Thursday, March 12, 2009
Interview with Doug Lenat
Doug Lenat discusses the future of Cyc technology, the role of Moore's law, and Cyc's place in the business community. DS&A students -- pay special attention to his response to the second question. :-)
Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha
Semantic Universe Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha: "Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.� As he said, it's not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn't be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo."
"There are two important dimensions I want to discuss about Wolfram Alpha, besides the remarks I've already made here. (1) What sorts of queries does it not handle, and (2) When it returns information, how much does it actually "understand" of what it's displaying to you? There are two sorts of queries not (yet) handled: those where the data falls outside the mosaic I sketched above -- such as: When is the first day of Summer in Sydney this year? Do Muslims believe that Mohammed was divine? Who did Hezbollah take prisoner on April 18, 1987? Which animals have fingers? -- and those where the query requires logically reasoning out a way to combine (logically or arithmetically combine) two or more pieces of information which the system can individually fetch for you. One example of this is: "How old was Obama when Mitterrand was elected president of France?" It can tell you demographic information about Obama, if you ask, and it can tell you information about Mitterrand (including his ruleStartDate), but doesn't make or execute the plan to calculate a person's age on a certain date given his birth date, which is what is being asked for in this query. If it knows that exactly 17 people were killed in a certain attack, and if it also knows that 17 American soldiers were killed in that attack, it doesn't return that attack if you ask for ones in which there were no civilian casualties, or only American casualties. It doesn't perform that sort of deduction. If you ask "How fast does hair grow?", it can't parse or answer that query. But if you type in a speed, say "10cm/year", it gives you a long and quite interesting list of things that happen at about that speed, involving glaciers melting, tectonic shift, and... hair growing.
GR: Lenat's analysis here is provides a nice overview of some of the issues involved in the intersection between search, knowledge representation and reasoning, and semantic web. Definitely worth reading all the way through.
"There are two important dimensions I want to discuss about Wolfram Alpha, besides the remarks I've already made here. (1) What sorts of queries does it not handle, and (2) When it returns information, how much does it actually "understand" of what it's displaying to you? There are two sorts of queries not (yet) handled: those where the data falls outside the mosaic I sketched above -- such as: When is the first day of Summer in Sydney this year? Do Muslims believe that Mohammed was divine? Who did Hezbollah take prisoner on April 18, 1987? Which animals have fingers? -- and those where the query requires logically reasoning out a way to combine (logically or arithmetically combine) two or more pieces of information which the system can individually fetch for you. One example of this is: "How old was Obama when Mitterrand was elected president of France?" It can tell you demographic information about Obama, if you ask, and it can tell you information about Mitterrand (including his ruleStartDate), but doesn't make or execute the plan to calculate a person's age on a certain date given his birth date, which is what is being asked for in this query. If it knows that exactly 17 people were killed in a certain attack, and if it also knows that 17 American soldiers were killed in that attack, it doesn't return that attack if you ask for ones in which there were no civilian casualties, or only American casualties. It doesn't perform that sort of deduction. If you ask "How fast does hair grow?", it can't parse or answer that query. But if you type in a speed, say "10cm/year", it gives you a long and quite interesting list of things that happen at about that speed, involving glaciers melting, tectonic shift, and... hair growing.
GR: Lenat's analysis here is provides a nice overview of some of the issues involved in the intersection between search, knowledge representation and reasoning, and semantic web. Definitely worth reading all the way through.
A Smarter Planet: New Intelligence for Smarter Cities
A Smarter Planet: New Intelligence for Smarter Cities: "If we want to build a Smarter Planet -- one where societal systems such as electricity and water distribution, healthcare and even physical infrastructure such as buildings and bridges become networks embedded with sensors and software -- there may be no better place to start than with our cities.
Today more than half the world's population lives in cities. By 2050 two-thirds of humanity are expected to be living in and around metropolitan centers. The 19.20.21 project notes that our world has become a network of 'supercities.'"
GR: I had heard of this recently -- applying semantic web technology to other networks such as electrical grids. In semantic web resources 'know' about themselves: web pages know what they are about, etc. In a parallel fashion, smart grids would be made up of nodes that knew and advertised their own capabilities and current operating status.
Today more than half the world's population lives in cities. By 2050 two-thirds of humanity are expected to be living in and around metropolitan centers. The 19.20.21 project notes that our world has become a network of 'supercities.'"
GR: I had heard of this recently -- applying semantic web technology to other networks such as electrical grids. In semantic web resources 'know' about themselves: web pages know what they are about, etc. In a parallel fashion, smart grids would be made up of nodes that knew and advertised their own capabilities and current operating status.
The cloud bites back: Google bug shared private Google Docs data
Between the Lines | ZDNet.com | TwineThe cloud bites back: Google bug shared private Google Docs data: "Google has confirmed that a software bug in its Google Docs online applcation service exposed documents thought to be privately stored.
The problem was fixed by the weekend, and is believed to have affected only half a percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.
According to Google, the problem occurred in cases where people had chosen to collaborate on multiple documents and adjusted settings to allow access to others. Collaborators were unintentionally given permission to access documents aside from the ones intended."
The problem was fixed by the weekend, and is believed to have affected only half a percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.
According to Google, the problem occurred in cases where people had chosen to collaborate on multiple documents and adjusted settings to allow access to others. Collaborators were unintentionally given permission to access documents aside from the ones intended."
Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?
Outside the Lines - CNET News Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?: "In May, Wolfram will unveil his latest creation, now called Wolfram Alpha. It applies his work with Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science) to Web search. 'All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do,' Wolfram said in a recent blog post. 'I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work...It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms,' he added."
"Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles.
"Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles.
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