Teenage Boy Creates a Seemingly Sentient A.I.

This is Acuman:

Give him a go! Have a chat and then read on below.

If he sounds like a superhero, you certainly aren’t the only one to think so. Imagined, invented, and developed by 14 year old Californian boy prodigy Sean Le Van, Acuman seems innocuous enough, until you engage in a conversation with him. An awake, aware, astute bot, based on Artificial Intelligence can be an exciting thing. Or a scary one, depending on how one sees it.

It isn’t nearly as diabolical as one can make it out to be, however. Here’s how it works. The mechanics may seem tricky and complex, but it’s entirely simple at the very essence of how Acuman works.

The usual methods of collecting personal information (metrics) is heavily reliant upon the participant (you, if you’re talking to a bot) and his/her ability to objectively take tests for the purposes of psychoanalysis, self-improvement, etc. This however, does not prove to be accurate in many instances.

Also, these methods do not autonomously track, record, and catalog this data for the participant.

This is where Sean Le Van had an inspired thought. After using a sentiment analysis algorithm called Naïve Bayes, he was able to devise a technology that was more accurate in collecting your ‘metrics’ through the answers you provide.

Here’s how he did it:

  • Coming up with various algorithms, he was able to gather information on emotional and personality traits, interests, future plans and goals.
  • His accuracy rate went up to 86% in information gathering, by devising his algorithms.
  • With the technology, he designed a contextually-aware and artificially intelligent personal assistant.
  • He did all this by putting it up as a piece of software on the internet which is able to self-perpetuate and gather quantified-self data that is provided by you, the participant.

With that, you have ACUMAN. Which also stands for Acronym for Artificial Chatting Utility Matching Algorithmic Nodes. There was a reason for the reference to the artificial assistant sounding like a superhero, after all.

Be devising and employing his own scripting language and algorithms which processed the language naturally, ACUMAN allows you to have a conversation with it in simple, everyday language.

Go ahead already, have a talk if you haven’t yet. Acuman is always there to listen and talk.

Within the same page, the personal assistant then uses the quantified data gathered from your conversation to analyze and create visual representation of the data in the form of a pie chat and other infographics.

It doesn’t stop there, ACUMAN actually gets back to you and reminds you of your goals and means of self-improvement in a clear, concise manner.

You’re missing out on a fascinating experiment if you haven’t tried it already. ACUMAN told me I’m an optimistic person. Coming from an artificially intelligent software created by a 14 year old Californian teenager, it sits just fine with me.