(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.

Rest in Peace Pappert.

Pappert: 1990-2008

She was a good cat.

As I’ve been saying recently to many students, CS really is a fourth new fundamental science. I submit for your consideration this article in the NY Times. Looks like all kinds of interesting posibilities for computing with this fundamental new basic circuit, and appears from their reports this is not at all theoretical, but they have already got practical implementations of the described circuit element.

For those wanting more detail, the Nature article Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element by the HP team making the discovery.

Also, Chua’s original article speculating about the posibility of the Memristor.

Sort of a followup to a previous post of mine about Vinge winning the Hugo for his Rainbows End. Dr. Vinge has made the whole of the book available as a free online download here. Share and enjoy!

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.

I’ve been reading a bit of the new atheists lately, Dawkins (The God Delusion), Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Harris (The End of Faith), Hitchens (God is Not Great). Anwyay, just saw this on YouTube from a rather clever British comedian bloke by the name of Marcus Brigstock, and its Bloody Brilliant!

Oh, and an almost as brilliant screed in a similar vein by that penultimate of British wit, Douglas Adams:

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.

I just finished giving a talk this afternoon for our TAMUC Freshman Success Seminar. Not sure if I managed to convey anything of use or import to any of you all. If any of the Freshmen who were there in the class want to leave me a comment I would love to hear what you thought, or if you had any questions. I really should have mentioned the blog and suggested people leave comments.

Anyway pressed for time I sort of threw out one topic or point that I was going to make. I’m sure by the last slide some students would perhaps think that I am obviously a Technophile at best, and possibly a naive fool at worst, in spouting an overly optimistic and simplistic view of the power of science and technology as a positive force in our culture. I was going to quote the following excerpt from Ted Kaczynski, you know he of Unabomber fame, as a somewhat diametrically opposed view of what I was presenting:

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

By all accounts Kazcynski is a very smart individual, a bonafide genius. So it should at least be distubing to us that he can look at the same set of facts and come up with such a bleak and opposite view of our potential future. In response I would urge you to read the following except by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger on Salon from their new book

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility

As a response to the type of depressive vision of Kaczynski, I think it rather nicely sums up my own message (though I wish I had even a portion of their talent to communicate it so well).

For those who might have been interested, here is a link to the slides of the presentation I gave:

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy PDF

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy PPT

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy ODP

For various other reasons I’ve recently been looking at and thinking about the discipline of computer science, and how it fits into the spectrum of the scientific endeavor. For some very good modern viewpoints of computation and its relation to engineering and scientific pursuits I recommend the following 2 resources:

A new framework for computer science and engineering by Paul S. Rosenbloom Computer Volume 37, Issue 11, Nov. 2004 Page(s): 23 - 28. An excellent position paper laying out Computations newly emphasized importance as a fundamental tool of science alongside theoretical (mathematical) modeling and experimentation.

Great principles of computing by Peter Denning and Craig Martell. This is a web site which is a compendium of many published position papers on this subject, with much on computing as a natural science, and synergies between computing with the natural sciences and engineering disciplines. (Especially look at the Computation item under the Narrative Summaries.)