Hi!

Hanneli - @hannelita
Computer Engineer
Programming
Electronics
Math <3 <3
Physics
Lego
Meetups
Animals
Coffee
GIFs

Agenda

My first (dummy) bots
Initial attempts
Cassandra helping to colect data
Spark helping to analyse it
Machine Learning making smart bots
Epic Fails
Resources

Why bots?

Several actions can be automated

And become way better

Examples

Chat responses
Reminders
Default answers
Discard unimportant emails
Social media feed
Collect GIFs
Announce meetups
etc

My first (dumb) bots

Cron job on Linux
Periodically send troll messages in Turkish to undergrad students mail group (admins thought system had been hacked)

The troll-less case: Hangouts

People talking to me

Ask questions
Ask more questions!
Randomly talk to me, since I was a teacher at the time

Demanding too much efforts

Options

Impolitely ignore
Spend too much time answering

Automatically answer.

How can I automate a chat?

Take #1

Automatically respond to everyone

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Hi

Can you help me with this algebraic equation?

Hi

Évariste

Nope.

Create contextual answers.

Take #2

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Sure, could it be later?

Can you help me with this algebraic equation?

Bot analysis: It's a greeting

Bot analysis: It's a question

Hi

Évariste

It's better.

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Sure, could it be later?

Did you see the movie yesterday?

Bot analysis: It's a greeting

Bot analysis: It's a question

Hi

Évariste

if {
} else {
  if {
  } else {
    if {
    } else {
      if {
...

Take #3

Refine the cases and answers

Need something smarter to handle the answers.

HI HONEY

Sure, could it be later?

DID YOU MAKE UP YOUR ROOM?

Bot analysis: It's a greeting

Bot analysis: It's a question

Hi

Mom

Take #4

Select people to not generate automatic answers. ("whitelist")

New Contacts

Take #5

It's a lot of information

Brute force may not be good.

You can loose a lot of info

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Sure, could it be later?

Can I send you cool GIFs?

Bot analysis: It's a greeting

Bot analysis: It's a question

Hi

Évariste

Analyse previous chats and copy behaviours

Take #6

Read all my chat records and collect data

chat_timestamp	sender	message
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Hanneli T.	Certo

chat_timestamp	sender	message	message_category
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...	Informative
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Hanneli T.	Certo	Motivational

chat_timestamp	sender	message	message_category
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...	Informative
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Hanneli T.	Certo	Motivational
2015-10-05-14:19:00	Leandro P.	https://i.imgur.com/sSOmKqw.gifv	GIF

Cassandra can store this information <3

chat_timestamp	sender	message	message_category
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...	Informative
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Hanneli T.	Certo	Motivational
2015-10-05-14:19:00	Leandro P.	https://i.imgur.com/sSOmKqw.gifv	GIF

chat_by_category

chat_timestamp	sender	message	language
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...	Portuguese
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Évariste G.	Je ne sais...	French
2015-10-05-14:19:00	Anton T.	Привіт	Ukrainian

chat_by_language

chat_timestamp	sender	message	allow	message_category
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Ilma R.	Só agora...	Yes	Informative
2015-08-27-14:11:00	Évariste G.	Je ne sais...	Yes	Casual
2015-10-05-14:19:00	Anton T.	Привіт	Yes	Casual

chat_by_allow

contact_id	name	email	twitter	facebook
1	Ilma R.	ilma@ilma.com	_	ilma.k.r

contacts

contact_id	name	email	I_follow_tw	my_friend_fb
1	Ilma R.	ilma@ilma.com	yes	yes

contact_tracking

Cool! I have data!

Quick Q/A

How did you fill up "message_category" column?

Basically an ugly parser with custom parameters that apply to myself; written in Ruby and Python

Example: URL ending with .gif, .gifv, .webm is categorised as GIF.

Quick Q/A

Where do you run this code?

Initially local. Then I went to Amazon.

API reads chat

Hangouts

Parse and create objects

Write in Cassandra

Existing messages:

Quick Q/A

API reads chat

Hangouts

Parse and create objects

Write in Cassandra

New messages (after seeding Cassandra)

Reads from Cassandra

Produces enhanced object

Response

Quick Q/A

API reads chat

Hangouts

Parse and create objects

Write in Cassandra

New messages - Improving

Reads from Cassandra

Produces enhanced object

Response

Queue

Quick Q/A

What is this "Enhanced Object?"

An object with extra inferred parameters built with Cassandra information. Example: Do I follow the person on Twitter? Yes - Do not generate auto-answer. No - Electable to generate an auto reply

No formalism applied.

Great. How can I automate this EVEN MOAR?

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Did you see my Pull Request?

Hi

Évariste

I want to reply "Yes I saw it!"

Need to collect information from Github.

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Where is the meetup today?

Hi

Évariste

I want to reply "Paulista Avenue, 2001"

Need to collect information from Meetup.

Hey Hanneli, sup?

Where are the links for your presentation slides?

Hi

Évariste

I want to reply "slides.com/smart-bots"

Need to collect information Slides. And Calendar.

The more information I collect, the more precise are the responses

Too much data for my "home-made" analyser

Spark comes to rescue :)

Take #7

Analyse the information that I have on Cassandra with spending too much time on boilerplate stuff

Cassandra Connector for Spark - https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector

From table to RDD (Resilient Data Model)

Instant benefits from Spark

Simplify my ugly parsers

API reads chat

Hangouts

*Raw* data to spark

Write raw in Cassandra

text.flatMap(line => line.split(" ")).
map(word => (word, 1)).
reduceByKey(_ + _)

Instant benefits from Spark

Simplify my ugly parsers

Significant decrease for writing time!

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/EvanChan2/cassandra-day-2014-interactive-analytics-with-cassandra-and-spark

Instant benefits from Spark

Simplify my ugly code to categorise

API reads chat

Hangouts

*Raw* data

Write raw in Cassandra

filter and process with Spark

Produces enhanced object

Response

Queue

Good.

Hey Hanneli, sup?

What time is the meetup?

Hi

Évariste - Monday, 8:45

7PM

Where is it?

Paulista Ave, 2001

Hey Hanneli, sup?

What time is the meetup?

Hi

Évariste - Wednesday, 7:45

7PM

Where is it?

Paulista Ave, 2001

Hey Hanneli, sup?

What time is the meetup?

Hi

Évariste - Wednesday, 7:45

7PM

Where is it?

Paulista Ave, 2001

He always asks where is the meetup.

Hey Hanneli, sup?

What time is the meetup?

Hi

Évariste - Wednesday, 7:45

7PM, at Paulista Ave, 2001

Great response.

Learn to improve the answers.

Machine Learning

Take #8

Supervised

Unsupervised

Reinforcement

Machine Learning

Take #8

Supervised

Unsupervised

Reinforcement

Supervised model

Predict - He asked "what time", he will ask "where"

Person started conversation complaining, he/she might be angry

Reinforcement

Person started conversation with trivial question that could be found on Google. Should I answer or ignore it?

Analyse the environment.

Mathematics to make things better

Regression models
Generate equations to parametrise behaviours
Matrixes
Analytical Geometry
Topology (!!)

Which topics are you considering?

Have I had any previous contact with the person on the internet?
Does this person have Twitter? (quick search before deciding; 123.people is a good start)
Does it look like Spam?
Is he/she trying to contact me in other social media?
Did he/she try to send me emails?
Does the message have any blacklisted sentences? *

* Custom list based on my context.

There is no default cookbook for the algorithms, but the idea may be applied in other areas

With Machine Learning

API reads chat

Hangouts

*Raw* data

Write raw in Cassandra

filter and process with Spark

Produces enhanced object

Response

Queue

Machine Learning Processor

Write in Cassandra

Reads from Cassandra

MOAR bots

Take #9

Meetups

Answer messages
Tweet and announce
Find venues
Schedule new events

Motivational bots

Send positive messages!

Github activity bot

Monitor my commits, terminal actions
Monitor my new PRs, automatically comments on some tasks on Pivotal
Monitor build status
Comments on PRs

Email responder

Automatically answer some emails
Search for new Spam
Automatically create filers to Ads

Epic Fails

Take #10

Because bots are not so perfect (yet)

API reads chat

Hangouts

*Raw* data to spark

Write raw in Cassandra

filter and process with Spark

Produces enhanced object

Response

Queue

Endpoint A

Endpoint B

Take #11

Swiping the endpoint addresses by mistake.

API reads chat

Hangouts

*Raw* data to spark

Write raw in Cassandra

filter and process with Spark

Produces enhanced object

Response

Queue

Endpoint B

Endpoint A

Take #12

Weird answers. Friend called Paul Regus (PR)

Paul != Pull Request (PR)

Check if message sender is a developer before evaluating the 'PR'.

Take #13

Trust Problem

Hey Hanneli

Hi

It that you?

Yes

How can I be sure it's not the bot?

It is not

Take #14

Topics and references

XMPP
Apps Script
Parser and Regex
Spark + Cassandra course
Presentation
ML free content
Quora Thread for ML
Event driven, notifications.
Math and computer theory may be helpful

Take #15

Discussion points

Security - it is sensitive information! OAuth, cryptography and 2FA are a must.
Bias - How can you be sure you are being impartial? Should we be impartial all the time?
Remove all possible sensitive info and open source it; how can I determine if all algorithms that are specific to myself were removed?
Migrate legacy code to new languages
Functional Programming makes things much more clear
Human factors - people get super sad/angry when they find out it was a bot.

Special Thanks

@planetcassandra
@lafp, @romulostorel and @pedrofelipee (GIFs)
Bots <3

Thank you :)

Questions?

hannelita@gmail.com

@hannelita

Building Smart Bots