LO 11 – Female Practitioners

Creator: Allison Parrish
Piece: Semantic Similarity Chatbot
Date: 2018

Allison Parrish is a programmer and a linguist. Allison currently works at NYU as a faculty member. She also graduated from NYU with her master’s degree. A lot of her projects involve bots and poetry as these are the topics she is most interested in. All of her projects that I have seen mix language and coding to create unique tools and artwork. The Semantic Similarity Chatbot is a creation of hers which allows people to text with historical figures of their choice. She wrote programs that dissected the way that different characters wrote and then added AI that could replicate similar patterns. One of the coolest aspects of this project in my opinion is that fact that it was created for her students to modify. She started with a few people from history, but as a project, she had her students write more code to add even more unique figures. I really enjoy the concept of this and love that she taught her students through such an interesting project.

https://gist.github.com/aparrish/114dd7018134c5da80bae0a101866581