The alarm clock projected its cardioid waking field over the bed. The substance of his dream started to fade away and crisp reality was pouring in…
“Damn it, not again, not when I’m dreaming of her” he shouted, kicking away the clock’s antenna towards the wall. He closed his eyes, she was still there: soft and warm, sleeping in his arms and slowly fading away.
He opened his eyes — she was gone. (more…)
I’ve just read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot.” I’m stunned. There is no way I can analyse it objectively; as it renders back to life vivid bits of memories from my childhood. Let me explain.
I was born behind the so-called “Iron Curtain,” been raised in a communist society where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideology was the purest and our technology was the best. And supposedly — in our glorious history — we invented everything and the perverted capitalists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.
“Ubik helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Your friends will say, Christ, I used to think that you weren’t fun. But now, wow! — Safe when your privacy settings match your level of comfort, do not forget to review them often. Avoid prolonged use.”
“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wikipedia, Here be dragons)
As a reaction to the Utopian science fiction (frequently set into a distant glorious future), cyberpunk projected all our fears into the uncharted territory of the very near future.
What separates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspecified, yet imminent apocalypse. Hence, most of the cyberpunk scenes are post-apocalyptic ones, where the apocalypse is a given, part of a forgotten history:
“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Chapter 2)
Technically an anti-hero lacks the attributes of the hero, of the “knight in the shining armour” type. I believe that one particular aspect of not being a (classical) hero is the use deception, living double lives, etc.
In The Matrix, Neo lives a double life: he works a dull cubicle job by day, helps his landlady take out the garbage; by night he’s involved in illegal information trade. He is trapped into this double life and he looks for an exit: an answer and a saviour (Morpheus).
Science fiction — before the cyberpunk split — was more or less different retellings of the same archetypes where aliens replaced ghosts and monsters, space replaced the oceans and technology replaced magic. This provided the grounds for scientific speculations, — and for a long time that was the main theme — and that was the fuel of the (technical) imagination of the mankind. We reached the Moon in a story first in Kepler’s “Somnium,” then with Jules Verne’s “From Earth to Moon.”
So, in days four and five we managed to build a team (thanks to Helen): me, Rabeeh Abasi, Sofia Angeletou, Aurona Gerber and Alta van der Merwe. We started thinking on an two-day implementable project, we argued a lot on what a person needs when is travelling to another country, and the solution come at the bar (thanks to Asun, who chased us out of the school building) where we started discussing cultural differences — as we were a heterogeneous group: two south africans, one greek, one romanian and one pakistani. In the end we decided to build an ontology that can model what are the social norms that govern different situations (such as visiting somebody, courtship, etc.) in different cultures.
We also focused (and argued a lot) on the use of some ontology patterns, such as situation, agent-role and role-task. We were on Saturday the second group to present our mini-project, all the other presentations had a significant fun factor and implementation plans, and couple of them had real prototypical implementations.
And we won! it seems that the complexity of the modelling effort and the sanity of the open research questions we launched did this. I’m personally still puzzled about it.
On day four, the invited speaker was Dieter Fensel, who presented “Service Web 3.0″ — from services ubiquity (the milk bottle in the fridge becomes a service), what’s missing in SOA and to how to bring to it the web properties (scalability, descentralisation, interoperability, openness, etc.). He underlined the major breakthroughs of Web 2.0: blurring the distinction between content/service consumers and providers, the move from media for individuals to media for communities and integration of human and machine computing in novel ways. Next he presented the Semantic Service Bus, WSMO and MicroWSMO, and the semantic space: TripleSpace.
On day five, Enrico Motta spoke about “A Research Programme for the Semantic Web,” where he underlined that the classical problem of knowledge aquisition
(KA) bottleneck can be solved by using the whole semantic web as an infrastructure and also as background knowledge provider. The gaved examples were about semantic web background knowledge usage in ontology matching.
The rest of these two days were dedicated to the work for “mini-projects.” Most of the meetings for these projects employed more or less formal places, such as the pool and the bar.…
This day’s invited speaker was Peter Mika, from Yahoo! Research Barcelona. In his talk — The Future of Web Search — emphasised the state of the web search, semantic web deployment difficulties, the shift from documents to databases (web of data), and current trends in annotation/structure of data: folksonomies, µformats, wikipedia infoboxes, RDFa; then how to reconsider IR in this context: folksonomies mining, GRDDL and hGRDDL, should we have “forgiving” parsers for µformats?
In this context the description of the ideal world would be:
In real world we face technical and social challenges: query interface usability, data quality (from synctactic/semantic errors to spam), ontology mapping, entity resolution, ranking across types, results display (information overload and partial understanding issues), user motivation to annotate, trust.
Next, Fabio Ciravegna presented the state of the art in using semantic web technologies for knowledge management (KM) in large distributed organisations — from the sheer amount of raw data (i.e. a Rolls-Royce jet engine produces 1GB of vibration data per hour) to unstructured reports on the lifecycle (diagnose, repairs, etc.) of such engines, distributed over multiple repositories.
The Rolls-Royce case study of cross-media KA was impressive, the main issues (apart of data volume) were that evidence is distributed over different media, from more or less structured text (word, excel, powerpoint and PDF) to 3D images, data integration and hybrid search.
Other specific information extraction (IE) issues were event modelling, table data extraction, distance metrics approaches (as opposed to the linguistic and statistical ones).
Later in the practical session we explored machine learning (ML) from both (human) text annotations as well as image annotations; which also showed how easy humans disagree on annotations and how the annotations reflect the world model of the annotator (and not of the user).
The last tutorial was given by John Domingue, on semantic web services (SWS) — the problems with the web services today, SWS vision, IRS3 SWS broker, web service modelling ontology (WSMO), orchestration and choreography in SWS. Then the Essex County Council Emergency Planning case study was presented and demoed, and the talk ended with OWL-S and semantic annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL).
In the afternoon’s practical session, Barry Norton led us in how to re-create the european travel demo with IRS3 and WSMO Studio.
The invited speaker of the day was Richard Benjamins (iSOCO, Telephonica), about “Semantic Solutions for the Enterprise,” he talked about the market, Gartner Hype Cycle 2006 predictions, public and corporate semantic applications and cost factors for constructing ontologies.
Next, Jérôme Euzenat presented at a very fast pace, the role, state of the art and future in ontology matching and alignment; and we got a taste of various matching algorithms in the afternoon practical session.
Asunción Gómez Pérez, gave a presentation on ontological engineering — development process, ontology lifecycle, methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. Most of the things were part of NeOn Project, the NeOn glossary of activities is a nice overview of what ontological engineering deals with.
In the afternoon, another practical session was lead by Aldo Gangemi, where we had to build an simple (and funny) ontology using another set ontology patterns than the ones discussed in the previous day. If in the previous day we played with Protégé 4, now we designed the ontology with TopBraid Composer. (I wonder what is the acceptance within this community of Altova’s SemanticWorks).
Later we had a extreme short walk in mountains, where we followed briefly one of the footpaths of the Fuenfría Valley.