Scenario: A fiction author looks for mythological information

I am currently working on a project proposal in which also the following scenario will be addressed:

Researching information is a vital task for fiction authors. Say, he is interested in writing a novel that deals with some mythological topics. As one would guess Google delivers tons of information; information one would need to sift through carefully. Say, he would like to restrict his search to museums as he wants to base the story on artifacts throughout the last 20 to 25 centuries, i.e., beginning with Egyptian history. Let us assume museums provide tags for their artifacts (and let us forget for the moment how to acquire those tags). Then a Semantic Web search and browse would deliver all kinds of artifacts classified, e.g., as paintings or sculptures. The author would get information on their creation dates, the artists, probably who knew whom (e.g., by way of friends-of-a-friend links). Additional information could point him to biographies on Wikipedia or more specialised sources, point out and explain symbols used by an artist or at a certain time, etc.

Let us assume the story is set to take place in London and he will go there for location scouting. He now needs a way of combining his digital search results with his trip to London. Several itineraries could be created from his search results; each itinerary describing a way through a museum or gallery, e.g., Tate Modern Art Gallery or The British Museum, linking exhibits together in different ways, e.g., by dates, owners, a certain story, artists or relationships between artists.

Location scouting and research work is always accompanied by taking notes and pictures. Tagging could be simplified by computer support. If a mobile device knows its GPS co-ordinates or network location, routine information could be added very easily for later processing. (Another way of identifying artifacts are Semacodes if provided by a museum.) Recording the places where the author has been could be fed in future research activities. Having been in London before would have an impact on the selection of places to visit, wouldn’t it? Either there are places that were interesting enough to gather more details from there or they already have been tagged to be unimportant.

Btw, a while ago I briefly described some other semantic support fiction authors could find interesting (see earlier post).

First Nepomuk Doctoral Colloquium

At the General Assembly this week in Palaiseau, France, (near Paris) the first Nepomuk doctoral colloquium took place (see also an earlier post). Due to the lack of time only six presentations could be given. (From 24 participants 18 were doctorands. And those were not even all PhD students of the project!) I was supported in this effort by Mehdi Jazayeri, professor of computer science at University of Lugano, Switzerland, and Yngve Sundblad, professor of computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

The event was quite a learning experience not only for the doctorands (at least, I hope so!) but more so for me. It was kind of comparing notes on how to supervise doctorands. I am involved in supervising doctorands for quite a while now, but I rarely get the opportunity to see if my opinion / my view on how PhD research should be done is valid …

PhD research is communicated in the project via the Nepomuk-internal wiki. So I cannot link to it from here. But I will give you an impression of what such information looks like. Each doctorand is being asked to provide basically the following information:

====================== snip ======================

PhD research of doctorand X

General information

• Title of the thesis (even if temporary): <title>
  Supervisor(s) (formal): <formal supervisor>
  Supervisor (informal): <informal supervisor>
  University (where thesis should be submitted): <university>
  Start: <start date>
  Planned end: <end date>

Motivation

Topic of the thesis

Research question

Publications relevant to the thesis

1. [XY] title, author
   [YZ] title, author
   …

Planned publications

Directly related Nepomuk PhDs

====================== snap ======================

Maybe this helps others—supervisors as well as doctorands—out there. And if so, let me know!

AAAI changed its name

AAAI has just announced that it has changed its name to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence [1]. It’s about time, isn’t it?

[1] http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/03/01/aaai-changes-name-to-association-for-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligence/

The future of Artificial Intelligence

Last year’s fifty’s anniversary of Artificial Intelligence sparked discussions about the results of AI research. Many advances already became so mainstream that they are not visible anymore. Fuzzy control in washing machines is a famous and often cited success story, but by far not the only one. AI research also led to view software development in a new light, e.g., modelling became a commodity.
But where is AI heading?

I am a firm believer in weak AI. (“Weak AI refers to the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks that do not encompass […] the full range of human cognitive abilities.” [Wikipedia]) Maybe at some point in the far future some intelligent behaviour emerges from the development and use of complex information systems, but I don’t think we are capable of understanding what intelligence is and how to create intelligent machines in the first place. I believe in further developing many more decision support systems, each very specialised but on the other hand better integrated with the environment and with improved communication abilities. I do not talk about spoken language understanding capabilities here but of more intelligent user interfaces in general.

In my opinion, research on intelligent user interfaces is an important topic. Intelligent user interfaces rely on symbolic reasoning as only symbolic reasoning allows for explanation capabilities, which in turn are the basis for improved understanding and, thus, a better synchronisation of knowledge of the user and the information system. It is probably worthwhile to look into hybrid approaches where sub-symbolic reasoning engines are supported by symbolic reasoners that can interpret what the sub-symbolic reasoner is doing. But this is outside the scope of my explanation research.

Software systems get embedded more and more in electronic devices providing contextual and personalised information. New opportunities arise for supporting everyday activities. For example, GPS-enabled digital cameras already provide the necessary position metadata to place photos on GoogleMaps or create other Web 2.0 mash-ups. And powerful mobile devices such as Apple’s upcoming iPhone lets me wonder what one could intelligently do with it. So it will surely play an important part in my upcoming FP7 project proposal.

User centric design, personalisation, context, social software are topics addressed by our research department for quite some time. Their importance is visible in and through our projects as well as the Competence Center Computational Culture and the newly created Competence Center Human Centered Visualisation HCV.

The Macintosh User Interface rules when it comes to precision

As Les Posen reports on his blog Windows Vista gets worse than its predecessors regarding mouse precision. Who would have thought, since Microsoft spent so much money on developing Vista. Les Posen quotes a Pfeiffer report, which also states that Vista has improved functionality over previous Windows version but also clearly points out degradation. An interesting article for us Mac aficionados.