Tag Archives: cognitive modeling
08 Feb The Power of Inference
Joe Roushar – February 2024 Sense Perception and Cognition What can you infer about the things in this picture: Our senses are constantly feeding information to our brains, but how much can we trust? Inference is guesswork performed by the frontal cortex based on circuitous electrical signal pathways from the sensory parts of the brain, […]
04 Jul Cognitive Multi-Processing
Joe Roushar – July 2017 Divide and Conquer Swarm computing applications, with large numbers of autonomous agents are beginning to appear and deliver stunning results. The combination of autonomy, simple tasks and parallelism has great power. Today I’ll address parallel computing and models for breaking down computational problems. I will not address the question of autonomy today, […]
09 Jan 2017 – The Year of AI
Joe Roushar – January 2017 Intelligent but Artificial Recently, January 5th, 2017, on my ride into work I was listening to BBC World Update with Dan Damon, as I often do, and heard him interviewing someone about the new artificial intelligence (AI) app for the British National Health Service from Babylon Health (similar story on […]
07 Dec Curating Digital Meaning
Joe Roushar – December 2016 That should be in a museum I think of museums when I hear about curating. Meaning is, in a strange way, an artifact, simultaneously ancient and modern. Meaning has existed as long as perception has existed in the most rudimentary forms of life. For the purposes of my blog, I […]
30 Nov Architecting Meaningful Relationships
Joe Roushar – November 2016 Getting the Knowledge Out How do you know — anything? Chemicals and electrical impulses splash around in the brain, and voila: we understand the meaning of life, the universe and everything. We have looked at how synapses connect neurons, and how taxonomical and other associations connect concepts, but is it […]
05 Sep Fuzzy Idea Wars in Always Never Land
Joe Roushar – September 2015 Trusted Rx How should a digital device answer a “Should I…” question? “Should I put on my left shoe first, or my right?” “Should I take the alternate route to avoid traffic? “Should I get a more fuel-efficient automobile?” “That stock price is lower, so should I buy now, or is […]
11 May Thinking in Parallel
A Parallel Expert I once rode the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Ulan-Batar, Mongolia (not the picture at right – the engines were diesel). Several times along the journey we passed slower trains, and we were passed by faster ones. When people and freight are confined to a single lane, the speed of the slowest defines the speed of […]
27 Feb Six Reasons Businesses are Implementing Semantics
The wave is coming. I spent some quality time last summer in a large consumer products manufacturer in Cincinnati helping architect semantic capabilities to automate tasks in chemical compliance for selling a large number of products in dozens of countries, each with hundreds of rules that apply to thousands of chemicals constituents. You can imagine the combinatorial explosion. […]
23 Feb Inference in Knowledge Apps
In Section 5 we discussed different kinds of knowledge, including existential or hierarchical knowledge and causal knowledge. In Section 7 we discussed modeling approaches and search techniques that could be applied to any kind of knowledge. We saw that causal knowledge can be modeled as chains of causes and effects, and that existential knowledge can be […]
08 Feb Just In Time Knowledge
One of the beautiful things about the human brain is it’s adaptability: people can “change” their minds at the last minute based on the changing situation (context). This is not trivial, but I believe that it is one of the characteristics of human cognition that is relatively straightforward to mimic in computer programs and apps. In […]