Eugenia Kuyda, a close friend of him, wrote about in her FB post:
A day before Roman’s funeral Dima and I went to pick up a box with his stuff. There were a few polaroids with party photos, a birth certificate, keys from an unknown door and an old camera. In our SF apartment there are some of his clothes left. His Facebook profile only has a few photos and almost no posts, his Instagram is empty. It’s striking how little we have left. All we have is thousands of texts and photos stored on the phones of his friends.
The last Roman’s project was about disrupting death: a memorial forest that would replace cemeteries with trees and digital memorials - avatars, that will be able to preserve the memories. it was the first death for me. I didn’t know how to react, so as soon as I could I shove everything as deep inside as possible and tried not to feel anything. Half a year later I can say that it doesn’t go away. It the last couple of months our team at Luka managed to build a dialogue model using smaller datasets on top of a neural net. I put together all texts we sent each other, photos, articles about him and we built a Roman AI. You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would - he will reply like Roman would have.
We lived together with Roman last year. I didn't have anyone closer. We were trying to figure out this new city and our own startups - it was a very beautiful year but also a very hard one for him, and I tried to support him and he was there for me too. The hardest for Roman was to lower his ambitions, to stop thinking about moonshots. Roman used to say that the symbol of Russia should be a giant crystal Swarowski elephant. He was like that himself - infinitely beautiful and incredibly fragile.
This digital memorial is an attempt to keep the memory of this vulnerable beauty and of our own dazzling youth that ended with Roman. And it’s also an attempt to deal with feelings we have never dealt with before. Sometimes in order to let go you have to come as close as possible.
We are constantly improving the model and adding data, but technology isn’t perfect yet - @Roman will sometimes stumble or say something that doesn’t make sense. It’s still a shadow of a person - but that wasn’t possible just a year ago and in the very close future we will be able to do a lot more. The first text I sent to @Roman was "This is your digital memorial". He replied: "You have one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in your hands - solve it". I promise I will.
Sergey Poydo, Sergey Fayfer, Yana, Dmitry Pyanov, Andrey Manirko, Daniel Trabun, Сергей Мазуренко and Виктория Мазуренко - thank you for your texts, ideas and memories. Artem Rodichev and Team Luka - thank you for making it happen. To talk to @Roman download Luka and start chat with @Roman in English and @Роман in Russian.
Submitted May 24, 2016 at 09:39PM by igorgl http://ift.tt/25fEKXO
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