Legal
The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Search
Recent Comments
-
arno verhoeven on "Ambient Intelligence"
thanks for the posting! I'm a design student in Eindhoven actually, doing a Masters degree based upon touch, and the emerging notion of AmI. I feel that exactly as you do, a theory of surfaces, or more deeper, a better ...
-
Ken on "Old versus New AI"
The AI Effect is the name of the gap that you mention. ------------------------------ ------------------------------ -- Thanks Bill
-
mathagat on "The World has Changed"
Well said Bill. ----------------- Thanks Bill
-
Spamzany on "The World has Changed"
I come to this site to learn about what's happening in the world of Photoshop and Adobe. It’s disappointing to find off topic geo-political commentary. There are other sites for that purpose. ------------------------------ ------------------------------ ----------- You can, indeed learn what's happening in ...
-
Tim on "Old versus New AI"
I think your thought on the gap between what we believe to be "real AI" and the useful algorithms formerly called AI is mainly due to a deep sense that we have missed something. The "emergence" property is one way ...
-
John Chatzikonstantinou on "Old versus New AI"
"In some region of ourselves, we know that what these techiques represent, as amazingly successful as htey are, is Artificial Smarts, not Artificial Intelligence. We sense that Intelligence will be recognizable and will be emergent, not algorithmic in nature." For ...
Archives
December 07, 2005
Final Entry --- Blogosphere relocation
As my final entry here, I would like to thank Adobe for giving a fascinating and rewarding experience over the last several months. The people I've met here and the friends I've made are some of the smartest people I've ever had the priviledge to work with.
I was looking forward to working with the macromedia folks as well because i think they bring a special insight and point of view which is much needed. I hope the continued integration goes well and I'm sorry that I will most likely not be around to see it.
However, World Behind the Glass is moving on to http://worldbehindtheglass.blogspot.com
I hope to see everyone there who enjoyed my wild ramblings here...I hope to make the ramblings even more wild very soon!
Bill
November 21, 2005
The World has Changed
For those of us raised on duck and cover drills in grammar school during the cold war and who remember being told by radio and tv announcers to not play in the snow because Chinese nuclear weapons testing might have made it radioactive, the world has a definite new feel to it sometimes.
The other day I was listening to NPR and heard them report that the US has suggested that Iran can have a nuclear power program as long as they allow a trusted third nation to perform the final processing that could result in weapons grade material. The US suggested that the trusted third party nation be Russia.
The world has certainly changed!
Bill
November 15, 2005
Old versus New AI
I just returned from the International Semantic Web conference in Galway. A very good conference delivering a large number of important papers and convincing me that semantic Web applications are beginning to emerge into the real world..
But later I was discussing AI techniques with some folks at PARC and at Adobe the other day and a couple of questions arose.
My comment was that while the current crop of AI techniques work and work well, they do not reflect what we do when we reason or when we perform instinctual activities. The question came back, "Does a computer have to do things the way we do to be intelligent."
My answer was "no, not at all". You cannot argue with the success of fuzzy logic, vision processing algorithms that are increasingly able to understand the contents and purpose of photos, document understanding systems that can restate the menaning of text in new words. These are all amazingly powereful and successful technologies.
However, my other comment was that it would be fascinating to work on the other problem, to reproduce what we do when we think, plan, understand, and create And I do not believe we will achieve emergent intelligence similar to our own until we pursue that harder and less travelled path.
October 30, 2005
What makes ebooks work
A couple weeks ago I was talking about ebooks with some folks, including Bill mcCoy who also posts here.
What intrigues me is what it will take for ebooks to catch on. I think some very important aspects of books were ignored by previous attempts to bring out ebooks.
Here's a thought: ebooks get adopted in education because of the presence of guns in the schools.
How's that work? Guns led to no lockers...no lockers led to back packs...back packs led to back problems in children...and this leads to ebook adoption.
I do not know if that is accurate, per se...but it illustrates the chain of unintended consequences which lead to the adooption of new technologies at a social level.
Other things are important if they are to be accepted:
First...I have two rocket ebooks, but I never use them anymore. One is for me and one is for my wife. The problem I encounterd was that I could not give her a book.
October 16, 2005
Associative Indexing in the Brain
Leipzig, Germany:
Last night I flipped on the hotel TV...all stations, essentially are in German which i do not speak. I channel surfed for a moment, then stopped.
Scene: Night. Two men in suits and hats at the bottom of a plane stair. In the background, another man is helping a gentleman into one of the black sedans pulled up. They are 1960's cars. A fourth man is standing with his back to the camera on the plane steps. No dialog, maybe a little background music.
My brain IMMEDIATELY fired off the words "FANTASTIC VOYAGE"
I was correct, of course. I have seen this movie perhaps 3 times since 1966. Usually, I miss the begining and pick up after the old man is already in the operating room.l
Now THAT'S Associative Indexing. Every frame of that movie must have the metadata "FANTASTIC VOYAGE" stamped on it SOMEWHERE in my head. The speed with which I made that association from literally thousands of other films i have watched in my 50 years was scary!
Bill
PS
I grabbed my laptop and went out to IMDB. Almost every actor in that movie is dead now except Raquel Welch. most died in their fifties and Arthur Kennedy who played Duvall, the brain surgeon with the laser, died of a brain tumor. IMDB.com is incredible!
Bill
October 13, 2005
Ambient Intelligence
I am at the Ambient Intelligence conference this week in Grenoble, France. There are some very interesting papers on what happens when you have intelligence in things around the home or office.
Emile Aarts of Philips presented a view of the future that is remarkably in sync with my own thoughts. I have to say, that, while he may be overly optimistic about timeframes for e-ink, intelligent textiles, and many other things that are coming out of Philips, Sony, nd other companies soon (just as I probably am) he does 'Get It'. I recommend his books too.
Many of the presentations, though, have to do with interactions with common objects and i have noticed a common theme. Most of these objects are actually surfaces...that is, many of the papers are about interacting with horizontal or vertical surfaces that can connect to computing resources in some manner.
October 01, 2005
Fantastic Movie - Serenity
I just watched a fantastic movie. Serenity is Joss Whedon's latest effort. He managed to ressurect a fascinating TV show (Firefly) that was only on for 11 out of sequence episodes a few years ago.
For those who are not followers of Whedon's work, more information about the story and characters can be found at: http://serenitymovie.com/nonflash_site/index.html but beyond that, the movie is incredibly well acted, the story deep and multi-layered, and the writing, as usual in Whedon's work, is incredible.
Have a fun couple of hours watching a story about heroes. We need more movies like this
September 25, 2005
What makes us human?
I attended a conversation between Andrea Ackerman (digital artist) and Ellen Ullman (author, "The Bug" and "Close to the Machine : Technophilia and Its Discontents") where the conversation was supposed to be about issues arising from the ongoing merger of humans and cybernetics. it was organized by Marcia Tanner, the curator of SJMA's Brides of Frankenstein exhibit (worth a look if you're here in SJ?
September 13, 2005
Where Will we Be
A question:
What do you think computing will look like in 10 years. in 1995 we got netscape and since then we've seen tremendous change, innovation, wierdness, failure, and some notably interesting successes. We literally do things differently now.
September 12, 2005
The World Behind the Glass
For my first entry on this public facing blog, I wanted to re-publish a short essay I wrote a while back on how I, and I believe many others, view computing and computers. This essay is the inspiration for the name of my blog as well:
The World Behind The Glass
I wrote my first program (in Fortran) in 1964 at the age of 9. My brother-in-law took me to St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas where his aerial mapping firm bought time on an IBM 1141. He showed me how to write a simple program and I wrote up something that would print the Fibonacci sequence (I had never heard of it before but it was simple to come up with and it made a LOT of cool numbers come out of the computer and was fun to watch).