Category Archives: Learning
14 Jan Segregating Layers of Intelligence
Layered Architectures Layers appear regularly in my blog, whether it’s layers of the brain, layers of processing nodes in artificial neural networks or layers in systems architectures. Layering embodies important patterns in the inexorable move toward a knowledge economy with knowledge systems. In today’s post, I’m going to talk about what layering brings to enterprise […]
05 Jan Another Great Year in Cyberspace
2015 promises to be a good one. Going into the year we see massive progress in the “big data” movement ushering in unparalleled convergence of structured and unstructured content. I am seeing more model-based solutions, and broader use of semantics and ontologies in enterprise solutions. Mobile apps are getting smarter all the time with time […]
27 Dec Visualization Deception
The differences between the way computers think about things and the way humans process information can create significant dissonance and opportunities for misunderstanding. Both are in the business of finding answers, but approaches differ. While for humans, things we see with our eyes may be earliest and foremost in our thought process, it is almost always the […]
23 Dec Visual Knowledge Dimensions
Visualizing knowledge in graphs and charts empowers decision makers by giving them actionable knowledge in understandable format. To make this most effective, the labels on the graph must provide clearly defined context cues that make it easy to interpret. Converging data strategies using Big Data (Hadoop, NoSQL, Cassandra, MapReduce…) can change the way we access content […]
10 Dec Measuring Knowledge
Sometimes you need to know about your knowledge. When you’re in the middle of trying to build a system that knows stuff, you may ask, how much does the system know after this training or learning cycle as a percent of the total knowable amount? When we test students in their learning cycles, we use a […]
28 Oct Chemicals And Cognitive Performance
Outside Influences Mind-altering chemicals, stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens to name a few, affect the entire process of cognition, from receiving and processing input, through recognition and reasoning. They often even improve or impair our ability to act, affecting everything from muscle performance to language production and comprehension. Bacteria and viruses can also impact people. Things that come from outside […]
21 Oct Fuzzy Interconnectedness
Fuzzy and Interconnected Techniques Section 5 suggests that the software of cognition is very fuzzy and able to operate efficiently even without having complete or totally accurate information. We said that we want to replicate that flexibility. We spoke in Section 7 about different fuzzy approaches for representing and processing information. These approaches include artificial […]
17 Oct Neural Conceptual Dependency
Conceptual Dependency Much of this blog has been about knowledge representation: how the brain might learn and process it, how cognitive functions treat knowledge, and now, how computers may store and process it. Conceptual structures and conceptual dependency theories for computation have been useful for categorizing and representing knowledge in intuitively simple and cognitively consistent […]
09 Oct Resolving a Paradox
In time and space some things are impossible, but the pen is more powerful than reality. I can draw a world in which stairs lead in crazy, mind-bending directions, and I could probably build a structure that implemented upside-down staircases to nowhere. But I could never build the cube shown here, because it violates some […]
08 Sep Gnostic Learning Model
In prior posts in this section, and periodically in other sections of my blog, I have been exploring how humans learn, and how we might replicate those processes in computer software or (less likely) hardware. The context of the learning, or knowledge acquisition, upon which I choose to focus is language learning. While knowledge acquisition is much broader, this is an […]