Deb Roy's TED portrait. Refer to their website: http://www.ted.com/speakers/deb_roy.html

I suppose that one could write a blog entry about almost any TED talk; however, this one struck me for several reasons.

(1) It deals with a topic of great interest to me at the moment: how a child learns to talk about the world. At the moment my son is learning one or two new words every week and has become quite the mimic. (2) The data visualizations are striking, fluid, dynamic, and intuitive. (3) The sheer amount of data collected in the different branches of this project is overwhelming. (4) The use of the Internet as a “collective consciousness” of sorts (and not in a Web-Bot manner) has enormous scientific – and philosophical – implications. (5) This researcher is using his children as data in his projects. I’ve always found this method fascinating, especially as I find myself tempted to do the same. I should clarify that I don’t mean that in an obtrusive way: rather, I find myself observing my son’s development not only from the point-of-view of a “proud mom” but also from the point-of-view of a philosopher. A young child is a perfect specimen to study nature v. nurture and to observe how people develop conceptual thought patterns.

Actually, on that last note, one of my professors last semester said lightheartedly that “everyone becomes a biological determinist once they have children.” I have to say that I agree. My son has a natural curiosity, intelligence, and charisma that he’s developed over the past year and a half. I suppose that any parent would say that about his or her child, but there is no question that even infants have “personalities.”

One of the reasons I posted this video is because I think it would be of great interest to my sister, who runs the blog Sidenot.es. Her blog deals with the social implications of technology and the internet and with other media theory topics in general. The latter part of Deb Roy’s talk concerns the social links among commentary on the Internet, and, as I said before, the visualizations are fantastic. While he does not say this outright, I feel that the use of these social links as insight into how people generate content makes a claim about the Internet as a form of collective consciousness. This is an issue that I have been pondering for quite some time, as I am not sure which stance to take on the matter.

On the one hand, the Internet is not “consciousness” in the sense of unbridled and free-flowing thought and speech. Any piece of data that one adds to the web is premeditated to a certain degree. Perhaps some bits of data are raw and unedited, but nonetheless someone thought about the words he or she typed before he or she commented, “hay dis video is awesum!” He or she thought, “Okay, I like this video, and I want to share that preference in the comments section for it.” In that respect, the Internet is not like consciousness. Note that I am making an implicit assertion that the concept of consciousness involves very little “filter.”

On the other hand, one can say the Internet is like “consciousness” in the sense of unbridled and free-flowing thought and speech. Yes, the same criteria can be used to argue for both positions. This is due the fact that anyone can say anything in any forum that he or she wishes to participate in. There is unlimited access and an (almost) infinite amount of data and resources to voice one’s opinions. Anything one says is stored in some archive for posterity (assuming your archive doesn’t explode or something). So one can gain insight into the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of a huge amount of people on the planet. One can contact almost anyone, find anything, and say anything.

I think a curious ontological assertion is attached to one’s point-of-view on this manner. If one does conclude that the Internet is a form of collective consciousness, it entails a dualist idea that mind and body do not necessarily intersect. If one wants to maintain that mind and body are connected, then one may be tempted to categorize the Internet’s hardware as the “body.” However to give this distinguished status to hardware just leads to a lot more questions. So where does artificial intelligence fit in? Smart phones with access to the Internet? How about Roombas? However, it is important to note that I’m saying Internet is potentially a form of collective consciousness. Thus, if one does not want to go as far as to say that the Internet is equivalent to the human mind but that it is a form of collective consciousness, what kind of form is it? How is it different from consciousness in general? If one grants the Internet “consciousness status,” what other things can be categorized similarly? Are there other categories that can be fleshed out? And on and on and on.

So, to conclude on that point, I have no conclusion. I’m still mulling over it. I’d love to read some thoughts on the matter in the comments.

The observation that Deb Roy made that the caretakers’ use of language seemed to unconsciously conform to his son’s growing vocabulary is a fascinating reversal. Intuitively, one would assume that the child learning to speak is conforming to his environment rather than the other way around. However, I do see a major methodological issue in generalizing this observation into an assertion or theory. While Roy has an enormous wealth of information on two data points (his son and his daughter), how many data points would one need to generalize this observation? There is a huge amount of time and effort that goes into sorting, transcribing, and stream-lining all the information. How many children would one need to observe in this manner to make it general? Does it matter where the child is born and raised? If one has ten data points with this much information attached to them, the data collected on only ten children is not necessarily enough to make a general theory, no matter how precise and informative the information attached to those data points is. So I suppose that while Roy’s method is absolutely fascinating, I don’t really know how useful it is for language acquisition theories in general (though I do think his method’s other applications can be very useful indeed). Furthermore, due to my ignorance of linguistics, I don’t even know what the baseline is. How can one make a universal theory of language anyway?

There’s probably a lot more I can go into, though I figure that that’s enough disorganized thoughts for today. I was planning on doing several blog entries over my spring break, but I’ve been sick for most of it and unable to really do so. Oh well. Back to the grind on Monday.

If you started wondering who HE is, here is the answer. Watson, an IBM’s project of Artificial Intelligence machine, here it a link to Jeopardy’s website about the challenge. What does that have anything to do with metadata? IBM says Watson is loaded with tremendous amount of data, from encyclopedia to periodicals. In fact, as Backe’s says in chp. 4, metadata is like a an indicator in database. A pointer towards the location we search. This method is going to provide a more accurate results then just using keywords, and also to filter unnecessary informations.  On the other hand, Backe also suggests to use both “controlled vocabulary” and key word to search, which provides more narrow results, and most likely it’s what we really want to find. So, this IBM machine on the show, picks up the question, and search in its database, keyword non keyword, maybe meta or whatever, narrows it down and tries to come up with the most accurate answer. With the most comprehensive database, I believe many research will become less challenging, and frustration.

this picture is originally posted in

http://www.pondaray.com/blog/silicon-life/

Fiction ain’t what it used to be.

Watching a calculator on steroids named Watson made me yearn for the days I wasn’t even around to enjoy. Back when the rotary phone was space aged shit. Hell, it made me yearn for a time much more recent when I used to believe Ken Jennings was a robot. Not since I dated a girl who did theater and wore makeup twenty hours out of the day have I been this scared about what tomorrow may bring.

Watson isn’t human, but it isn’t a vacuum cleaner either. It  sounds like a cross between Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the automated jerk-off who always seems to screw up my Fandango order. Chilling as that is, what’s worse is the thing Watson can do that no inanimate object this side of Ozzie Osborne can do. I watched the thing reason.

Of course, we never quite get it when the predictions of dead generations come to fruition. This is because we’re so damned literal with our inventory. We fail to recognize Big Brother despite the fact our lives are under surveillance most everywhere we go. We’re expecting the black and white apparatus, we’re expecting Garibaldi. Hey, as long as we can still purchase sports cars and watch porn, everything’s cool.

But Big Brother’s mission was a pervasive one. To crawl and seep through the fog of our every day chatter and to win the war through epic battles fought in miniature.

Skynet hasn’t taken over . . . The Firemen that Bradbury wrote about aren’t receiving big fat federal bonus money to burn books . . .

It’s not chic to believe in a higher power or world peace any longer. But we’re all about the blind faith of the ghosts in the machines we need in order to survive past next Tuesday. It’s perfectly acceptable to be led along by the artificial intelligence because the kids at IBM wear Old Navy and dig sashimi, just like us. They’re not Frankenstein’s modern day solution.

But really. How many times have you ended a disagreement by saying “I’ll Google it!”. Wanna know what your squeeze is up to? Text them. Did your best friend pop the question? Check your Facebook wall. Not sure where you’re going? GPS the trip. Is it true there are still tickets available when the Phillies come to town? Log on and check it out and if so, gobble up some tickets safely and securely. Then Twitter your friends, email your wife, check the weather and Visa yourself a “Cliff Lee Sucks!” shirt while you’re at it.

Life is easier. Which is all that ever has to matter in the present day, where convenience always rules . . . even over the fates. We never mind the fact that we are crumbs to the bigness of things. We can be lost, stolen, changed by anyone other than ourselves at any time with zero hour coming at the touch of a button.  That doesn’t feel like empowerment to me.

We’re zombie bloodhounds when it comes to next gen stuff and the farther along we go, the more interesting, expansive and plugged in we assume ourselves to be when it very well might be the opposite. Who can know?

Some day, we’re not going to laugh about this.

Drink of the morning- Vienna Sumatra Mandheling from the Porto Rico Importing Company.

If we were to pause for a second and recognize that all tech players including IBM, are constantly developing ways to push the boundaries and remain a leader, with Watson they have found a unique vehicle to latch on to and simplify to the masses what would otherwise be complicated to explain – the subject matter being data analytics and the vehicle being jeopardy!.

As we think about ATN, jeopardy! represents an untapped cultural phenomenon that IBM recognized and created an integrated communications approach to demonstrate industry leadership, promote discussion, generate PR, and invite consumer participation.

Tune in on 2/14 to watch how Watson competed against Jeopardy!’s top champions.

IBM’s corporate video promoting Watson:

A preview of the episode via Engadget:

For more information on Watson and IBM’s plans for application please visit the following link:  http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

In the mid-1990s, a friend of mine was attending graduate school in Chicago.  One night, she was asleep in her bed when she woke up suddenly to find a strange man crawling in her bedroom window.  What she did next might have saved her life.  She sat up and calmly, firmly said, “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”  Within seconds, the man mumbled about someone named Jose Garcia and clamored out.  It was obvious, she said, the man was dumfounded by her reaction.  I hate to think what might have happened had she panicked, screamed in fear, or even attempted to assault him.  Was there something in her face that exuded confidence and power, enough to ward off a potential attacker?  Or was she simply able to mask her fear enough to fool him?  To what extent can our human intelligence “read” people?

We think we’re pretty good at it, most of the time.  Most of us have internal radar that can help us sense people who are untrustworthy, for example.  But how much can we detect?  And could a computer potentially do it better than we do? 

You may be familiar with the term “Artificial Intelligence,” a branch of computer science that studies how smart our computers can be—relative to human intelligence.  As it turns out, a computer that can analyze our behavior is not all that farfetched.  What if our machines could know more about us than we do?  What if computers could recognize and even predict behaviors based on facial expressions? 

In 2008, Steve Wilkins, the forensic services supervisor for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office in Tacoma, Wash., used facial recognition software, a photo taken from a security camera at an ATM, and a database of prisoner mug shots taken over a 16-year period at the Pierce County jail to identify a suspect in a forgery and theft case.  At that time, the office was one of two in the country pioneering the use of a program called Morphoface, which analyzes images and compares them against a database of available possible matches (Mulick). 

According to Mulick, the technology itself has been around for a while, and it’s gotten some criticism for potentially violating privacy laws.  In 2001, she says, it was used at the Superbowl in Tampa, Fla., to identify felons as fans made their way through the turnstiles into the stadium.  More recently, in Toronto, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is getting ready to unveil facial recognition software in 27 casinos.  The system will scan everyone who comes into the casino and compare those photos to a database of self-exluded gamblers—in other words, people on a voluntary ban list.  If they return to the casino, the system will flag them (Robson).

But what if this technology could recognize way more than just appearance?  What if it could analyze the intricate movements of a person’s face to determine things like mood, state of mind, or even intent?  What if the technology could not only identify criminals, but also the potential for criminal behavior?

A 2010 study published in the journal Advanced Imaging explores this possibility.  According to the study, humans have approximately 40-90 unique facial muscles that create about 5,000 expressions.   And it is from those expressions that we decide things like whether or not we trust a person, or whether or not that person is happy.

Using sophisticated computer technology, researchers at the Machine Perception Laboratory, Institute for Neural Computation (University of California, San Diego) were able to code and analyze facial expressions as never before—and, while the technology is not at the level and accuracy of actual human analysis, it can identify, through video streaming and its imaging database, emotions such as anger, contempt, disgust, drowsiness, pleasure, etc.

The technology works by focusing in on what are called “micro-expressions,” or the hundreds of involuntary facial movements that indicate mood or intention.  If you’ve watched programs like The Mentalist, you get the idea.  Our face, according to this study, gives signals even we don’t know about.  I have to wonder—was my college friend’s face twitching involuntarily with extreme fear, at the same time that she was consciously disguising it?  Is it easier to fool each other than it might be to fool a machine?

The applications of this technology are interesting, to say the least.  Technology in automobiles can detect if a person is going to fall asleep at the wheel, indicate dishonesty on a polygraph more accurately, tell doctors if a patient is in real or “fake” pain (Nelson), or even suggest when a prison riot might break out, and who will start it (Lohr). 

The possibilities are mind-blowing.  Could a computer detect a crime before it happens?  Could a personal camera placed outside our home, or carried on our person, alert us if a person is potentially dangerous?

This technology, of course, is based on the idea that Truth is absolute, that somehow the truth of situations and human behavior exists independent of what we choose to believe about them, that deviant behavior might be categorically defined, reduced to a specific set of criteria. 

As Lee Nelson describes, “The truth always is present in some form. Trying to control one’s facial muscles can send mixed signals, leading others to be unsure about causal intentions. Changing how we feel, inside, alters our expression on the outside. Thus, even the best liars eventually give themselves away.”

Copyright 2011, Melissa Dereberry

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Images:  Microsoft.

Mulick, Stacey.  “Facial Recognition Software Gives Pierce County Help in Tough Cases.”  Tacoma News Tribune. Dec. 22, 2008, web edition:  http://www.seattlepi.com/local/393308_computercrime23.html). 

Lohr, Steve.  “These Computers—Watch US and Learn.”  The Virginian Pilot [Norfolk, Va.]  January 2, 2001, Sunday Edition:  A10.

Nelson, Lee. “Machine vision and your face: the Facial Action Coding System is a comprehensive inventory of the muscles and their movements that form frowns, glares, grimaces, and smiles.” Advanced Imaging 25.3 (2010): 12+. Academic OneFile. Web. 1 Feb. 2011.

Robson, Dan.  “High-Tech Facial Recognition To Keep Gambling Addicts Out of Casinos.”  Guelph Mercury [Ontario, Canada] January 12, 2011, Final Edition, Local:  A4.

Knowledge explosion has given way to advancement of Information technology into every walk of life of the man and as a result of  this,  Countries started competing each other to excel in IT field and dominate others.  This has lead to hardware and software fields and each and every field is now IT driven. We have Software development, domain name for websites, hosting, ftp, email services, open offices, data mining, data entry and editing, anti-spam and anti-virus development, ethical hacking, PC to laptops, palmtops, Robotics and what not.  From Banking to retailing and space research and oil exploration and even the battle field have been computerized. There are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for air offense and defense and Robots to fight in place for humans in the War Front. Computer also plays a major role in Medicine, Surgery, Education, Entertainment etc. Online and offline games are very prominent these days for refreshing the minds of the young and old. We can see dignostic, lab reporting and testing solutions, remote sensing and remote surgery made possible through Computers. There are not any area where Computers have not reached and influenced and has not become an indispensible part of the Mundane World, is not it? It is evident that India has the monopoly of having the best and largest number of IT literate and Professionals in the world and it has become the best IT Power in the world.

Here’s another uncanny valley-post. I’m not sure if it beats poor spermobot, but it’s pretty damn awesome either way.

(there’s some info and photos of it here).

Here’s a link to NELL’s site.

It’s interesting and exciting breakthrough.  While I understand that the primary exercise is language learning, it did leave me curious how it will respond to widely propagated fictions that don’t have corresponding written counter information (e.g., the existence of Santa Claus).   Which raises a question about whether it develops a credibility bias, and how that ties back to language learning.  Humans guage language and other things people say/write to develop a credibility bias.  I wonder if NELL does as well.

For those of you out there who don’t play a lot of videogames, don’t worry, I don’t either. In fact, you can tell it by the fact that the review I’m about to cite comes not from the explosive panoply of video game blogs out there, but from the WSJ’s Speakeasy blog:

[Question:] My 12-year-old son is among those who almost always turned to warfare as the way forward in Civ IV. How have you tweaked the AI to punish those who rely too heavily on one development strategy?

More than just a tweak, we have dedicated an entire software subsystem to scrutinizing the actions of the other players in the game. This “diplomatic AI” makes sure that each AI civilization performs a full assessment of each of its neighbors. Each turn this analysis includes noticing which players are trying to grab open land, which ones have particularly large armies, and also making a guess about which type of victory each opponent is pursuing. So your son’s warmongering will be noticed by the AI right away. This information is then critical to how the AI chooses its friends and enemies and also to how it picks its own path to victory.

They just keep making it harder! The article talks a bit about changes to the war-fighting mechanics – but the interview is with the game’s AI Programming Lead – so AI is a primary focus. And it’s fascinating!

Reading this I couldn’t help but imagine a future in which Civilization 10 actually just runs the same AI engines behind the foreign policy of small nations. That that was Firaxis’ twenty year corporate plan: building the diplomatic advisory algorithms for developing nations. (“Yes General, I’m sure your half-brother has a natural talent for diplomacy, but you might want to consider our product as a back-up.”)

From there it’s just another few iterative steps to the backrooms of power in the developed world.

And then?

I love the idea that sports provide an outlet for regional rivalries played out without bloodshed (British hooligans aside) – perhaps diplomatic games will provide the same. We’ll cheer on our national foreign policy AIs at the Global Civilization Olympics. All that friction of competing ideologies dissipating in the cheering throngs while the computers quietly negotiate the climate change treaties and free trade agreements.

Our grandparents saw some amazing technological advancements in their time.  The 20th century saw both the invention of the airplane, and the space program.  We forget but electricity wasn’t even that widespread in 1900.  However, as mind blowing as the 20th century was in terms of technology, the 21st century will make it look like the middle ages.

Based on the current rate of technological progress, computers will get faster and more powerful every year.  It has been established how much computation power the human brain has. The Singularity is what happens when computers reach and then surpass human intelligence. This term was first coined by writer Vernor Vinge in 1993.

This graph from Ray Kurzweil that illustrates this acceleration and the timeline we might reach it.

Exponential Growth of Computing

That’s just math.  This acceleration of computing has been happening for hundreds of year.  It’s only about 15-20 years off until computers surpass human intelligence.

How does this apply to Education?  These are the sorts of issues our children will have to be prepared to deal with.  It hopefully starts to show how the education system in this country is getting more obsolete each day.  I don’t care about Interactive Whiteboards, 1:1 computing, NCLB, RTT, or any of the other things we are dealing with right now.  Those are just details.

I think we should setup an education system that lets each child reach their full potential, as determined by the child and parent.

Here is Ray Kurzweil’s TED talk. Watch this and then see if it changes your prospective on the current education issues.

This article talks about how AI is being used in various areas of society and talks about it’s current limitations.  The potential is there though.

Keeping an open mind is the way to survive and thrive in the upcoming Education Storm.  Constantly ask yourself, what can I do that is essential and valuable to others?  Seth Godin would call it being the Linchpin.

I’ll have to write a longer post fleshing this concept out.

• Smarter Than You Think – Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back – NYTimes.com

  Nice Article on Artificial Intelligence

  tags: technology, AI

  • “Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines that look at them and understand them,” said Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft’s research laboratory who led the medical avatar project, one of several intended to show how people and computers may communicate before long.
  • For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence — the use of computers to simulate human thinking. But in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn, in their way. The prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines.
  • Smart machines, experts predict, will someday tutor students, assist surgeons and safely drive cars.
  • Computers with artificial intelligence can be thought of as the machine equivalent of idiot savants. They can be extremely good at skills that challenge the smartest humans, playing chess like a grandmaster or answering “Jeopardy!” questions like a champion. Yet those skills are in narrow domains of knowledge. What is far harder for a computer is common-sense skills like understanding the context of language and social situations when talking — taking turns in conversation, for example.
  • The real issue with artificial intelligence, as with any technology, is how it will be used. Automation is a remarkable tool of efficiency and convenience. Using an A.T.M. to make cash deposits and withdrawals beats standing in line to wait for a teller. If an automated voice system in a call center can answer a question, the machine is a better solution than lingering on hold for a customer service agent.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I find myself in a challenging position. To interpret the past I need a guiding idea – holism. My main source for an understanding of holism was Henri Bortoft.

He deals with the metaphysical challenges surrounding a phenomenological hermeneutic consideration of the holistic relationship between parts and wholes very well. However, he did not explore the mathematical approaches to this subject. Worse, he is not known as an authority.

Holism has been defined in terms of the relationship between the whole and its parts. Mathematically, part-whole theory is an alternative or a complimentary approach to set theory. Bertrand Russel uncovered the paradoxes that lie at the heart of the formal logical rules or axioms that have defined set theory. The barber paradox is the most well known. Mereology, the successor to whole-part theory, and fuzzy set theory were, at least in part, reactions to this state of affairs.

I am sure that it is no coincidence that Husserl, the mathematically trained founder of phenomenology, was one of the first to write about the relationships between parts and wholes in his 1901 Logical Investigations (volume 2). This was as a direct response to the increasing gap between the formalism of logic and mathematics, and the physical world as we experience it, which that mathematics was (at least in part) formulated to help us understand.

I had naively hoped that a reading of Bart Kosko’s Fuzzy Thinking would provide a non-contraversial place to start. All I find is controversy. Kosko loses the machine intelligence audience with his talk of Zen Buddhism. The book reviews clearly show a gap between those with an interest in the philosophical implications of fuzzy logic and those who just want to deal with the formalisms of the maths.

Whilst writng this post I have discovered that neither mathematics, nor logic (and they are not believed to be the same by all), have been able to provide me with solid ground. As Kosko discovered, if you do not find common ground with your audience, the chances are they will not follow.

So it boils down to me and the hermeneutic circle. To understand something one needs to understand each of the parts of which it consists. Yet the parts are only intelligable in terms of that of which they are a part. The solution to this paradox is entailed in fuzziness. The first part that is considered may give us a vague notion of the nature of the whole to which it belongs. This vague notion helps in developing a partial understanding of the next part to be examined. With each step by way of the various parts, an understanding develops in the manner of a ball spiralling in towards a central well of attraction.

This is essentially the method Plato gets Socrates to use in many of his dialogues. Thus in the Theaetetus the task was to discover what is knowledge. But to discover the answer the participants needed to have an idea of what they were searching for. By the end of their search they didn’t appear to have found it. But they agreed that they were closer to an answer than they had been at the start.

The trouble is, the closer I get to understanding holism, the further away the answer seems to be. This is possibly because I have been searching for an exact, definitive answer. The alternative that I now choose is a study of the writings of the great thinkers of the past whose influences colour our thoughts today.

So it is that I start my fuzzy holistic hermeneutic circle with the earliest of Ancient Greek writings, heading slowly towards the present.

SOURCE: ENGADGET, BBC