Category: xstof

Natural Language Interface Microsoft Research

With thx to xstof for spotting this one. Looks like i cannot embed the video, so please go here or click the picture below.

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It turns out 2019 is getting closer every day. At the moment, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officerCraig Mundie is doing the rounds at a number of prestigious colleges in the States showing off Microsoft’s vision for technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Of course, one must use the latest in natural user interfaces for this task.

A feature of this year’s tour appears to be a next-generation computer – one that docks and undocks from a transparent glass display and allows for not only pen and voice input as you’d come to expect from natural user interfaces, but also incorporates touchless gestures and eye-tracking to interact with the information at hand.

Getting closer to the Minority Report type of interfaces 😉

MIT Personas Project

Spotted via Techcrunch and my always reliable source “xstof”:

MIT Personas Project.

It gives you an idea on how the internet sees you. A quite better version of Google your own name.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Have a look here and enter your full name and allow MIT to determine your online profile or the associations they’re able to make based upon your name.

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First, this thing starts scanning your information shadow on the internet:

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At the end you get:

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Doing this live is much more impressive !

This is a very good example of what i meant in earlier posts on your Information Shadow on the internet, and how that is leading to your unique identity “footprint” or DNA. Just start imagining that the colored bar above is your own unique personal spectrum analysis. Just like they do for spectrum analysis of substances or stars. 

Retaining our identities

Thanks to xstof (again ;-), I discovered daily galaxy site.

Two really interesting blog entries related to our Long Term Think Tank ambitions:

The first about robots developing at warp speed.

Hans Moravec,  pioneer in mobile robot research and founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Yes, again that Carnegie Mellon University.

robota_3_3_2

Whilst today, these robots are barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, they could catch up with us within a half century."

  1. 2010: A first generation of broadly-capable "universal robots".
  2. 2015: Utility robots host programs for several tasks.
  3. 2020: Universal robots host programs for most simple chores.
  4. 2030: Robot competence will become comparable to larger mammals.

In the decades following the first universal robots, a second generation with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability will emerge. They will have a conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience, gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike, generation will abstract and reason from the world model.

Others believe that it is humans who will evolve into advanced “robots”. Their belief is that with futuristic technologies being developed in multiple fields, human intelligence may eventually be able to “escape its ensnarement in biological tissue” and be able to move freely across boundaries that can’t support flesh and blood—while still retaining our identities

Many more video material from Carnegie here.

One is about identities, privacy and social security numbers. I am sure my friends from the Belgian eID project will have a sort of déja-vu when watching the following video:

But in essence, it’s all about the changing nature our own real and perceived identity in a digital world. I should drop the word “digital”, as young people see this as “old-mans-wording”. They not talk about a “digital” camera. It’s just a camera. It’s our “world”.

The other article is about Project Blue Brain.

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A bit scary is the statement: ""We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," That is Mr. Markram during this month’s TED Global Conference at Oxford, England.

… a simulation that recreates the activity of a human brain may produce ethical concerns.  Technically a computer that recreates a rat brain would raise similar issues but, as you’re about to see, these guys don’t have any sympathy for rats.

And not that innocent at all:

With the ability to simulate the effects of rewiring, drugs or external electric fields at an individual neuron level we can investigate enhancements (such as new senses, new cognitive modes or neuroelectric interfaces) without all the inconvenient "human rights violations" and "Crimes against humanity" such research normally entails.  We could improve our own minds – and since we’ll have just invented a silicon model operating at computer speeds in a bulletproof shell, we’ll have to.

Again, this is one of the key purposes of our Think Tank: what if all this (technological evolutionary exponential explosion) happens, what are the consequences for our value kit for the future ? For our personal and corporate values, for our ethical context, for the way we want to be human ?

And also, how do we prepare the future generation of leaders for this radically different world ?

By coincidence, one of the links on the home page of Carnegie Mellon University’s Next-Generation Computing faculty points to project Alice 3.0

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

(btw, also note that the classrooms are packed with Mac’s not PC’s)

Again, it’s again about “doing things that matter”

Why can we from Europe not set-up this sort of stimulating initiatives for our Net Generation (or Generation Y or Generation M) to prepare the next generation of leaders to be ready for 2030 ?

It’s Lifestyle, stupid !

I have a couple of days off, so we can have some lighter (albeit) subjects.

First enjoy this video:

Then read this article on Singularity Hub site, and dream away with all these great subjects like Longevity, Nanotech, Robotics, Genetics, AI, The Brain…

And then click on the link to disturbingly-real-replicants-from-hanson-robotics, and enjoy scary Einstein robot (Video also below). Man, this is really creeepyyyy !

It’s funny when he says at minute 1:20 “Hello, my name is Albert Einstein, i am a physicist”. Would love to hear a trance or techno mix with this sound sample 😉 Gunbee, xstof, Maurice: want to give it a try ? Could be a big hit !

And then there is Zeno Robokind.

For Robokind, wait till minute 3:40 or so, when he/she ? awakens and starts asking questions of life like “Who am I ?” and “What is my purpose ?”. Or also “save the world from the evil” and “…allow users to explore the world of 2029”.

And “Work with us to realize the dream”: Close to our Think Tank Long Term Future (2030) “Inspire People to Dream”

Enjoy !

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

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 Tank – Inspiration

     

    Some interesting sources of inspiration, with thanks to xstof.

    1) Fantastic on-line magazine H+ (Human +), and transhumanistic inpired: http://hplusmagazine.com/magazine

    ad-omg-read-hplus

    In the intro by the editor of the Summer 2009 issue of the H+ Magazine, there is a wonderful setting-the-scene statement that we can also apply to our Think Tank on Long Term Future:

    Watching the news as we do, we witness incredible breakthroughs nearly every week. These are stories that would have been the “story of the year” if they had happened just a decade ago. But these days, they are quickly swept aside by the next breaking science story. They seem to come at ever increasing speeds. In this sense, we are becoming ever more aware of the implications of moore’s Law being played out in the “NBIC” (Nano, Bio, Info & Cogno) “Information science” fields.

    We hope that (among other things) we can inspire young people to study and get involved in the emerging “NBIC” sciences and technologies so as to help us transcend our genetic/biological limitations. We’re hoping that future generations will be able to live incredibly long and healthy life spans without disease, enjoy higher intelligences (perhaps augmented by computers through braincomputer interfaces), and generally be more productive and happy.

    In the Spring 2009 Issue, there was also a really cool article about the state of Nanotechnology.

    Excerpt from that article:

    If nanotechnology follows Moore’s law (transistors on a chip double every 18 months), this level of nanotechnology could occur in the next 15 years or less. The vision includes:

    • Precisely targeted agents for cancer therapy
    • Efficient solar photovoltaic cells
    • Efficient, high-power-density fuel cells
    • Single molecule and single electron sensors
    • Biomedical sensors (in vitro and in vivo)
    • High-density computer memory
    • Molecular-scale computer circuits
    • Selectively permeable membranes
    • Highly selective catalysts
    • Display and lighting systems
    • Responsive (“smart”) materials
    • Ultra-high-performance materials
    • Nanosystems for APM.

    It also includes numerous links to the coolest sites on that subject, including a link to Eric Drexler’s Nanotechnology Roadmap, dated 2007, and translated in Russian June 2009 (Elie, how is your scientific Russian ? 🙂

    2) A Web² PDF Whitepaper that is published at the occasion of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit scheduled for 20-22 October 2009 in San-Francisco.

    The whitepaper can be found here.

    Some salient extracts, that really inspire me and the folks at our Think Tank:

    Collective intelligence applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. The "subsystems" of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage: Data is the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

    Today, we realize that these insights were not only directionally right, but are being applied in areas we only imagined in 2004. The smartphone revolution has moved the Web from our desks to our pockets. Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors. Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

    With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems. As a result, the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared. 1990-2004 was the match being struck; 2005-2009 was the fuse; and 2010 will be the explosion.

    Ever since we first introduced the term "Web 2.0," people have been asking, "What’s next?" Assuming that Web 2.0 was meant to be a kind of software version number (rather than a statement about the second coming of the Web after the dotcom bust), we’re constantly asked about "Web 3.0." Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality?

    It is all of those, and more.

    The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow," an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.

    The whitepaper tackles Web² from following angles:

    – Redefining Collective Intelligence: New Sensory Input

    – Cooperating Data Subsystems

    – How the Web Learns: Explicit vs. Implicit Meaning

    – Web Meets World: The "Information Shadow" and the Internet of Things

    – Photosynth, Gigapixel Photography, and Infinite Images (example)

    – The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind

    Thrilling is the thinking on identity and information shadows of objects:

    For instance, a book has information shadows on Amazon, on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs.

    A song has information shadows on iTunes, on Amazon, on Rhapsody, on MySpace, or Facebook.

    A person has information shadows in a host of emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings, photographs, videos, and government documents.

    A product on the supermarket shelf, a car on a dealer’s lot, a pallet of newly mined boron sitting on a loading dock, a storefront on a small town’s main street — all have information shadows now.

    In many cases, these information shadows are linked with their real world analogues by unique identifiers: an ISBN or ASIN, a part number, or getting more individual, a social security number, a vehicle identification number, or a serial number. Other identifiers are looser, but identity can be triangulated: a name plus an address or phone number, a name plus a photograph, a phone call from a particular location undermining what once would have been a rock-solid alibi.

    This puts a completely different perspective on the thinking about for example the Belgian Electronic Identity Card (eID) which is based on information in the government central database and referred to by the Belgian Social Security Number.

    Why do we still need numbers ? See also my earlier post on “Do we still need identity numbers?”.

    There is also a fantastic reference to Jeff Jonas work on Identity.

    Jonas’ work included building a database of known US persons from various sources. His database grew to about 630 million "identities" before the system had enough information to identify all the variations. But at a certain point, his database began to learn, and then to shrink. Each new load of data made the database smaller, not bigger. 630 million plus 30 million became 600 million, as the subtle calculus of recognition by "context accumulation" worked its magic.

    The last paragraphs are even more stimulating:

    But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world.

    And the world needs our help.

    If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work – its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.

    It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World – that’s Web Squared.

    3) A recent interview with Ray Kurzweil at the occasion of the real start of his Singularity University.

    It little less exciting – at least of you have read his book “The Singularity is Near” – but always inspiring.

    http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-26-Inventing-the-Future.cfm

    Let the future emerge !

    Think Big – Think Open

    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 ?

    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.

    Smart Data go mainstream

    Smart Data are the promise of the Semantic Web.

    And yes, i heard the pitches from Tim-Berners Lee. But that sounded all so far away and abstract, and i could not imagine what it would give me as added value.

    But the video & site below put this into a competitive advantage context and that’s where it gets interesting.

     

    Check out the OpenCalais project: fantastic site with many interesting other links to semantic web related sites, blogs, etc. This will take me week to digest.

    And these are not some geeks putting together something. This is an initiative powered by Thomson Reuters: “The Calais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver pervasive, intelligent information. It builds on the company’s investment in semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing to offer free metadata generation services, developer tools and an open standard for the generation of semantic content. It also provides publishers with an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud and introduces a global metadata transport layer that helps them leverage content consumers like search engines to reach more downstream readers.”

    I decided to try the DocViewer at http://viewer.opencalais.com/ and i cut & pasted the full text of my recent blog on “My new desktop: touch and 3D of course” and hit the submit button:

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    What i get back is amazing:

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    The unstructured data of my blog are parsed, patterns are recognized and semantic data is added. All this can now programmatically exploited as the APIs are published.

    Imagine combining this power with drag & drop mash-up techniques such as Yahoo Pipes or similar.

    Or imagine using this to feed info from financial data reference sources into your financial planning or even trading rooms. I recently have seen a similar demo, with very powerful multilingual parsing and pattern recognition of unstructured data, but this is the first time i see something that has the potential to go mainstream very fast.

    PS: some folks ask me where i find these interesting links. Well, i spent quite some time researching on the web of course. But i also have some friendly secret sources. Friends that just share a link via Twitter or mail, and who themselves have no time or appetite to make a blog out of it. The subject for this post was kindly provided “xstof”