IFTF's Future Now

Brain Models for Intelligence

I reviewed Jeff Hawkin's book: On Intelligence here last year. The founder of Palm Computing suggested a model using the architecture of the brain to build artificially intelligent systems. This is a novel approach, since most AI systems do not attempt to use the brain as a model. His book was very good, but I suggested that he had considerable work to do to implement his ideas. Its another commendable attempt at the holy grail of machine intelligence.

Now an article in today's WSJ: Next Case for Palm Pilot Creators: The Brain and another in BusinessWeek: Jeff Hawkins' Bold Brainstorm, suggest that some progress has been made. He linked with Dileep George, who has started to implement some mathematics based on Hawkin's ideas, and formed a company called Numenta to work on practical applications. Both articles quote Intel scientist Gary Bradksi who says "Even if he's wrong, his theory is better than nothing. And it's 'attackable' -- and that's a good thing." Likely early applications are in machine vision and drug discovery. Well worth tracking. See also article in the NYTimes.

links for 2005-03-24

• Andrés Guadamuz
  "E-commerce lecturer, University of Edinburgh"
  (categories: economics law Internet people)
• AHRB Research Centre for Studies in IP and IT Law
  "The research programme reflects the unique nature of the Centre in combining research on IP and IT law together with work on bio-medical technologies, and in developing inter-disciplinary perspectives..."
  (categories: law Internet Europe biology)
• Honey, I Geotagged the Kids
  (I hate when that happens.) "How collaborative cartography could enable us to map our shared worlds -- and why the wireless industry probably won't go for it."
  (categories: geoweb Internet place/space)

links for 2005-03-23

• Outsourcing in China
  f Henry Luce were alive, he would undoubtedly label this the Asian Century, just as he deemed the 20th century the American Century. The big driver is China, enticing because of its low-cost labor, which is poised to burst into a consuming middle class to
  (categories: software)

Match-making Maps

New Scientist has an article about people using GPS devices to create their own maps. According to the article the rationale - it least in Europe - is the price of otherwise available maps. To save a couple of pennies (Euro) the people behind the trend spend hour upon hour traversing the local network of streets to produce the homemade maps.

I have to admit that I am among the apparently few who haven't become addicted to flick, so perhaps I have a problem when it comes innovative ways of spending time, but the mapping activity ranks among the most foolish things I have heard recently. Perhaps a few Scotsmen would go (walk) this far to save money, but still...

That was at least my immediate reaction until my eyes caught up with the fact that the article featured IFTF describing the trend as the beginning of a geospatial web. With the IFTF "endorsement" I felt I had to give the idea a second chance.

It didn't make much more sense on second thought either, there has to be simpler ways to put the local coffee bar on a map, but then movies such as "Sliding Doors", "Short cuts" and "Magnolia" came to my mind. Imagine if we all gave up some of our right to privacy and produced and shared dynamical private maps. Not just maps of the local neighbourhood, but maps containing information about when we had been where. Pretty straightforward. It would no longer be left to Hollywood to speculate in what would have happened, if I had taken another route to the office this morning - or if I had been 10 minutes late. On the map sharing server (Mapr?) some pattern recognition routine would allow me to see, who I would have met in that case. It would even be possible to perform match making among persons travelling in my foot steps but at different times. People I may otherwise never have met would suddenly leave anonymity. As in the movies our lifes would begin to converge.

In this case I think that I would buy myself a GPS, opening the door to a fascinating kind of parallel worlds. But my map of London would still be the one I can get free of charge at the airport.

Tivo Collaborative Filtering

When I first got a Tivo, I wondered about the details of how their collaborative filtering (recommendation) system worked. Not that it always did a good job, but I was interested in how much work was done to link behavior to recommendation. Could have value for other kinds of consumer behavior interaction linkage to 'offers', such as that being done by IBM and Cuesol in the store. Here are the Tivo recommender technical details. Via and more at Daniel Lemire's blog. Update: Economist on Collaborative filtering.

links for 2005-03-22

• Telegraph | News | Pupils make more progress in 3Rs 'without aid of computers'
  (categories: education)

Interesting quote

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn't have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by "conventional" means.

There were nay-sayers then, and indeed there still are, but I would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallible than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Euan Semple, "Duck!"

[via Cutting Through]

links for 2005-03-21

• An Atlas of Cyberspaces
  This is an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces.
  (categories: cyberspace Internet visualization)
• Knowledge Leadership (I)
  "Open-loop archetypes, technology preponderance, tangible focus, machine organizational metaphors and pedantic training systems, for example, are just some of the 21st Century knowledge-based enterprise artifacts that trace their problematic origins from
  (categories: collaboration collective_intelligence blogging wiki)
• 'Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are' by L. Gabora
  "This paper addressed the question of whether anything in culture, or the cognitive machinery that underlies it, constitutes a replicator, and explores implications for how to proceed with a theory of how culture evolves."
  (categories: collective_intelligence culture)
• Why Blog a Project?
  "Blogging helps you and others notice what you're accomplishing. It tests your commitment, and demonstrates it."
  (categories: blogging business)
• Off Track
  "America's economy is losing its competitive edge and Washington hasn't noticed."
  (categories: economics government science)
• What happens when you replace the word "blogging" with "thinking"?
  "There’s also some big criticisms of blogging being aired in various places too. I’d like to talk about 6 benefits of blogging here and present some counters to the arguments that surround those benefits."
  (categories: blogging business collaboration)
• Blogging at IBM
  "At this moment we [at IBM] have about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM'ers.)"
  (categories: blogging business)
• 10 ways to use blogs for managing projects
  "Here’s ten ways that we’ve used blogs for managing projects - both internally and with our clients."
  (categories: blogging business collaboration)
• How To Blog And Not Lose Your Job
  "These points relate mainly to work-blogs, but with a bit of thought will translate pretty well to anything that you write on the Internet. "
  (categories: blogging business)
• Conversations with Dina
  Essay "examining whither Indian blogging today, why it is on the threshold of a tipping point, and what might we see in the future."
  (categories: blogging culture Asia)
• Most bloggers ‘are teenage girls’
  Report on Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas' survey.
  (categories: blogging Europe)
• my PhD thesis - first ideas: the social capital
  "I think I am going to stop for a while in the field of the social and psychological capital created and developed in the blogosphere."
  (categories: blogging)

Baby Name Visualization Application

There is a great example of data visualization at the Baby Name Wizard Site. Go to the site and click on "Launch Baby Voyager". The application is very simple. You enter in a name and a chart shows you how popular the name has been over the last century. In addition displaying a lot of data in an easy to understand way, it is also fun.

Thanks to Jason Timmermans at Echo Location for pointing this out.

links for 2005-03-20

• The New York Times > Technology > Growth of Wireless Internet Opens New Path for Thieves
  (categories: wireless)