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Prof Gets $700K in Stimulus Cash to Write Jokes

Take my tax dollars ... please!

By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff

Posted Sep 2, 2010 1:32 PM CDT

(Newser) – Here’s a knee-slapper for you: A Northwestern University professor has snagged $712,883 worth of stimulus funds for his efforts to teach computers how to create jokes. Kristian Hammond and his grad students are working on a “machine-generated humor” project that aims to create “structured queries that lead to interesting, factual juxtapositions of ideas that lead to a humorous outcome … sometimes.”

The program has drawn budget hawk ire, the Chicago Sun-Times reports, with John McCain listing it as his 36th most wasteful stimulus project. “Why do we need to pay for a joke machine, when we already have Congress?” asked one conservative blog. But Hammond says the project will have important benefits beyond making jokes, saying that ultimately this type of automated content generation will become the new search engine. “We’re modeling human cognitive skills on a machine,” he protests. “This is hard-core computer engineering. … I’m not really that funny of a guy.”

This, it should be noted, is not Kristian Hammond.
This, it should be noted, is not Kristian Hammond.   (Shutterstock)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 13 comments
SilenceDogood
Sep 3, 2010 5:58 AM CDT
Actually the humor of this situation is stuff made for John Cleese, Obama passes a 900,000,000,000.00 dollar Bill to get the American economy moving; Congress is not allowed time to read it’s 1,200 plus pages of pork and waste; the American economy is still sinking into oblivion; and buried deep within it’s depths is money to write jokes. Obama must be laughing his arse off like Nero burning Rome, now that is humorous.
acerbus80
Sep 2, 2010 9:34 PM CDT
I suppose there could possibly be some positive outcomes of this in the field of computer programming, but I fail to see how this project is eligible for any stimulus backing.
Shawn_The_Bohn
Sep 2, 2010 4:42 PM CDT
The real joke is that the professor probably thought he would call positive attention to his project by dealing with humor, but he forget how stupid Americans are. 700k? Seven hundred thousand is squat. The titanic amounts of money wasted on saving criminal banking institutions will never be equaled.

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