Blogging the Noosphere

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.

A few people have been curious about the meaning of the word metacortex after seeing it here on the blog. I saw a column today by David Brooks on the New York Times that probably does as good a job as anything in giving an intuitive feel of the evolving concept of an exocortex.

Vinge, the originator of at least the term Singularity, if not the concept itself, has proposed 3 main routes to a technological singularity. One route is by the development of a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. A second route is by the genetic enhancement of human intelligence to above current human maximum. But a third route Vinge proposes is through human augmentation, a man-machine cybernetic merger. In the NYT article I referred to earlier, you can get a feel for what he is talking about, of how technologies such as GPS auto navigation systems along with calculators, iPods, BlackBerries and other devices provide many of the functions of a cortical memory in an externally stored and accessed form. Now I don’t know if a technological singularity is really in our future or not, but one must admit that people do have a point with these observations of the trends we are seeing today. Our information technology devices and systems are greatly enhancing our memory capacities and practical functionality in many interesting and unforeseen ways. And this is happening today, right now, and it is not our children but we who are participating in this transformation.

Metacortices and Exocortices (from Wikipedia ): Though etymologically similar, the two are quite different — the former, in effect, being composed in various ways of the latter. An EXOcortex can best be described as the portion of a trans- or posthuman entity’s brain (or cortex) which exists outside of that entity’s primary computing structure, usually the brain inhabiting a person’s “meatbody.” For example, a person’s exocortex could very well be composed of all the external memory modules, processor, and devices that the person’s biological brain interacts with on a realtime basis, thereby in effect making those external devices a functional part of the individual’s “mind.” A METAcortex, on the other hand, is a processing construction built entirely out of the connections between other processing constructions — a sort of “higher brain” composed of lesser brains, all of which contribute to its functionality.

The 2007 Hugo Award Winners were announced awhile ago and I saw that Vinge had won another Hugo for his excellent novel Rainbows End. I love Vinge and read everything he puts out, as soon as it comes out. He is one of the few I will pick up in hardback, which I did with Rainbows End.

One thought after rereading. We are currently in the middle of our Fall 2007 AI Course. Vinge is a Computer Scientist by training, and it shows in his work. The ideas just leap off of every page of this novel. I especially love his concepts of Analyst Pools. These are really a bit of a fleshed out version of a borganism (a term invented by Stross, I believe). I can almost see how a system like this might be created in today’s world of Social Networking Systems and Wisdom of Crowds organization. To bring it back to our AI class, imagine a big A* or min-max search specification being conducted in real-time. But instead of machine generated and evaluated heuristic functions, imagine analysts instead providing human-level-intelligent type heuristic estimation of states, possibly mitigated by a Prediction Market to allow many competing heuristic estimates of states to be combined. I could imagine, if you could build the software support system to manage 10s or 100s of thousands of analysts all working collectively on such a machine/human guided search, you would have something very like what Vinge envisions in Rainbows End. I’ll just say that I know of research initiatives at NSF and elsewhere that are envisioning and working towards the possibilities of such real-time social borganism as this.

Our cognition and intelligence research group has recently announced and been looking to fill a Post Doctoral research position. The formal announcement, with more details, can be found on the IEEE Career web site. We are looking for a recent Ph.D. graduate with research interest in Intelligent Systems, complex adaptive behavior, as well as some experience with distributed computing. If you know of someone or are interested in the position yourself, you may send me your CV and references. We are considering applications now, and will accept applications for the next 4 weeks or so before making our decision.

Well looks like I’m going to be going to 2 conferences in August here, though I don’t have a paper or talk at either one. From Aug 1-4 I’ll be in beautiful downtown Nashville at the 29th annual Cognitive Science Conference. Then from the 12th to the 17th its off to beautiful Orlando FL for the 2007 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Both look exciting, though especially IJCNN (for me) as a lot of our Kozma/Freeman cognitive neurodynamics group are giving talks and tutorials there. If you are going to be to either one, look me up. I’ll probably post a few blogs about impressions, etc. from the conferences while I’m there.

I’ve been doing a bit of planning for my Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, to be taught this fall. For those who haven’t yet discovered, MIT offers a wonderful resource in their MIT OpenCourseWare. Basically they have opened up many of their courses materials for open and free use. A great resource for educators and self-learners alike, as they state on the site.

Anyway, I think I will be using one of my favorite texts, and the one I used as a student for my AI course (though it has been updated in a second edition), Russel and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. In my opinion, a very good introduction to the basics, with as the title suggests a modern viewpoint cognizant of the successes, failures, strengths and weaknesses of the standard techniques and algorithms of AI.