HUGINN - WordPress.com · 2014-05-14 · WHAT ARE PEOPLE USING HUGINN FOR? Personal Uses • Alerting when an emergency happens (earthquakes, fires, security alerts) • Monitoring

HUGINNA System for Building Personal Agents

Andrew Cantinoandrew@andrewcantino.com

@tectonic

Tuesday, May 13, 14

WHAT ARE “PERSONAL AGENTS”?Personal Agents are automated systems that

• let you offload your attention (so you can focus now)

• let you multitask by delegating repetitive/mechanical tasks

• answer your questions in real time

• ideally, predict your needs

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WHAT WE HAVE NOW

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THREE (ROUGH) TYPES

Assistive Personal Agents answer your questions

Declarative Personal Agents automate tasks via instruction

Predictive Personal Agents anticipate your needs

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ASSISTIVE PERSONAL AGENTS

• Apple’s Siri

• Google Now

•Microsoft’s Cortana

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• IFTTT

• Zapier

• Yahoo! Pipes

DECLARATIVE PERSONAL AGENTS

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PREDICTIVE PERSONAL AGENTS

• Google Now

•Microsoft’s Cortana

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WHAT WE HAVE NOW

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WHAT WE HAVE NOW

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HUGINN WATCHES THE WORLD FOR YOU

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WHAT ARE PEOPLE USING HUGINN FOR?

Personal Uses

• Alerting when an emergency happens (earthquakes, fires, security alerts)

•Monitoring sites that do not have RSS feeds (iTunes top charts, local event sites, social media websites)

•Watching Twitter for interesting events

• Travel alerts (trains, buses, school bus arrivals)

•Weather alerts (rain, freeze, sunset, wind warnings)Tuesday, May 13, 14

WHAT ARE PEOPLE USING HUGINN FOR?

Incorporating Data into Business

• The New York Times Interactive team used Huginn to help monitor their Olympics coverage, including infrastructure alerts and monitoring when medals were awarded.

• A DJ uses Huginn to watch for new music, compiling a morning update email.

• “I’m using [Huginn] to watch a few NYC government sites so I can be alerted to new data releases”

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WHAT ARE PEOPLE USING HUGINN FOR?

Making Business More Efficient

• As an integration platform to tie services together, such as to send a Hipchat message whenever activity occurs in a Basecamp project.

• A business uses Huginn to monitor the status of pending corporate expense reports, and to generate notifications when employees complete field reports.

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HUGINN

•Open Source (MIT License)

• Extensible and open API

• Ruby, Rails

• Active Community (30+ contributors)

• Still Young!

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HUGINN AGENTS

• Each one serves a single purpose

•Memory

• User configurable options

• Send and receive JSON events

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EVENTS FLOW IN A DIRECTED GRAPH

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TWO EXAMPLES

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“Remind me to take my umbrella if it will rain.”

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“Tell me when things I care about are happening in the world.”

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Slate.com article about Facebook’sMachine Learning techniques

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CAN ALSO ALERT IMMEDIATELY

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INTEGRATIONS• SMS & Voice calls via Twilio

• Location Tracking

• Webhooks & REST APIs

• Web scraping

• Sentiment analysis

• Run arbitrary JavaScript

• Public transit, Jabber, MTurk, JIRA tickets, Bitcoin data, and much more...!

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ADD NEW AGENTS EASILY WITH RUBY

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ROADMAP

• Pull Agents into Gems

•Migrate to Liquid templating (thanks Dominik!)

• Export and import Agent sets

•Work on a contextual signal framework... e.g., an Open Source Google Now

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BIG PICTURE• Commercial products are going to get very good at predicting your

thoughts and needs, but they will do it by gathering ever-larger datasets.

• Huginn and others like it will work to incorporate similar features into an environment that is extensible, user-driven, and user-owned.

• As the world grows in complexity, we need tools to help us organize our data and our lives to deal with that complexity.

• As Data Scientists, you have many tools for data gathering, but Huginn may be a useful addition to your toolset due to ease of use and a growing set of shared primitives.

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HUGINNhttps://github.com/cantino/huginn

Andrew Cantinoandrew@andrewcantino.com

@tectonic

Tuesday, May 13, 14

Come work at Mavenlink!http://mavengineering.com

Ever wanted to work in San Francisco?

Tuesday, May 13, 14