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Neil Movold

Computer Scientist leads the way to the next revolution in artificial intelligence - 0 views

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    AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.
Neil Movold

Brain's unconscious bias sways decisions - 0 views

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    "If you've ever had to make a snap decision between two unfamiliar choices, you may want to thank your subconscious for making it possible. According to new research, the brain's memory areas link new memories to old associations, providing a roadmap for decision-making we don't even realize we have. The research, published in the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Science, focuses on the hippocampus, a region nestled deep in the brain that helps consolidate memories. Scientists have long known the hippocampus links memories and integrates them together, but the new study is the first to look at the region's role in biasing the brain toward certain choices."
Neil Movold

The emerging science of 'collective intelligence' - and the rise of the global brain - 0 views

  • "It's becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain,"
  • collective human intelligence
  • emergent phenomenon
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  • global brain
  • genomes of collective intelligence
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    "The emerging science of 'collective intelligence' - and the rise of the global brain"
Neil Movold

The True Hive Mind - How Honeybee Colonies Think | Wired Science - 0 views

  • Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.
  • This extends to decision-making, which is the main subject of Honeybee Democracy.
  • Honeybee Democracy provides not just a look at a particularly rich life of inquiry but some nice, unforced parallels between the workings of honeybee colonies, small human societies, and our great big human brains: Certain group dynamics, it seems, are scalable and fractal.
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    We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective. Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.
Neil Movold

The loneliness of making sense - 0 views

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    Jonah Lehrer in his book "Imagine" introduced me to an interesting study by Beeman and Kounios. They showed, in brief, by using fMRI imaging and EEG measurements of brain activity, that we possess two different modes of problem solving: One dominated by the left half of the brain, and one dominated by the right half of the brain.
Neil Movold

What's your mind code? - 0 views

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    How you react to people and events can tell us a lot about the way you process information. The brain runs our lives. It processes and creates different emotions in us everyday. We have a choice of either letting it run its course or guiding it the way we want to run our lives. Our brain has 61 patterns that drive our behaviour. So here is a quiz that will provide you awareness and insights into how your brain processes any information. 
Neil Movold

Power Up Your Brain: Myth vs. Reality - 1 views

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    Forget coffee and crosswords. If you want to supercharge your brain, you have to change your lifestyle. But only a few things about it. Here, we lay to rest some of the well-worn myths of power thinking, and give you the facts on what you can do to actually improve mental performance.
Neil Movold

Dan Dennett's mind-shifting perspective | TEDx - 0 views

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    One of our most important living philosophers, Dan Dennett is best known for his provocative and controversial arguments that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness - isn't. This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a philosopher and cognitive scientist. And while the philosophy community has never quite known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has made him, as Edge's John Brockman writes, "the philosopher of choice of the AI community."
Neil Movold

Subconscious Information Processing - 0 views

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    But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful. He explained that I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why that was better than cramming at the very end (as I was doing during the conversation). He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn't stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you'll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.
Neil Movold

New Ways of Thinking - Beyond Machines - 0 views

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    "For more than half a century, computers have been little better than calculators with storage structures and programmable memory, a model that scientists have continually aimed to improve. Comparatively, the human brain-the world's most sophisticated computer-can perform complex tasks rapidly and accurately using the same amount of energy as a 20 watt light bulb in a space equivalent to a 2 liter soda bottle. Cognitive computing: thought for the future Making sense of real-time input flowing in at a dizzying rate is a Herculean task for today's computers, but would be natural for a brain-inspired system. Using advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, cognitive computers learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember-and learn from-the outcomes. For example, a cognitive computing system monitoring the world's water supply could contain a network of sensors and actuators that constantly record and report metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide, and issue tsunami warnings based on its decision making."
Neil Movold

Conversations That Share Tacit Knowledge - 0 views

  • Now when I’m asked, “What's the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge?” I always think of Hans and the answer I give is: “Tacit knowledge needs to be shared through conversation.” My reasoning is as follows. Our tacit knowledge is drawn from our experience as well as our years of study and is stored in bits and pieces in our brain, that is, it is not stored as answers or explanations but as fragments. What we call “tacit knowledge” is the human ability to draw on those fragments to construct a response to a new problem or question. Tacit knowledge is particularly useful when we are faced with a complex problem. By complex I mean a problem that does not have a factual, right or wrong answer, for example, "What architectural design would best fit this physical space and meet the needs of the client?" or “How would you stop an oil leak 5000 feet under water?” When an expert like Joachim faces a complex problem he brings together those bits and pieces of his experience and study that are relevant to that specific problem situation and puts those together to form a solution. Because he is embedded in the situation he knows the context and the end goal. In bringing together those bits and pieces that are in his head, he conducts, what Don Schon would call, a “reflective conversation with the situation.”
  • Tacit knowledge, then, is constructed in response to a question or to a problem at a specific moment in time. It is a magnificent human capability we have to be able to continually reconstruct what we know into new forms to face new situations.
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    Now when I'm asked, "What's the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge?" I always think of Hans and the answer I give is: "Tacit knowledge needs to be shared through conversation." My reasoning is as follows. Our tacit knowledge is drawn from our experience as well as our years of study and is stored in bits and pieces in our brain, that is, it is not stored as answers or explanations but as fragments. What we call "tacit knowledge" is the human ability to draw on those fragments to construct a response to a new problem or question.
Neil Movold

Collective Intelligence: The Mating of Ideas - 0 views

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    "Collective intelligence has been around for a long time. What is different today, however, is how collective intelligence, combined with technology, has the power to create what has been described as a "global brain." Technology optimists like Thomas Malone, who heads MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, argue that this global brain will develop into an awesome problem solving tool that will be able to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems. "
Neil Movold

Tips For Using Critical Thinking For Business Success - 0 views

  • Any aspect of your daily life – most importantly your projects, business, or career – can be helped by critical thinking. You just need to practice it constantly. What’s Critical Thinking? Your brain thinks diversely. It can be affected by various factors too, plus the problem of relationships, for example, exactly what the heart says usually overwhelms exactly what the mind suggests.
  • In business, problem solving skills often war with instinct. Critical thinking can be a method that seeks to deal with facts derived by experience, rationalization, examination and other methods.
  • Understand the Distinction between Fact and Fiction
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  • Always Verify the origin
  • Make it a point critical thinking skills to withhold judgment until someone offers you documentary evidence and hard proof for your information youre focused on.
  • do not let pride or ego to influence your situation
  • If you wish to be a great critical thinker, you have to remember that gaining the best facts – and not having the winning argument – is your goal.
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    Any aspect of your daily life - most importantly your projects, business, or career - can be helped by critical thinking. You just need to practice it constantly. What's Critical Thinking? Your brain thinks diversely. It can be affected by various factors too, plus the problem of relationships, for example, exactly what the heart says usually overwhelms exactly what the mind suggests.
Neil Movold

Cognitive Computing: When Computers Become Brains - 0 views

  • The human brain integrates memory and processing together, weighs less than 3 lbs, occupies about a two-liter volume, and uses less power than a light bulb.  It operates as a massively parallel distributed processor.  It is event driven, that is, it reacts to things in its environment, uses little power when active and even less while resting.  It is a reconfigurable, fault-tolerant learning system.  It is excellent at pattern recognition and teasing out relationships.
  • A computer, on the other hand, has separate memory and processing.  It does its work sequentially for the most part and is run by a clock.  The clock, like a drum majorette in a military band, drives every instruction and piece of data to its next location — musical chairs with enough chairs.  As clock rates increase to drive data faster, power consumption goes up dramatically, and even at rest these machines need a lot of electricity.  More importantly, computers have to be programmed.  They are hard wired and fault prone.  They are good at executing defined algorithms and performing analytics.
  • Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE)
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    Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing concepts to a whole new level.  Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who works at IBM's Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a machine that thinks the way we do.  His own blog on the subject is here.
Neil Movold

Brain Bugs - How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives - 1 views

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    Simply put, our brain is inherently well suited for some tasks, but ill suited for others. Unfortunately, the brain's weaknesses include recognizing which tasks are which, so for the most part we remain ignorantly blissful of the extent to which our lives are governed by the brain's bugs.
Neil Movold

The age of smart machines - 0 views

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    "Two things are clear. The first is that smart machines are evolving at breakneck speed. Moore's law-that the computing power available for a given price doubles about every 18 months-continues to apply. This power is leaping from desktops into people's pockets. More than 1.1 billion people own smartphones and tablets. Manufacturers are putting smart sensors into all sorts of products. The second is that intelligent machines have reached a new social frontier: knowledge workers are now in the eye of the storm, much as stocking-weavers were in the days of Ned Ludd, the original Luddite. Bank clerks and travel agents have already been consigned to the dustbin by the thousand; teachers, researchers and writers are next. The question is whether the creation will be worth the destruction."
Neil Movold

The Future Of Technology Isn't Mobile, It's Contextual - 0 views

  • It’s called situational awareness.
  • Our senses pull in a multitude of information, contrast it to past experience and personality traits, and present us with a set of options for how to act or react.
  • it selects and acts upon the preferred path. This process—our fundamental ability to interpret and act on the situations in which we find ourselves—has barely evolved since we were sublingual primates living on the Veldt.
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  • Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life. A lot of the data needed to make good decisions are unreliable or nonexistent. And that’s a problem.
  • contextual computing
  • Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses.
  • These merely scratch the surface. The adoption of contextual computing—combinations of hardware, software, networks, and services that use deep understanding of the user to create tailored, relevant actions that the user can take—is contingent on the spread of new platforms.
  • It’s interesting because it’s always with the user and because it’s equipped with sensors.
  • It’s a cultural moment that’s not dissimilar to the way in which graphical, and then networked computing, were introduced in conceptual and technical forms 10 years before reaching commercial success.
  • identified four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.
  • There are legitimate ethical concerns about each of these graphs. They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation.
  • In an ideal contextual computing state, this graph would be complete—so gentle nudges by software and services can bring together two people who are strangers but who could get along brilliantly and are in the same place at the same time.
  • Given that psychology still struggles to explain exactly how our personal identities function, it’s not surprising that documenting such information in a computable form is slow to emerge.
  • A more successful example is Evernote, which has built a large business based on making it incredibly easy and secure to document both recently consumed information and your innermost thoughts.
  • It cannot yet tackle the way your curiosity might lead you to new directions. And it could never effectively recommend a restaurant or a vacation spot based on what it knows you read.
  • As Bill Gates astutely pointed out, "There’s a tendency to overestimate how much things will change in two years and underestimate how much change will occur over 10 years."
  • By combining a task with broad and relevant sets of data about us and the context in which we live, contextual computing will generate relevant options for us, just as our brains do when we hear footsteps on a lonely street today.
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    "NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER.""
Neil Movold

Picking the brains of strangers helps make sense of online information - 0 views

  • “Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,”
  • “Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is essentially lost, benefitting no one else and perhaps even being forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts, however, all of us might learn faster.”
  • Using eye tracking, the researchers showed that as knowledge maps are modified successively by multiple users, new users spend less time looking at specific content elements, shifting a greater balance of their attention to structural elements like labels. “This suggests that distributed sensemaking facilitates the process of ‘schema induction,’ or forming a mental model of the information being considered,” Counts said.
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  • digital knowledge maps — a means of representing the thought processes used to make sense of information gathered from the Web.
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    People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated. This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.
Neil Movold

The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind - 0 views

  • Virtually all of them. Many people believe creativity comes in a sudden moment of insight and that this "magical" burst of an idea is a different mental process from our everyday thinking. But extensive research has shown that when you're creative, your brain is using the same mental building blocks you use every day—like when you figure out a way around a traffic jam.
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    What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford; 336 pages). He's working on a version for the lay reader, due out in 2007 from Basic Books. In an interview with Francine Russo, Sawyer shares some of his findings and suggests ways in which we can enhance our creativity not just in art, science or business but in everyday life.
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