Group items tagged

LONDON-Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files - more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:

In computing, ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence is a vision on the future of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing that was originally developed in the late 1990s for the time frame 2010-2020. In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices (see Internet of Things). As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies-especially the Internet-now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways.  The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.   Our basic research question is:  How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?' The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing the way people work together.

"This year's Slush conference in Helsinki has been a terrific event, with a very high standard of startup and a disproportionate number of great ideas floating around. One of the most intriguing has been that of Futureful, a sort-of-browser app that's going to be made available to iPad users in the U.S. in January. Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It's a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it's an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser - you can't enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content. However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top - click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a 'Silicon Valley' tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like 'Moore's Law'. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery."

"It all started with Steven Ing's counseling practice. He was working with all sorts of people who were dissatisfied with their lives in one way or another. A man and wife who couldn't talk to each other about their problems, a woman who felt depressed but didn't know why, an older man who seemed to hate the world. And then there were the people who had committed sex crimes who were court ordered to go through therapy with Ing. As Ing went on with his practice, it became apparent to him that his "regular" clients and his "sex-offender" clients all had similar problems that stemmed from the same place. The problems all came back to their individual sexualities and inability to cope with them. Ing then went further and realized that these problems were societal, no one seemed to be able to have an open and honest conversation about sex. But it was not just because in his own backyard that struggled with this aspect of their lives, it was people and cultures all over the world as well. So Ing decided to start a community called "sexual futurist." He wasn't trying to solve everyone's problems or tell them what to think, he just wanted to encourage people to start having intelligent and logical conversations about sex to ultimately lead to change for the better. If we are able to have these intelligent conversations about sex using reason and logic, perhaps one day we'll start being more comfortable with the topic and therefore able to respect sex as an important aspect of our lives. Perhaps we will be able to encourage the United Nations to help people all over the world by enacting our "Sexual Bill of Rights.""

This is a USA based project that seeks to crowd source predictions about the future. It is being run by the Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). IARPA "invests in high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries." Jose's little analysis - because it is limited to a US audience it will probably have good technological inputs, but its cultural and political input will be largely worthless. I don't see any cultural studies and political scientist types making a contribution (could be very wrong of course) and commentary will most likely come from a combination of mis-informed moderates and Fox news fruitcakes. For ICT and the CRC project it is an example of crowdsourcing for competitive intelligence.

"U.S. intelligence officials say that in hindsight, using open sources like Facebook and Twitter could have helped them predict the uprisings that have swept the Arab world."

An industry that once told hard truths to corporate and government clients now mostly just tells them what they want to hear, making it harder for us all to adapt to a changing world -- and that's why I'm leaving it.

200 examples and research detail and definitions of collective intelligence

"Futurescaper creates bespoke solutions for futures research and scenario planning studies, using the power of the internet to gather stories from an unlimited number of individuals. This approach combines the qualitative richness of a traditional scenario planning workshop with the breadth and diversity of online collective-intelligence systems, producing faster, cheaper, and more effective outcomes."

Brilliant article on the insides of the struggle for control of the internet....  "For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington DC, six blocks away from the White House."

"Late last week, Google representatives unveiled a significant enhancement to the company's ubiquitous search engine. They're calling it the "Knowledge Graph" and claiming it will support "more intelligent searching for real-world things on the internet"."

"Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology - and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous."

Acclaimed global futurist and iconoclastic "chief unlearning officer" Jack Uldrich has been selected to deliver a series of seminars on future trends and "disruptive innovation" to the education industry. Uldrich will review major educational industry trends, including advances in mobile web communication, interactive and customizable e-books, gaming dynamics, augmented-reality, artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing and much more.

A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms - online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile. A three-part ecosystem, where the audience takes part of a mobile app which lets them take part of different "Worlds", each belonging to a separate story or story world, the designers of the narrative get a "cloud-based network intelligence" and the developers get an API to play around with.

" Consider the disruption that technology has already introduced. The big data company BeyondCore can automatically evaluate vast amounts of data, identify statistically relevant insights, and present them through an animated briefing, rendering the junior analyst role obsolete. And the marketing intelligence company Motista employs predictive models and software to deliver insights into customer emotion and motivation at a small fraction of the price of a top consulting firm. These start-ups, though they lack the brand and reputation of the incumbents, are already making inroads with Fortune 500 companies-and as partners to the incumbents. "

"As Surowiecki explained, certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently. Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. Computer modeling of crowd behavior also hints at dynamics underlying crowd breakdowns, with he balance between information flow and diverse opinions becoming skewed." I thought this might have implications both for Delphi methods in general and for our crowd work specifically.