People
Noel Bush took over development of Program D in 2001. Since that time, he has rewritten the majority of the code, with an eye toward standards compliance and performance, and has maintained Program D as the de facto reference implementation of AIML, as well as the most widely used free ("open source") AIML bot platform in the world.
Noel authored the official AIML specification that has been used, along with Program D, as a guide by numerous implementors of AIML interpreters. He was one of the original founders of the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation, and served on its board of trustees until the foundation was "adopted" by a third-party commercial concern.
Noel has worked for several companies that pursued the development of proprietary chat bot technology, and has also been an independent consultant in the field of conversational AI for the past several years. He also has experience developing knowledge base systems for interal use by IT organizations.
Noel is also a musician and composer. He currently lives with his family in New York City's East Village.
Nika Dubrovsky was one of the original founders of the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation, along with Noel Bush, Richard Wallace, and John Baer, and served on the board of trustees for its first year.
Nika is developing a Russian bot knowledge base, and inventing and elaborating concepts for knowledge base editing tools.
Nika lives in the East Village with her husband and children. She writes for Russian newspapers and magazines, keeps up a Russian-language blog, and is working on a variety of art projects.