KeJi’ (meaning ‘science and technology’ in Mandarin) is a collaborative commission by Cheltenham Science Festival and i-DAT, Plymouth University, of the artist and designer Nathan Gale.
KeJi is a playful artificial intelligent (AI) creature that visitors to the Cheltenham Science Festivalcan ‘chat’ to through tweets and sms txts. Visitors can also play the game, ‘KeJi Bounce’, which KeJi has created for you.
KeJi Bounce is a game that births a unique KeJi spawn character whose behaviour is linked to the ECG of the players heart rate and biological data. Players have to bounce on a trampoline to keep their creature afloat and win the game.
Visitors that have played the KeJi Bounce game can drop their own personal KeJi spawn onto the main KeJi installation at Cheltenham Science Festival by typing in their email address. The KeJi spawns will cluster to others with similar heart rate and generally bounce around with the bigger KeJi ‘the original’. Each spawn will display a name and the heart rate of its ‘owner/creator’.
KeJi’s appearance will be affected by the average heart rate of the festival visitors (fed virtually from the KeJi Bounce game) and its gradient colour will indicate its mood (red = angry/stressed to yellow=happy, blue-chilled and green = lonely). KeJi’s mood will also affect its response in communicating with visitors through tweets and sms txts, so if he is a bit short or moody, he is only feeling a bit out of sorts.
KeJi’s AI is based on A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to asAlicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processingchatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human’s input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum‘s classical ELIZA program and developed byRichard Wallace in 1995. (Wikipedia, 2012)
