Tom M. Mitchell

"They have (in a funny way) a more complete factual set knowledge than a normal three year old, but they still don't have that kind of common sense that a 3 year old has"

"The hardware is a collection of about a hundred computers that Garth Gibson (another faculty in our department here), runs as a research project and he lets us use that collection to run NELL....Maybe more interesting than the hardware is how the learning itself works and I could take a few minutes to explain that"

"Let's say I give you the word 'mom' or 'computer'....it's really the same brain and the only difference is that when I say the word 'mom' it was one pattern of neurons firing and when I say 'computer' it is a different set of neurons firing in your brain. We've become very interested in how the brain processes natural language and for the past 12 years with my colleague Marcel Just in our psychology department"

"We have this research project going which we call our Never-Ending Language Learner (or NELL for short), and the goal here is to build a program that runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week and everyday it has two things it has to do."

"One is that it has to extract some more facts from the web by reading (facts like 'Obama is president' or 'blue jeans are often worn with t-shirts'), and the second task it has to do each day is to learn to read better than it could the day before so that tomorrow it can collect some more facts more accurately....We started this program running 24 hours a day January 2010 so it's about 4 years old now and the results so far is that it is indeed learning."