Heel, Rotson! My list of computer-generated dog names

Shadoopy. Dango. Ray-Bella. Figgie.

If I told you those were names of actual dogs in New York City, would you believe me?

They're not. They were generated by a machine-learning algorithm mimicking dog names after it "studied" a list of 81,542 dogs registered in NYC.

The experiment, which took just a few hours Saturday, was something I've wanted to try since I saw the playful, awesome work of Janelle Shane and her experiments using neural networks to generate paint colors, guinea pig names and Harry Potter fan fiction.

I happened to have some free time, and decided to give it a shot. Along the way I:

  • built, in mere minutes, a computer in the cloud powerful enough for machine learning
  • made and played with a recurrent neural network
  • learned a little more about machine learning
  • had a lot of fun

The program generated lots of names, including many that existed in the original data. Once I filtered those out, I had almost 400 computer-created, mostly plausible dog names. Here are some of my favorites:

Rotson
Dudly
Lenzy
Murta
Cookees
Geortie
Dewi
Chocobe
Sckrig
Booncy
Cramp
Dango
Ray-Bella
Santha
Coocoda
Satty
Bronz
Shadoopy
Mishtak
Figgie
Grimby
Phince
Bum-Charmo
Soma
Blant
Snowflatey

If you'd like to geek out about how I did this, read on. You can do it, too.

Building a "Build-A-Bot" Workshop

I've been playing a lot with bots lately, and recently had a great opportunity to help others play, too.

It was part of the Future.Today conference in New York City last month. Futurist and organizer Amy Webb planned deep discussions about artificial intelligence and human-machine interactions on the main stage. In a side room, she wanted to give the audience tactile bot experiences — and asked me to help. Could I create a "Build-A-Bot" workshop?

The idea was to get conference-goers building chatbots over lunch -- making them easily, without code, and in a way people could "take" their bots home to work on further.

We ended up making nearly 100.