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.

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.

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 …

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.