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

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

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.

This is an ambitious project but one worthy of IBM's Blue Gene super computer.

The other question that arose was "why is it that when we build AI systems, the ones that work are no longer considered AI?" This has plagued the AI arena for years. it seems that as soon as we develop a new technique for deriving a semantic result such as decomposing unstrutured text into structured document leements using heuristics, controlling temperatures in laundry machines via fuzzy logic, or recognizing ancient script from illuminated manuscripts, it is immediately classed as useful algorithms, seantic technology, vision processing, anything buy AI. Yet, even when we start by saying we will research an AI problem, the solved ones must move into another descriptive space.

I suspect some of that is because we do NOT solve these problems with emergent AI, intelligence that both arises out of some "ghostly signature" in our knowledge bases and tta seeks to extend itself. It is, i contend, the very absence of these traits that makes us so reluctant to embrace wht we HAVE accomplished as Intelligence.

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. And we won't be happy with AI until we get that.

Comments?
Bill

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.

In the same vein we have to ask whether ebooks need to have a physical tangible instantiation. Why? Because gifts need to be tangible.

Music has never been unabstracted in reproduction. That is, you have never been able to deliver music without a player, a device to interpret the abstract representation of music encoded as grooves on a vinyl disk, magnetic domains on tape, or pits in a CD.

Books on the other hand are unabstracted. That is, the medium is, indeed, the message...the book needs no intermdediation for the human user to consume it.

So giving music has always been giving abstraction, but giving literature has not. Now, however, we want to give and deliver literature that is abstracted and that requires the intermediation of a device to interpret it. This is a significant change for many of us, making the value of an ebook less than that of a book.

When I give a CD as a present, just as when I give a book, I give a physical entity...even though it is an abstraction of the music i intend to deliver. If I am going to start giving abstractions of literature (ebooks) as presents, I will need to be able to present a physical object, just as I do with music. I need something I can wrap and put a bow on.

So ebbooks need to be available in book stores, perhaps as chips or blocks which will then be offloaded into the reader, or perhaps, they should be slivers of material we hold onto.

Now DRM plays a part in both these issues. But there are solutions. For example, if I purchase an ebook online for my wife, I should be able to just target it to her reader. But the book block i purchase at B & N may need to be encrypted in a neutral 3rd party manner that can only be moved from the block to my ebook reader through a process that leaves the block unusuable or contianing only a version encrypted for me.

This brings us to the issue of loaning books and of moving them from reader to reader. I should be able to loan an ebook as I do a real book. Of course this means being able to invalidate MY copy while validating someone else's so that only one person may have access at a time.

Another rather unrelated aspect of ebooks is the fact that we do not have a cure for presbyopia. And many of us suffer from it as we grow older.So I should have a VERY easy way for the reader to bump the font size up and down. Prefereably a pair of buttons or a jog wheel or some such one touch control. A drop down menu with mutliple selections is too inconvenient..

A backlight is, of course important, but a text-to-speech capability is as well. It would be nice to be able to read a few chapters in the evening, then listen to a few onthe way to work. Or to listen to the last chapter late at night with the lights out so as not to disturb the spouse.

All of these considerations have much more to do with the social aspects of books and ebooks than they do with the technology. Books have specific connotations and social uses attached to them. It is very important to preserve, recreate, and extend these features. If they ar lost or are made difficult in ebooks, ebooks will not succeed.

Bill

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

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.

This brings me to my point. Do we need a new theory of surfaces? ...a line of research (probably already underway) into how humans use vertical and horizontal surfaces in their day to day lives..

I recall thinking about this a lot when I first moved to San Jose and had to furnish an apartment from scratch...I needed SURFACES...in particular horizontal ones upon which to dump things...other than the floor.

And I thought then that diffferent cultures might think about this differently...some cultures are more at ease with using the floor for a horizontal storage surface than others...American culture really likes tables and shelves and surfaces above the floor.

Vertical surfaces such as mirrors, windows, walls, TVs and other such things are important too, but we don't seem to have a concise body of research on how they are used.

So I propose someone do some thinking and research into a Theory of Surfaces as a line of inquiry to support studies on ubiquitizing computing...integrating computing into modern life will involve integrating it into the surfaces we surround ourselves with...

Architects, interior designers, gallery owners, ethnogrpahers...we need these people to help us understand how to better use and design our surfaces.

Maybe the editors at WallPaper and Surface magazine would be interested.

Bill

Technorati Profile

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

However, a couple of things said by the conversants prompted me to think and ask some questions here. One of the objections Ms. Ullman had to the current state of Ai research was that most AI research has been directoed toward reasoning, ratiocination. Not enough, in her opinion, has been devoted to artificial emotions, to modelling emotional intelligence.

I tend to agree with this, although not with Ms. Ullman's generally pessimistic view of computing. I think that very few researchers are looking into modelling emotions and emotional intelligence.

I was also reminded of what I saw at IJCAI this year and at UBICOMP in Tokyo, this month. There is a lot of very successful research going on in vision processing, a variety of reasoning methods from case based to ontological. And let me hasten to say that, after about 30 years of research and development into AI, I am still a proponent of its possibilities.

But, what has emerged in my thinking in the past two years is a realization that these techniques, so successful in operation, are not intelligence. They might, for want of a better word, be described as artifiicial smarts.

I have been summing this up by noting that I do not solve differential equations when I catch a baseball (or navigate a room, or recognize a face, or any number of other things). Whatever I do might be modelled by a computer solving differential equations (or quadratics, or mapping features into a hyperplane) but it isn't what I do.

A researcher at University of Massachusetts said to me that he is looking for the "ghostly signature" (his term) in the data structures we use to perform these so-called AI tasks now. he has the sense that there is something else in there, a pattern, a property, something, that will unlock the door and take us from these brute force methods we use today (which work amazingly well) to something that is more akin to the processes we, as humans, actually use to accomplish those takss we call intelligent.

I find it interseting that there are many artists emerging now who wish to explore this idea as well. It will be more of an issue, perhaps, as we augment or replace more and more of our physical selves with digital components. We'll not only have to ask what makes us human, but also whether these additions to our humanity are doing things in the best or most appropriate way.

Comments?
Bill

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.

But the hotel staff in room service did not know what the spoken English meant and I did not know how to pronounce the Kana even phonetically. The menu was useless for non-japanese speakers using it over the phone.

I was about to take it downstairs and point to what I wanted when I had a thought. I quickly googled for Japanese translation sites and found JEDI, the Japanese-English Dictionary Interface which would translate my English into Romaji, the Latin alphabet phonetic representation of Japanese. I called room service back and now ordered my dish reading the phonetic syllables printed in Roman letters on my laptop screen.

It worked and I succesfully had dinner that night.

We couldn't do that 10 years ago...

So how will information technology be delivered, packaged, consumed in 2015?

All comments welcome.

Bill

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).

Fast forward to 1969 and I'm 14. I am a freshman in High school and hanging with some cool Juniors and a Senior who could drive us out to Jesuit High school in North Dallas. There the Math Teacher, named Brother Orlando, let us use the Jesuit teletype hookup to a GE 255 computer. The next year MY high school would get one, but we had early access! There was something different. No cards, a paper tape could save and restore your program, and there was the teletype to print results.

And it had a window over the typeball mechanism

Something clicked. I began to sense that, behind this window, somewhere in the bowels of a machine I couldn't even see, there was a world hiding.

And by writing programs I could explore it, control it, and even create with it. I could create a virutal world within the world behind the glass. My first virtual world was, like many in 1970, Conway's Game of Life...watching those critters evolve in generation after generation printed on greenbar paper was an incredible experience.

Later, in college and in my first job in this industry in 1975 as an assistant operator, we were still using typing style interfaces (a Control Data daisy wheel terminal connected to a CDC Cyber 72 and an IBM 360 Console based on the Selectric typewriter of the day) And there again was that sense, particularly as I got my hands on an IBM 360 and started to learn systems programming, that there was a world behind the window.

We graduated to VM/370 and 3270 video terminals in 1977 and I realized it was a world behind the glass. Now watching Life evolve was a satelite movie not a series of aerial photos. Nearly lost my job when my program brought the CICS order entry system to its knees...I swear I ran it in a low prioirty partition!

That sense remains. Now, as I sit at this laptop 30,000 feet above the planet, I still have a sense that there is a mirror world, a hidden world, behind the glass of my display. My writing, my programming, my browsing, my googling are all exploratory probes into this alien and still mostly undiscover'd country.

But I also realize that the world behind the glass is being reflected in the real world as well. so sometimes I wonder...is the world behind the glass staring back and wondering about this side. As we add more and more knowledge and sense of the real world to our machines and devices, do they begin to gain a sense of the undiscover'd country that is what we call the real world?

Ain't it cool?

Bill