Dr. Katherine Hayles, the other keynote speaker, mentioned that Amazon recommended one of her own books to her ("we predict you'll love this!"). Wlel, kindasorta my p6int, nazwaz. #-)
Generally people were rather critical or at least skeptical of AI, but enthused about emergent behavior in human-computer interaction (HCI). Which is how I couched the data mining discussion, so I guess that's another positive outcome.
Oh, and true to my TEUNC heritage, I put this pic in one of my slides on Cultural Evolutionary Computation. *snh snh snh* (Nice to see we have found Thranduil for The Hobbit, if it gets filmed.)
One more anecdote: the second presenter was a Ph.D. student at U. Wisconsin-Madison (UWM). "Hey, do you know David Salo?" I asked. D'oh! *nirghsipeehs*
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Banazir