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05 Jan Another Great Year in Cyberspace

Digital Flight Paths

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 […]

29 Dec Unhuman Expertise

Expert System Architecture with Common Sense

Artificial Intelligence has suffered from a persistent scale problem: up to now, many techniques have been shown to work well and reliably in narrowly defined domains, but outside the domains of their expertise, they fall apart very quickly. No techniques of which I am aware, have exhibited common sense in the way we expect humans […]

27 Dec Visualization Deception

Head connections

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 […]

17 Dec Visualizing Knowledge

Visualizations on multiple devices

Visualizing Knowledge – Automatic Generation Words are so symbolic that even symbolic thinkers, like me, understand more when there’s a picture to go along with the words. is partly explains my crazy use of images in this blog. The various forms of graphical representations are superb inventions that enable us to view and understand mathematical data […]

20 Nov Identifying and Acquiring Knowledge

Key To Knowledge

One of the simplest knowledge systems is a photograph. It consists of a systematically arranged collection of pixels and its design is based almost completely on framing and focusing. Specifying knowledge software involves framing the knowledge domain and focusing on the aspects that are meaningful to users, and the constraints that affect meaning. By so saying, […]

27 Oct The Nature of Innovative Thinking

Mental Exploration The shape of the world changed radically when folks from the eastern and western hemispheres became aware of one another and of their respective geographies. The Age of Exploration (AKA the Age of Discovery) was amazing – or should I say “it is amazing”? While the focus has changed from continents and cultures, to galaxies […]

17 Oct Neural Conceptual Dependency

Representing Conceptual Graphs

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

Square 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

Hard Disk in Brain

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 […]

25 Aug Determinacy in Neural Connections

Neural Net

For many years, researchers thought that it was wrong to assume that there was a cell or set of cells in the brain that stored the memory of Grandma’s face. Though the comparison with computer memory was appealing, it was thought to be too simplistic and incorrect. Now, more researchers in different academic disciplines are assuming […]