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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 […]

23 Dec Visual Knowledge Dimensions

Statistical Analysis

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 […]

26 Nov Planning and Scheming

Paint a Brain

Select a Knowledge Representation (KR) Scheme In prior posts I have been describing the steps of building knowledge systems. A major part of Step 3: Task 1 is defining how to store knowledge – selecting a scheme. Giarratano and Riley (1989) suggest making the selection of a scheme, such as rules, frames or logic, dependent upon […]

28 Oct Chemicals And Cognitive Performance

Lightning Brain

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 […]

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 […]

21 Oct Fuzzy Interconnectedness

Phone Brain

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

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 Aug The Fourth Dimension

Time as 4th Dimension

To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season… Time is a fundamental and omnipresent element of context. It goes intrinsically with space, so much so, that we sometimes hear about a “time-space continuum” in which all things occur. Space and time are relevant to brain processes: electrical potential moves through physical pathways and brain […]