I have recently been exploring social networking sites and collective intelligence algorithms. I suppose I am of the generation that just missed out on the Facebook/MySpace phenomenon. But I have always found recommendation engines from places like Amazon and Netflix quite useful. They provide an indirect type of socially augmented intelligence by using algorithms to find people with similar tastes, and then rate or recommend items indirectly based on their recommendations and their similarity to your own tastes. Newer sites like del.icio.us and last.fm take this to an explicit next step. These types of social networking sites allow you to actively find not only items that interest you (web sites and music respectively), but also people with similar interests and tastes to form explicit and ad-hoc social networks. See the new items on my side bar which should follow my del.icio.us bookmarks and last.fm music interests and activity from these sites.

One of the themes of this blog is Metacortices, the idea that the collective cognition of many people can be harnessed to perform more intelligent behaviors than would be possible from any of the individuals. Social networks, as I am describing them, do fit this definition to a degree, though the intelligent behavior being generated is really one that benefits the individuals by helping them make better choices, and find more interesting stuff. Though, look at collective intelligence and social games research for examples where people are designing systems based on playing games that do appear to create behavior that is more intelligent than any of the individual participants might do on their own.

A related concept that comes to mind looking at my del.icio.us and last.fm logs is the lifelog (also known as lifestream or total history). This is more in the realm of building an Exocortex, the idea of a constantly created log or memory of activities, thoughts, findings, etc. The basic idea of a lifelog is a technologically enhanced long-term episodic memory. Episodic memory is a type of long-term memory recognized by psychologists and cognitive scientists. It is the type of memory that allows us to store and recall episodes in our life, like our last birthday party, or what we ate for lunch yesterday. A lifelog would consist of a technologically enhanced person with devices that capture all video, images, audio and other type of sensory inputs, and stores and processes these logs in ways that make them searchable. Imagine a camera in your glasses taking video at 10 frames per second, being automatically meta-tagged with gps location information of where the photos occurred, and associated through temporal tags with other streams, such as audio or other, possibly uploading them to a Flickr stream, with auto-generated tags, etc.. The link given previously of Stross’s ideas on this subject propose a rapidly approaching capability to log and process this level of data for individual people because of increasing computing storage and processing power and mobility.

A lot of this interest was because of a new book I have been reading Collective Intelligence by Tobey Segaran. I think this is a wonderful book, almost on the level of Norvig’s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, in terms of giving concrete and hands-on views of the important algorithms and methods behind these intelligent systems. My graduate AI course this fall of 2008 will be using this book as our text and will concentrate on machine intelligence and collective intelligence methods.

(Yes that title is a Benigni reference. The gist of this post got me to thinking about Benigni’s and other’s movies that present an unshakable core of optimism in the face of unspeakable tragedy.)

As those who know me well would tell you, at my core I have a bit of an optimistic streak concerning our future as human beings, as a race, as a society. Some might look around and see all the potentials for disaster and collapse (see some of my previous posts on the Unabomber and Jared Diamond). But I can’t help but look at the other side of the coin. I don’t think I am naive, or unaware of the very real problems that face us as a race, I try not to be an unabashed technophile. I suppose the general outlook does somewhat go hand in hand with being a geek and a technophile, how can you not be excited (but frightened as well) by the things being unleashed around us, by us; by the very interesting times we are living in!

Case in point. I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned the Grand Challenges of Engineering yet. I have even used these as a theme for a talk I gave this spring for our TAMUC college days to prospective students. If you want an example of something that gets me out of bed in the morning, something that really excites me, look through this list of items. The list was developed by some of the top minds of our days in the engineering and scientific field. Minds like Larry Page, one of the founders of Google and Ray Kurzweil, inventor and technologist (and a scarily unabashed technophile if there ever was one).

I’ll just point out to student who might be reading, most all of my research being done here at TAMUC, by me and my research group and colleagues, falls within one or the other of the areas given in this article. Much of my main research touches on reverse engineering the brain, trying to build smarter artificial systems by studying and emulating neural processes. We have recently become more involved in virtual environments for training. And I have always had a strong interest and involvement in computational modeling and scientific computing, which is the heart of the types of new tools we are building for cutting-edge science of the 21st century. So again to any of you student, if you are interested in learning more or even working on some of the Grand Challenges mentioned in the article, you might want to stop by and talk with me sometime.

Back from China

Went to China at the start of the Summer to visit with Shulan’s family in Nanjing, and also took a trip to Beijing for a bit of sight seeing. This was just after the major earthquake in Chungdu, so as you see it has been some time since I got back, but wanted to post a few notes about the trip.

First some pictures. A lot of these are from our trip up to Beijing to do some sightseeing. We took an overnight sleeper train up north to get there, which was fun, haven’t done that since I was a child. But I’m sure the enjoyment factor would fade quickly after the novelty factor wears off. We got to see some of the Olympic buildings constructed for this summer, including the new main stadium known locally as the Bird’s Nest. We went and saw many of the historical sights while in Beijing, including the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs, and of course since I was with Shulan sampled many of the authentic cuisines of Beijing, searching out the locals favorite restaurants and foods.

As you can imagine I was following the events of the earthquake quite closely. There was an amazing outpouring from the Chinese people while we were there. And the openness and effectiveness of the organized government response was equally impressive. Hopefully their openness signals some permanent future trends, and will not revert to old ways say after the Olympics. I know for example the criticisms by especially the parents of possible irregularities in construction techniques, especially for school and other public buildings, are beginning to be discouraged and quieted more and more by the Chinese officials. We will see if they can close the barn door after letting the horses of progress out this time.

Some of my favorite coverage of the Chengdu Earthquake came from NPR. I am a listener and supporter of public radio, and they happened to have some of their radio reporters in Chengdu for a feature on China focusing on Schizuan providence when the earthquake struck.