challenge providing their little piece of intelligence.

We call these pieces of intelligence Sparks. A Spark is part of an avatar, like an app. It can be its appearance (3D or 2D models), its voice (speech synthesis, TTS), its hearing (speech recognition, ASR), its knowledge, its abilities (face recognition),(face detection ), its functionalities (reading and answering emails, informing about the weather, reading news, scheduling meetings…) and many more things.