• by May 17, 2011

Japan's Dentsu, whose U.S. agencies include 360i and McGarry Bowen, has entered a new phase in an 8-month-old, crowd-sourced, artificial-intelligence project conducted with the MIT Media Lab and IT consulting company Nihon Unisys.

A new site, called "Finding Gifts with Sasha," helps users choose gifts through conversations with a boy character. "At first, his gift suggestions may not be perfect," Dentsu says, "but the system learns from the user's feedback in the same way that children do in the course of their development." Links to ecommerce sites are provided for the suggested gifts.

Before making its gift recommendations, Dentsu said, Sasha analyzes the profiles and comments posted on social media sites by both the user and the intended gift recipient.

Sasha also has the help of 200,000 pieces of "common sense" observations that were gathered into a database during two earlier phases of the project. The first, "Play a Quiz Game with Nadya," used a girl character to gather common-sense suggestions from players. The second, "Poi bot," used a personalized robot character to automatically generate Tweets said to imitate each user's distinctive communication style and way of thinking.

Dentsu provided the following example of how Sasha works: Based on the "common sense" info that "cats like warm places," someone seeking a gift for a cat lover won't be directed to an actual cat, but to things that would make a cat feel warm.

The ultimate aim of the project, Dentsu said, is to "leverage the shared common background knowledge and senses... used by humans when we converse with others to create a computer system that can understand implicit meanings and nuances of language in the same way as humans."

Dentsu believes this should lead to improved advertising, providing a "next-generation client-consumer marketing communication model employing artificial intelligence that has common sense." For Nihon Unisys, the goal is to offer an interface targeting consumers online and offline that delivers "a next-level experience."

Leading the project at the MIT Media Lab is Henry Lieberman, head of the Software Agents Research Group, whose research focuses on developing software that utilizes common-sense reasoning.

Dentsu is a sponsor of the Media Lab's "Things That Think" consortium. Similar to Aegis Media's recently announced sponsorship of the Lab's "Digital Life" consortium, Dentsu funds research, and in return receives exclusive use of resulting intellectual property for two years without additional licensing fees or royalty payments.