Category Archives: Identity

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

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Something is going on at Carnegie Mellon University. Just a couple of days ago, my friend xstof twittered about claytronics research at Carnergie.

It’s about programmable matter. Not really sure what to image ? Have a look at the following video.

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This model car is made of programmable matter !

Today the New York Times (this is not what you call the average newspaper, i can tell you) had an article about the February 2009 private Asilomar Conference. The title says: “Association’s Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures”

On reflecting about the long term, panelists will review expectations and uncertainties about the development of increasingly competent machine intelligences, including the prospect that computational systems will achieve “human-level” abilities along a variety of dimensions, or surpass human intelligence in a variety of ways. The panel will appraise societal and technical issues that would likely come to the fore with the rise of competent machine intelligence. For example, how might AI successes in multiple realms and venues lead to significant or perhaps even disruptive societal changes?

The focus groups are on:

  • Pace, Concerns, Control, Guidelines
  • Potentially Disruptive Advances: Nature and timing

  • Ethical and Legal Challenges

    • The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

    Also in this context, the AI lab of the Carnegie Mellon University was mentioned.

    Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

    From killing to empathy is only a small step in the NYT article. Here is a robot showing empathy when you have diarrhea.

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    If you want some more serious stuff on this subject, i can really recommend the book “Beyond AI – Creating the conscience of the machine” by J.Storrs Hall, PhD.

    xhuman

    He talks about different “Kind of Minds”: Hypohumans, Diahumans, Epihumans, Hyperhumans.

    See also Ray Kurzweil.Net

    Think Big – Think Open

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    My friend xstof pointed me at ThinkBigManifesto. I started this blog with “Inspire others to Dream”. It could have been “Inspire others to Think Big”. And the advertising text of ThinkBigManifesto suggests: “Big thinking is open and generous, discerning and judicious, yet not judgmental. Big thinking is not excessive, nor is it about the pursuit of excess. Rather, it is moderate.”

    Google is big. Google is about Thinking Big. But what would it take to become a Google-Killer ? “More transparency and less opaqueness, more open”, says Jeff Jarvis in his short video posting on www.bigthink.com about the Google Killer. Jeff Jarvis is quite known from his bestseller “What would Google do”.

    But how open can you go ? Whereas in the past “standards” or “protocols” were focusing only on the connectivity (how to get data from A to B) and syntactic (and sometimes semantic) standards for data standards and “messages”, today we have open standards for all layers.

    I recently found this very interesting deck by Micah Laaker from Yahoo! I have to confess that these Yahoo! folks seem to be on top of everything these days. Also have a look at Yahoo Pipes if you have the time. Especially if one starts thinking about being open in a cloud and/or SaaS type of private or public community.

    Micah basically proposes an updated set of standards for many more layers than we used to think of (with courtesy of http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/04/baychi_open.html):

    1. Open Source (PHP, Hadoop)
    2. Open Infrastructure (Amazon EC2 & S3)
    3. Open Architecture (Firefox, YQL Open Tables)
    4. Open Standards (XML, JSON)
    5. Open Ontology (Microformats, RDFa). See also my recent blog on Smart Data and the OpenCalais project.
    6. Open Access (Twitter, Yahoo! BOSS)
    7. Open Canvas (Facebook, Yahoo! Application Platform)
    8. Open Content (Google Reader, My Yahoo!)
    9. Open Mic (WordPress, YouTube)
    10. Open Forum (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz)
    11. Open Door (Get Satisfaction)
    12. Open Borders (OPML)
    13. Open Identity (OpenID, AttributeExchange); btw have you noticed that Facebook is one of the first true big players to adopt OpenID ? Not as an Identity issuer, but accepting OpenID’s issued by other big players such as Windows Live ID, Yahoo ID, Google ID

    Slide #43 gives a good overview which standards bring most value to what audience (users/developers).

    Designing your Product as a Platform

    View more presentations from Micah Laaker.

    This presentation was delivered on 14 April at BayCHI http://www.baychi.org The meeting Report by student Gregory Cabrera ends with the appropriate questions:

    • Does the system need to be open in order for users (and developers) to derive value?

    • Is creativity an important feature in the design of a platform?

    • What are the features of a successful, creative, open system platform?

    • How creative would you like your users (or developers) to be?

    • How would you inspire creativity in the development of a product or service?

    Imagine a business to business cloud. What of these or other standards would make your offering truly open ? Feel free to comment or to come up with “open” suggestions.

    NUI, XUI, TUI ?

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    No, this is not the name of the latest song i have been teaching to my 3 1/2 year old daughter.

    I am just going completely crazy these days about touch-driven devices, and found some new acronyms in this space:

    1. NUI: Natural User Interface. Examples are Surface and Jeff Han’s touch interfaces
    2. XUI: XML User Interface

    So, i decided to invent my own. TUI: “Touch User Interfaces”, but a check in Wikipedia revealed somebody else already coined that acronym. I just wanted to add more touch or even no-touch as in gestures.

    As i have some days off this week, I have some extra time to introduce the topic with some parodies on well know advertisements. This will also please my readers who ask me questions such as “why do we need all these computers ?”

    Please enjoy the advantages of the Mac Air:

    Why spent 300 € on a Wii Fit, if 3 € would give you the real thing ?

    Surface on its best:

    Or this one: Put a Surface in your pocket:

    But seriously, how could these devices used in Business ? Let’s have a look at what Barclays is doing with it:

    Or at Identity Mine: a Touch-catalogue and Blackberry becomes check-out for Elektra, a big electro-shop in South-America (sorry did not succeed to embed that video).

    Or let’s throw in some “gestures” at GestureTek:

    And from the same GestureTek: full body Avatar control. Check out this link with plenty of other demos.

    But what if real and virtual get really mixed together. Have a look at the concept videos below:

    XUI/NUI/TUI at Home

    XUI/NUI/YUI at Work:

    Or get completely immersed. Check out how EonReality is pushing the limits. Here on their homepage and here in this video. It’s getting so real that you almost get sea-sick.

    Amazing 3D immersion technology from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

    Who said that singularity (the moment man & machine truly blend together) will happen in 2030 ?

    I think it will be much sooner.

    In 2030, having a brain implant will be as cool as having an iPhone today. Who in his right mind would have predicted in 1990 more than one cell phone per person ? That’s also only 20 years ago.

    Do we still need identity numbers ?

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    Tim O’Reilly did a great opening keynote at Web2.0Expo about 5 technologies to watch and subsequently also commented on a related Forbes article about the emergence of a social nervous system.

    Tim is saying some really profound things here. I will spend 2-3 posts to comment.

    He is saying some cool stuff about identities of things. He says that meaning does not have to formalized. And that for example the identity of CD’s in the CDDB project is based on recognizing the checksum of the length of the songs on the CD. Or the energy-signature of major appliances is so unique that you can derive from that unique signal what brand and model of fridge you are using. Its all about pattern recognition.

    Fine. All that is about things. But what about humans ? Do we “radiate” some sort of unique pattern that can be used to uniquely identify each of us ?

    In my previous life, i was pretty deeply involved in the Belgian Electronic Identity Card project (eID). In Belgium more than 8 million citizens have a smartcard that contains 2 certificates issues by the Belgian Government. One to authenticate and one for digital signatures with legal value. Is that advanced ? Depends how you look at it. Americans and Britains for ex shiver by the idea only of an identity card, don’t even mention an electronic identity card. Now on the other hand, a smart-card is not what one would call these days “rocket science”. And of course we get biometrics mixed in all of this. But all this is about capturing something unique of our body (fingerprint, retina, voice, etc) and being able to read it and map it to a database.

    And aren’t we all looking for one secure identity that we can use in many different contexts (work, private, different online services, etc,…) and across many different devices (PC, Mac, iPhone, touchwall, arm wrist devices, car, etc) ?

    And that we can use in different scenarios: authentication, signature, encryption,….

    But would there be something like a human unique energy-signature ? Or unique footprint ? Maybe your Twitter behaviour has a unique “twit-print” ? I don’t know. Are you aware of such initiatives ?

    If you want to think about human identity from a broader then technology perspective, then I recommend www.identityblog.com by Kim Cameron. Kim is Microsoft’s Chief Architect Identity. Kim is a non-typical Microsoftie 😉 He has a high teddy-bear factor, and talks more to the open source, IBM, Sun, etc community than pure Microsoft audiences because he is convinced that digital identity will need to be solved at industry level, not as proprietary company initiatives. Kim has on his blog some interesting whitepapers on the Identity Meta-System and CardSpace implementations in both Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments. If you want to get a feel of the full scope of identity – including themes like privacy, user control, etc – then this blog is an excellent point to start.