mm, mostly through my trip... still alive... haven't heard from the friends really.. I'll try to see if anyone here in SLC wants to hang out today or tomorrow... I've been very busy with family and thanksgiving activities, and hanging out with crystal..
I'll be back online soon. Some interesting ideas I may blog about some in a bit, or publish elsewhere and link to, in my copious free time.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Monday, November 22, 2004
Keyhole
An appropriate link for a traveling day. As more computer interfaces begin to bring usefully indexed and more massive amounts of data, we're really going to see the rubber hit the road in terms of large scale integrated analysis. Expect efficient extraction of significant features from large datasets(like maps, statistics, advertising data, financial records, text databases, traffic data) to be increasingly significant to business. The rise of researchers and supercomputing for hire will only increase as organizations begin to realize how much value they're drowning in, but can't realistically get at without searching, interface, and filtering.
Google is a very visible, very public front-runner here, but most of their services are very unsophisticated. Other firms, like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and CAS in many cases have much deeper search problems, and much more established revenue streams. Google is certainly increasingly dangerous to these markets, and is aggressively expanding their dataset, likely betting that a crosslinked, massively indexed series of search services will be more valuable than a more deeply searched, or better annotated one.
It's perhaps characteristic of Computer Scientists to overgeneralize, and for Artificial Intelligence researchers to do so in a manner bordering on the ridiculous. The search problem certainly seems like a weaker version of the perceptual issues in cognitive science to me, though. I anticipate that these fields will, at the highest levels be interlinked in theory, if not in practice.
I'm going to Salt Lake City, to visit with friends, and connect with family for a short time. I'm looking forward to it.
I'll be back the 30th. Please behave yourselves in the meantime.
Some status updates, I managed to finish the integration framework for all our virtual world testing for the next few steps. This is basically the system we'll use to transition from disconnected cognitive testing to a continous, task switching, big brain kind of model.
Whereas before we were testing specific ability in repeatable tests, and establishing the perceptive categorization, the learning algorithms, the exploration routines in separate domains, we're now upping the complexity and the richness, by jamming all these tasks into a big messy place, more like the real world.
There are several problems with this, the first being the difficulty of testing, which we've actually got a model to reduce this, by isolating particular tasks at particular moments, and generating baselines to compare against on the fly. It will really be interesting over the next month as we get our first experience with how all these capabilities interact in an unplanned fashion. I am cautiously optimistic. Many of the cognitive algorithms we have would operate better in a more data rich, and varied environment than the rather sparse controlled situations we've been using up to now.
a key point in cognitive design is that brains are supersystems, and it's very artificial to imagine that each module would be able to operate on it's own. Seperating out for testing and development is fine, but the capabilities and sections of intelligence must exist in an expanding ecology of goals and functionality, or the whole things falls apart very quickly, because of the complexity of the interactions.
Getting to this point before my vacation was a purposeful thing, as during the trip I plan on thinking through the more theoretical issues that face us now that we are in this expansion, scaling, and integration phase.
We're going to be dealing with much bigger brains, far more mental objects, and many many more patterns and actions to be correlated. All good things, but their effect on the system, and the development they will push us into must all be considered, lest we waste time. Ideally of course, we would push in all directions at once, perfectly co-ordinated, with no duplication of effort, but we dont' have either the manpower or the telepathy to do that. So we need to proceed piecewise, with some overall prospectus.
pity the poor man who is not confused by his job and his tasks. for he is either blind, or miscast in his role. and for either, he is learning nothing.
An appropriate link for a traveling day. As more computer interfaces begin to bring usefully indexed and more massive amounts of data, we're really going to see the rubber hit the road in terms of large scale integrated analysis. Expect efficient extraction of significant features from large datasets(like maps, statistics, advertising data, financial records, text databases, traffic data) to be increasingly significant to business. The rise of researchers and supercomputing for hire will only increase as organizations begin to realize how much value they're drowning in, but can't realistically get at without searching, interface, and filtering.
Google is a very visible, very public front-runner here, but most of their services are very unsophisticated. Other firms, like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and CAS in many cases have much deeper search problems, and much more established revenue streams. Google is certainly increasingly dangerous to these markets, and is aggressively expanding their dataset, likely betting that a crosslinked, massively indexed series of search services will be more valuable than a more deeply searched, or better annotated one.
It's perhaps characteristic of Computer Scientists to overgeneralize, and for Artificial Intelligence researchers to do so in a manner bordering on the ridiculous. The search problem certainly seems like a weaker version of the perceptual issues in cognitive science to me, though. I anticipate that these fields will, at the highest levels be interlinked in theory, if not in practice.
I'm going to Salt Lake City, to visit with friends, and connect with family for a short time. I'm looking forward to it.
I'll be back the 30th. Please behave yourselves in the meantime.
Some status updates, I managed to finish the integration framework for all our virtual world testing for the next few steps. This is basically the system we'll use to transition from disconnected cognitive testing to a continous, task switching, big brain kind of model.
Whereas before we were testing specific ability in repeatable tests, and establishing the perceptive categorization, the learning algorithms, the exploration routines in separate domains, we're now upping the complexity and the richness, by jamming all these tasks into a big messy place, more like the real world.
There are several problems with this, the first being the difficulty of testing, which we've actually got a model to reduce this, by isolating particular tasks at particular moments, and generating baselines to compare against on the fly. It will really be interesting over the next month as we get our first experience with how all these capabilities interact in an unplanned fashion. I am cautiously optimistic. Many of the cognitive algorithms we have would operate better in a more data rich, and varied environment than the rather sparse controlled situations we've been using up to now.
a key point in cognitive design is that brains are supersystems, and it's very artificial to imagine that each module would be able to operate on it's own. Seperating out for testing and development is fine, but the capabilities and sections of intelligence must exist in an expanding ecology of goals and functionality, or the whole things falls apart very quickly, because of the complexity of the interactions.
Getting to this point before my vacation was a purposeful thing, as during the trip I plan on thinking through the more theoretical issues that face us now that we are in this expansion, scaling, and integration phase.
We're going to be dealing with much bigger brains, far more mental objects, and many many more patterns and actions to be correlated. All good things, but their effect on the system, and the development they will push us into must all be considered, lest we waste time. Ideally of course, we would push in all directions at once, perfectly co-ordinated, with no duplication of effort, but we dont' have either the manpower or the telepathy to do that. So we need to proceed piecewise, with some overall prospectus.
pity the poor man who is not confused by his job and his tasks. for he is either blind, or miscast in his role. and for either, he is learning nothing.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
K, news:
Progress continues at a2i2. I am pleased with the direction the project is going, and some few details I can give here, we are finally moving in the direction of integration, extension and scaling, which will (I believe) show us the value of the cognitive abilities we have been developing thus far in a much more unified and applicable way.
Also, the project has swung a bit away from biological inspiration(a good metric, but a poor teacher of structure), which I think will allow us faster progress, if we can stay grounded and pragmatic. There are simply many shortcuts that nature couldn't, or had no reason to take, that we may have been missing.
I am visiting SLC for the holidays, a whole week, in fact(don't ask me why, but airline prices being what they are, there are some odd deals).
I'll be around Nov 22nd to Nov 30th. I'm afraid I won't be visiting for Newtonmas(X-mas), so get your Justin while he is available! Family members and my girlfriend have first dibs, but I'd like to see friends and cohorts too.
The field of AI in general seems to be heating up a bit. There still aren't any projects that are general and ambitious, but there are more players, narrow AI funding and commercialization increases unabated, we have the relative newcomers of RNI publishing things now, and more activity on the conference and publishing front as well.
As supercomputers and custom software become the norm for people who need intelligent data handling, we'll see more and more interest in the direction of machine learning, adaptive systems, and other approximations of intelligence.
Starglider(Micheal Wilson), of sl4 fame, has an interesting new AI application to an ancient game. The perennial computer challenge of a decent Go player has been picked up again, and his attack is interesting. I've investigated GnuGo, a relatively strong open-source player in the past, and am very interested in his new computational statistics approach. I'm afraid I don't really understand enough of it's structure yet to comment intelligently, but I think he may be on to a structure general enough to allow large gains from what is essentially a standing start. Even achieving parity with more established Go programs from such a theoretical standpoint would be very impressive to me. Most of the current crop are very practical designs forged in constant ladder play tweaking and special case operations. DestinyGo(following some naming convention of his own) will probably be more widely available sometime relatively soon, but I wouldn't want to put words or plans in his mouth. Contact him for more details.
Progress continues at a2i2. I am pleased with the direction the project is going, and some few details I can give here, we are finally moving in the direction of integration, extension and scaling, which will (I believe) show us the value of the cognitive abilities we have been developing thus far in a much more unified and applicable way.
Also, the project has swung a bit away from biological inspiration(a good metric, but a poor teacher of structure), which I think will allow us faster progress, if we can stay grounded and pragmatic. There are simply many shortcuts that nature couldn't, or had no reason to take, that we may have been missing.
I am visiting SLC for the holidays, a whole week, in fact(don't ask me why, but airline prices being what they are, there are some odd deals).
I'll be around Nov 22nd to Nov 30th. I'm afraid I won't be visiting for Newtonmas(X-mas), so get your Justin while he is available! Family members and my girlfriend have first dibs, but I'd like to see friends and cohorts too.
The field of AI in general seems to be heating up a bit. There still aren't any projects that are general and ambitious, but there are more players, narrow AI funding and commercialization increases unabated, we have the relative newcomers of RNI publishing things now, and more activity on the conference and publishing front as well.
As supercomputers and custom software become the norm for people who need intelligent data handling, we'll see more and more interest in the direction of machine learning, adaptive systems, and other approximations of intelligence.
Starglider(Micheal Wilson), of sl4 fame, has an interesting new AI application to an ancient game. The perennial computer challenge of a decent Go player has been picked up again, and his attack is interesting. I've investigated GnuGo, a relatively strong open-source player in the past, and am very interested in his new computational statistics approach. I'm afraid I don't really understand enough of it's structure yet to comment intelligently, but I think he may be on to a structure general enough to allow large gains from what is essentially a standing start. Even achieving parity with more established Go programs from such a theoretical standpoint would be very impressive to me. Most of the current crop are very practical designs forged in constant ladder play tweaking and special case operations. DestinyGo(following some naming convention of his own) will probably be more widely available sometime relatively soon, but I wouldn't want to put words or plans in his mouth. Contact him for more details.
Monday, November 15, 2004
The Price of Loyalty: The Bush Files:
"'Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.'
-- Justice Louis Brandeis, 1913"
"'Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.'
-- Justice Louis Brandeis, 1913"
Monday, November 08, 2004
United States IPv6 Summit 2004 - December 7-10, Reston, Virginia
a quick note on opportunities.
Alex Lightman, CEO of this lil site, is looking for good IPv6 technologies. We came up with a few ideas and will be kicking them around to see if they have legs. IPv6 is a tremendous opportunity that US companies are ignoring out fo bystander effect, because they expect someone else to blaze the trail, and to be able to progressive upgrade.
Alex is an interesting guy, and seems like a really sharp businessman. Networking theorists note, IPv6 is severely underrepresented in new technology, despite it's advantages and relative paucity of competitors, people just aren't using it.
a quick note on opportunities.
Alex Lightman, CEO of this lil site, is looking for good IPv6 technologies. We came up with a few ideas and will be kicking them around to see if they have legs. IPv6 is a tremendous opportunity that US companies are ignoring out fo bystander effect, because they expect someone else to blaze the trail, and to be able to progressive upgrade.
Alex is an interesting guy, and seems like a really sharp businessman. Networking theorists note, IPv6 is severely underrepresented in new technology, despite it's advantages and relative paucity of competitors, people just aren't using it.
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