Building the Metaverse @ AC2005

I am intrigued by the growth of 3D virtual worlds, and this session is
one that I have been looking forward to. David Smith of the Croquet Project started off in his demonstration of Croquet. Alan Kay and his Squeak project are both contributors to this work.

Croquet is a peer to peer collaborative 3D world. Avatars within
the Croquet world can interact with objects, and the lower level
messages are replicated within the peer group. He demonstrated
this by manipulating some windows in the world, along with more complex
objects. He also demonstrated stepping through a window … a
portal … into a moon/mars scape. Moving through these portals
allows the avatars to enter into alternative worlds. They both
went through a portal into a “water world” and immediately transformed
into fish. As they swam around they came across a “text editor”
white board thing … and edited the text on it.

Ok … he just opened a paint panel and drew a fish, colored it, and
then inflated the 2D fish as he dropped it into the world. Now
both of them were able to manipulate and move the new fish
around. He entered another portal and showed a interactive
spreadsheet, with the inherent ability to graph the values contained in
the chart. He also demonstrated using windows as filters to show
a filtered view of anything behind it. He was able to move it
around showing the wire-frame models beneath the textures mapped onto
objects.

All of this is written in Smalltalk, and uses Squeak … completely
cross-platform to Windows, Mac, and Linux. He indicated that they
will have a Python, Ruby, and other language support soon.

Expanding on his filter demo, he showed how he can open a new window
and use it as a portal to create new objects in the virtual world
through the new window. So the window become a palette through
which you are able to create even more content. Of course, as a
development environment, he is also able to add code that will add
behaviors to the objects.  I’m downloading it!

Tom Malone @ AC2005

Tom is from MIT and is speaking on The Future of Work … and I believe that I am really going to like this talk. He is really interested in organizations
… and how Intelligence Amplification could come from organizations of
intelligent humans. I thoroughly believe this, and that he is on
the right track.

One of his first examples is the Wikipedia, and that the organization
of so many people – however loose – was an amazing feat. His
bottom line prediction is that technology is changing the whole world
of organizations in a way similar to the revolution of democracy.
He feels that the costs of communications are the core element,
allowing the individual to have access to vast amounts of information
which allows for individual choice … over top down management.

His next example was eBay.  Amazing stats:

$3.3 Billion revenue in 2004
~430,000 people make their living from selling on ebay
If these were employees, they would be one fo the 5 largest employers

What eBay has attained is to reinvent the right kind of infrastructure
and community to invent a whole new kind of retailing.  He feels
this is the next logical stage of a pattern that has been repeated
throughout history.  These stages have been:

  • Bands – decentralized, unconnected
  • Kingdoms – centralized
  • Democracies – decentralized, connected

He feels that transitions between stages are based on the declining
costs of communications.  The more that decision making
information can be decentralized to the edges, the more efficient and
valuable the organization becomes.

He had some interesting examples of how democratic principals are slowly entering into leading companies:

  • W.L. Gore – managers become managers by finding people who want to work for them
  • Visa International – independent banks vote on policy questions
  • Mondragon Cooperative Corp – employees elect the board of directors and vote on key issues

Markets are another way that this revolution is taking place. 
Outsourcing is one type of market … creating the e-lance
economy.  Funny that Elance
is a web site that actually implements this idea.  I have friends
who have used Elance teams to do software development … from Sri
Lanka and India.  Intel has apparently been exploring the use of futures markets within their manufacturing to manage manufacturing capacity.

MIT developed a Process Handbook
with over 5000 processes and activities that can be used for planning
purposes within organizations.  They are looking to create an Open
Source version.

He showed the classic self-organizing humans demonstration … the interactive media solution by Cinematrix
It demonstrates – with the flight simulator example that he showed –
that there is a real power in collective human organizations that have
simultaneous access to the same data.

Cory Ondrejka @ AC2005

Wow … Cory is one of the most important figures behind Second Life is here with his presentation Why Games Will Save the World. 
It is always interesting to see the slides that attempt to communicate
important ideas by bashing certain people and conversations … I was a
little disappointed by that.  But he did get into the core of
using gaming for education.  It was a good talk with a lot of interesting sounds bites and examples of the values of game playing.

Joichi Ito @ AC2005

Joi was supposed to be presenting on the Future of Blogging, but immediately said that he wasn’t going to only talk about blogging.  🙂

He had some good stuff to say about a wide range of subjects …
Wikipedia, Firefox, File Sharing … and more on Wikipedia.  He
brought up fansubs
– which I hadn’t heard of, but makes perfect sense.  People take
various video content, and then add their own subtitles in their own
language.  Joi also showed a very cool remix of The Matrix
Reloaded done by someone who put together a bunch of anime clips to the
same sound track.

I had not heard of ccMixter … it’s a Creative Commons music site.  Of course he promoted the concepts of tags and technoratiPlazeslast.fm
and how quickly tagging has taken off … a new free-form way for
organizing/categorizing information, and more importantly information
flows.

Too much good stuff to blog … what a great spew of information!

Jerry Paffendorf @ AC2005

The evening sessions tonight started off with some interesting “open
mic” Q&A … some of the highschool students from the audience
spoke about their perspectives … it was interesting to hear.

Jerry got up to start talking about Brave New Virtual Worlds … and
jumped right into some of the interesting things going on in Second Life
He talked about how there are now all sorts of real-world to
virtual-world interactions.  One example was a Cancer Society fund
raiser where Second Life characters walked in Second Life to raise
money in the real world.  In addition, Jerry even holds regular
Future Salon meetings within Second Life where other Second Life
avatars come to participate and listen to virtual presenters.

He briefly talked about the Croquet Project … something that will be
in a talk tomorrow.  Another virtual world project.  I
downloaded the Second Life client software and will sign up for a free
account … I want to see what this is about.  Hmmmm … my first
virtual identity in a 3D virtual world.

Esther Dyson @ AC2005

To start things off, when I walked into the session Esther was pointing people to Vizu
… very cool polling site. I’m now signed up and playing around
with it. I pretty much missed a lot of the rest … it was
basically an open Q&A session … there were a lot of good questions about ICANN, privacy, and the accountable Internet.

John Udell @ AC2005

I have always liked reading John Udell … I think this might be the first time to see him present. His talk is on Annotating the Planet
and started with a very cool mash-up demo using Google Maps. He
reviewed the various Google maps mash-ups, and then went into some
details on his various bike rides that he is mapping with the Gmaps Pedometer.

He touched on the areas of privacy and geotagging of all sorts of information. Referring to David Brins book The Transparent Society
he had some commentary on how to potentially protect ourselves from the
abuse of this information, and how to control who can get at this
information.

He pointed to David Rumsey’s web site,
and quoted from his talk at a recent conference. David has an
amazing collection of maps … and is doing some very cool synthesizing
of old and new maps.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen @ AC2005 (via DVD)

The next breakout was supposed to be a video conference with Robert
Hecht-Nielsen, but something didn’t work out … so they chose to play
a DVD of his presentation. Still interesting. The best part
was the term “Confabulation Theory”! Yeah … confabulation is a word that is in the dictionary.

His presentation explained how four key concepts form the foundation of cognition.

He started by proposing that cortical modules exist in the brain, and each of these is responsible for describing one attribute of Objects in the Mental Universe. These cortical modules are made up of groupings of neurons in the form of symbols that we learn at an early age. Each symbol is made up of ~60 neurons. Symbols could be names, colors,
or any other attribute of an object. As numerous cortical modules
are receiving sensory input, confabulation occurs … triggering
behavior.

Again, he emphasized that it is the quantity of knowledge that allows
for confabulation to occur. Billions of knowledge links.
One third of our life or more is spent learning the foundations.
Language is the essential core
of cognition.  As we grow up we develop a rich set of symbols, and
interconnections between symbols – between cortical modules – by
hearing words combined with other sensory experiences.

There is more information about his theories in this article about his new theory of cognition.

Shrinking the Planet @ AC2005

After lunch at Accelerating Change 2005
we progressed into a series of breakout
sessions. The first of of my choices was tough, but I went to a
session titled Shrinking the Planet given by:

Peter Barrett, Microsoft IPTV
Scott Rafer,
Feedster

Peter started off commenting on the growth of bandwidth to the home,
and also the improvements in codec technologies. Both of these
are combining to create an environment for on-demand IP delivered video
content. This environment is quickly becoming the foundation for
supporting the long tail
concepts for video. He showed some demos of IPTV, and talked
about the metadata that will be exposed in the TV guide – like how many
people are watching a particular show, or even specific people you know
like your family and friends. He said that the project is based
on the DVR concepts, and that one of the initial partners is SBC with
their Project Lightspeed.

Scott began his talk with some thoughts that are similar to mine …
that AI might just come from millions of interconnected humans.
He referenced Dodgeball, and expanded on this theme with various potential mash-ups of various datasources. His slide titled Humans Will Be My AI
gave a number of examples where large amounts of data – aggregated by
humans – become the valuable source of metaperspectives. It was
almost funny how many people were uncomfortable during the Q&A with
his perspective of AI not necessarily being something that is
created on a computer from some lab. Maybe one day … but sooner
then that I believe that humans are quickly becoming the “sensors and
actuators” at the edges of a growing AI …

Prospects for AI @ AC2005

The first panel discussion here at Accelerating Change 2005
was on the Prospects of AI. The panel includes an impressive line-up of people:

Neil Jacobstein, Chair, Innovative Applications of AI 2005;
CEO, Teknowledge
Patrick Lincoln, Director, Computer Science
Lab, SRI International
Peter Norvig, Director of Search
Quality, Google; Author, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
(the world’s leading texbook in AI)
Bruno Olshausen,
Director, Redwood Ctr for Theoretical Neuroscience

The introduction by Neil gave an overview of the many Task Areas being explored in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
The key aspects of development are in Knowledge Engineering, Systems
Engineering, and Business & Cultural. In his bullets about
Ontologies and the Semantic Web, he referenced examples of early work –
Cyc (OpenCyc), SUMO, and OWL.

The second speaker, Patrick, talked to the value of AI – Intelligence
Amplification – and why this is necessary. The increasing gap
between the complexities of technology, and human capabilities is
causing more and more failures. AI can augment our ability to
design complex systems, debug complex systems, and even operate complex
systems. He talked about AI providing powerful abstracations – at
the right levels – for both designers and operators. His examples included the progress and predictions in the uses of UAVs.

Third was Peter, from Google, who started with a slide titled AI in the Middle. His comments were about AI existing between authors and readers. His first point was about Machine Learning
… and joked about the fact that we don’t know how to do it. His
comments on AI in the Middle included how authors can write trillions
of words, systems can detect certain patterns, and intelligent readers
can then actually sort through this and find information. He went
on to give examples of where apparent intelligence can emerge from
larger amounts of data . .. giving examples of the accuracy of Arabic
translation based on larger and larger data sets of example translation.

Bruno was the final panel speaker, and his area of research –
Theoretical Neuroscience – is looking to the brain to gain insights
into AI. The
view of his team is to understand intelligence by understanding the
brain. Not only the human brain … but also other animal
brains. One example is Jumping Spiders. He reviewed the knowledge that they have gained, and some interesting
points that they are exploring. One area they have
learned about involves vision, and where for each neural connection of retinal data (vision) coming in
from the outside world, there are 10 times as many feedback connections
coming from the cortex of the brain. So there is more information coming from the model in our own brain of what we are seeing, then the actual
information being sensed! The model that we have in our mind
contributes more feedback that what we are actually seeing! He
explained that this is only one rich feedback loop that they are
working to better understand.

It seems that all of the speakers look at advanced AI arising out of
the shear number of patterns and complexities of their foundation
work. I have to agree with them … what we
perceive as AI just might end up being an emergent property of
the systems that we are creating … not the explicit result of the
planning and construction of the system.