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29-418: Virtual Personalities , Inc. traces its technology back to Michael Mauldin 's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and its artistry back to Peter Plantec's work in personality psychology and art direction. In 1994, Michael Loren Mauldin , founder of Lycos , Inc., developed a prototype chatbot , Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test , for

58-483: A bachelor's degree from Rice University . In 1983, he received master's degree and in 1989, he received a Ph.D. , both from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His Ph.D. advisor was Jaime Carbonell . In 1994, while working at CMU on the Informedia Digital Library project, Mauldin created Lycos from 3 pages of code. Along with CMU, he sold 80% of the company to CMGI for $ 2 million. In 1996, Lycos

87-463: A $ 900 million bid, and was announced as the winner of the assets on September 14, 2009. In 1985, Performance Engineering Corporation (later PEC Solutions) was formed to offer technology services to government customers. On June 6, 2005, Nortel acquired PEC Solutions to form Nortel PEC Solutions. On January 18, 2006, Nortel PEC Solutions was renamed Nortel Government Solutions. On December 21, 2009, Avaya acquired Nortel's government business as part of

116-403: A certain kind of object or textual description). It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos , another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages. Sylvie was born and her abilities were expanded greatly to include interfacing with computers and control systems via her serial ports. Sylvie

145-565: A large number of Sylvies have been sold in Southeast Asia. Upon investigation, he found out that students had discovered a "test" mode that would allow them to type in English sentences that Sylvie would pronounce in her somewhat stylized English. In 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. to create Natural Language Processing solutions for companies. In 2001 Virtual Personalities, Inc. became Conversive, Inc. to reflect

174-605: A program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore PET Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to post new information, for example: Meanwhile, Plantec was separately designing a personality for "Entity", a theoretical virtual human that would interact comfortably with humans without pretending to be one. At that time the technology was not advanced enough to realize Entity. Mauldin got so involved with this that he majored in Computer Science and minored in Linguistics. In

203-494: A stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot, or Verbot, was deployed in fall 2000. The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Mauldin was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of ELIZA , he proceeded to write

232-727: Is also one of the authors of Rog-O-Matic and Julia , a Turing test competitor in the Loebner Prize . Verbot , a defunct chatbot program, is based on Mauldin's work. Mauldin is an active competitor in the Robot Fighting League . Mauldin was born on March 23, 1959, in Dallas , Texas, to Jimmie Alton Mauldin and Marilyn Jean Taylor. In 1974 the family moved to Midland, Texas and Michael enrolled in Midland High School and graduated valedictorian in 1977. In 1981, he received

261-649: Is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Morristown , New Jersey , that provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services. The company's platform includes unified communications and contact center services. In 2019, the company provided services to 220,000 customer locations in 190 countries. In 1995, AT&T Corporation renamed their subsidiary AT&T Technologies to Lucent Technologies and spun it off in 1996. Lucent subsequently spun off units of its own in an attempt to restructure its struggling operations. Avaya Inc.

290-500: Is married to Debbie and they have grown children. In addition to robot combat , they enjoy traveling via recreational vehicle and driving his Jeep Wrangler Sahara through the desert. They owned an 81-acre ranch near Austin, Texas . He is also an active bowler with a Brunswick Pearl engraved with his name "Fuzzy". Mauldin was recruited by Google but opted to stay retired. Avaya Avaya LLC , often shortened to Avaya ( / ə ˈ v aɪ . ə / ) and formerly Avaya Inc. ,

319-543: The NYSE began under the symbol AVYA. On February 14, 2023, Avaya once again petitioned for protection from creditors during restructuring under Chapter 11 with a restructuring plan already agreed on with their creditors. On February 15, 2023 the NYSE announced that shares of Avaya no longer qualified for listing on the New York Exchange and would cease to be traded there. Although the proposed restructuring plan would wipe out

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348-437: The amulet and emerging victorious from the dungeon. In 1989, when James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon created the first TinyMUD (a descendant of MUD and AberMUD), Mauldin was one of the first to create a computer player that would explore the text-based world of TinyMUD. But his first robot, Gloria, gradually accreted more and more linguistic ability, to the point that it could pass the "unsuspecting" Turing test. In this version of

377-462: The card game hearts along with the other human players. In 1991, Julia attended the first Loebner Prize contest in Boston, Massachusetts. Although she only finished third, she was ranked by one judge as more human than one of the human confederates, winning a coveted certificate of humanness in the world's first restricted Turing test . Julia continued to log in to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for

406-740: The company had a presence in approximately 190 countries. The company claims that its cloud services are utilized by over 90% of the Fortune 100 organizations. Avaya enterprise customers include Apple, AT&T, Dell, CVS Health, as well as government organizations. Avaya sponsors the IAUG users' group and training programs for IT professional certification in the use of Avaya's products. Avaya provides business related equipment for its customers such as cameras, collaboration units, conference phones, headsets, IP phones, room systems, Vantage, and wireless handsets. These devices are compatible with various options for

435-422: The company's assets sale. In October 2019, Avaya entered into a strategic partnership with RingCentral and together, introduced a new unified communications as a service solution called Avaya Cloud Office ("ACO"). RingCentral also contributed $ 500 million to be the exclusive provider of the new Avaya UCaaS offering. Avaya's headquarters are at 350 Mt. Kemble Avenue, Morristown, New Jersey 07960 US. In 2020,

464-489: The coveted Loebner Prize . The Turing test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. Julia was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist and animator, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release,

493-546: The early 2012 release of Verbot 5.0.1.2. Michael Loren Mauldin Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin ( / ˈ m ɔː l d ən / ) (born March 23, 1959) is an American retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language processing , autonomous information agents, information retrieval , and expert systems . He

522-635: The focus on providing Customer Service and Marketing to the Enterprise Market. In late 2012 Avaya , Inc. acquired Conversive's assets including Verbots. The Verbot 4 version was created and released in 2004. In 2005 Version 4.1 of the Verbot Software was released with many feature enhancements and bug fixes, including built-in support for embedding C# code in outputs and conditionals. In early 2006 Conversive launched Verbots Online allowing Verbot 4 users to upload their knowledge and show off their bots to

551-434: The late seventies and early eighties, a popular computer game at universities was Rogue , an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where the player would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called " Rog-O-Matic " capable of retrieving

580-413: The next seven years, and chatted with hundreds of people a month over the internet. Julia's job was to explore a virtual world consisting of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shortest route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained

609-655: The shares, several securities dealers announced that they would begin making a market in Avaya shares effective February 16, 2023 using the symbol AVYAQ and trading 'over the counter', i.e. a securities dealer is a counterparty of each trade. On May 1, 2023, Avaya Holdings Corp. completed its financial restructuring, emerging from bankruptcy owned by its former creditors as the private company Avaya LLC. Since 2001, Avaya has sold and acquired several companies. Through Nortel's bankruptcy proceedings, assets related to their Enterprise Voice and Data business units were auctioned. Avaya placed

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638-531: The test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks fewer probing questions. The second generation of Mauldin's TinyMUD robots was Julia, created on Jan. 8, 1990. Julia slowly developed into a more and more capable conversational agent , and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, and message-relayer. She could even play

667-404: The world. In 2009 Version 5 was released, completely free and fully featured. In early 2012 the last version of Verbot, 5.0.1.2, was released to the general public with support for Windows 7. Later in 2012 Verbots Online completely shut down. Verbots.com, its community of users, and its forums no longer exist, but the software and users can still be found. There has been no active development since

696-420: Was acquired by Avaya . In 2000, after watching BattleBots , Mauldin built a robot and became a successful competitor in robot combat . In August 2015, he became a member of the board of directors of Lycos, now owned by Suresh Reddy. In 2017, he appeared on Robot Wars as the team captain for the "rest of the world" team. Mauldin is the inventor or co-inventor of the following 4 patents: Mauldin

725-530: Was given effect by the court's order November 28, 2017. In December 2017, Avaya requested a federal judge to reduce their commitment to the Earthquakes' stadium name agreement. After Avaya vacated their naming rights, the venue was renamed Earthquakes Stadium in 2020 and PayPal Park in 2021 after PayPal bought the naming rights. On December 15, 2017, trading in Avaya Holdings Corp. shares listed on

754-543: Was renamed Avaya Holdings Corp. On November 19, 2014, Avaya was confirmed as the naming rights partner for the San Jose Earthquakes ' new stadium, officially called Avaya Stadium , paying $ 20 million over a 10-year deal. On January 19, 2017, Avaya Inc. and related affiliates including Avaya Holdings Corp. petitioned for protection from creditors during reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A restructuring plan for Avaya Holdings Corp. agreed upon during mediation

783-478: Was the fastest company ever to become a public company via an initial public offering . Mauldin sold his stake in Lycos during the dot-com bubble and retired. In 1997, he left Lycos to form Conversive with Peter Plantec. The company was an artificial intelligence software company that created self-animated computer-generated human characters. He remained on the board of directors of the company until 2013, when it

812-422: Was the first intelligent animated virtual human. She was designed both as a conversation agent and as a virtual human interface that would form a bridge between the two. She became more popular as a conversation agent, but her designers believe she serves as a prototype for future virtual human interface design that will help us all cope with the increasing complexity of technology. As an aside, Plantec noticed that

841-447: Was then spun off from Lucent as its own company in 2000 (Lucent merged with Alcatel SA in 2006, becoming Alcatel-Lucent , which was purchased in turn by Nokia in 2016). Avaya Inc. were listed on the NYSE using the symbol AV from 2000 to 2007. In October 2007, Avaya Inc. was acquired for $ 8.2 billion by Sierra Holdings Corp owned by two private-equity firms, TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners . On June 6, 2011 Sierra Holdings Corp.

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