John Bottoms wrote: (01)
> Clearly the future of AI, cognitive science or semantic processing
> must include tight coupling with real world problems. (02)
I think the scope of this statement is too grand.
Do we regard AI as
- primarily a (natural) science?
- primarily a formal or philosophical discipline?
- primarily an engineering discipline? (03)
Cognitive science is a science at the neuroscience (natural science)
level and at the psychological (social science) level. It is a study of
how things in nature and society behave, and is thus tightly coupled to
the real world, but not necessarily to "real world problems". (04)
Mathematics and semantics are primarily formal philosophical
disciplines. They are of themselves entirely about organizing
abstractions. They may have real world applications, but the nature of
the discipline itself is entirely divorced from "real world problems".
And some part of AI is a discipline of this kind. 30+ years ago, it was
inclusion of disciplines of this kind that justified the term "computer
science". (05)
The development of AI technologies -- algorithms for reasoning -- is an
engineering discipline. Its objective is to produce useful tools for
reasoning to effect about real-world problems. In a similar way,
"knowledge engineering" is about the capture of human knowledge in such
a way as to enable the tools to reason to useful effect about real-world
problems. So, yes, this part of AI must be tightly coupled to the real
world concerns. (06)
> I don't think we have a full
> understanding yet of how our large brains were justified. (07)
Agree. (08)
> In looking at commercial computing, it might be that we will only
> see some major developments in cognitive science when we have
> truly massive data sets that absolutely dictate processing
> efficiencies. (09)
I can't make sense of this sentence, and I don't see any connection to
the previous one. I'm a bit slow; you'll have to fill in some of the
mental leaps for me. (010)
> Is that where cloud computing finds its raison d'etre? (011)
<heresy>IMO, the principal raison d'etre for "cloud computing" was the
need for a new buzzword to generate a new set of funding. "SOA" and
"net-centric" were fueling others.</heresy> ;-) (012)
John Sowa wrote: (013)
>> AI is dominated by brilliant people who are totally out of touch
>> with anything and everything that goes on in the field of commercial
>> data processing. (014)
My gut reaction is: and rightly so. Most commercial data processing is
not very interesting. The technologies needed to do it well were
devised over the 30 years 1965-1995 and they are heavily and reliably used. (015)
The really interesting commercial processing began to benefit from AI
and OR technologies 30 years ago, and there is much more commercial use
of AI (of the rule engine kind, and some others) in the last 15 years,
as memory sizes and processing speeds have made it practical. (016)
>> There is no question that many of their ideas
>> could, if properly implemented, revolutionize commercial systems. (017)
I'm willing to believe this, but you would have to put a lot of effort
into formalizing the reference knowledge for the domain. The cost of
enabling the great ideas to be useful is very high. And the putative
revolution has to produce a return on that investment. (018)
An EU study ending in 2007 concluded that we now have a lot of AI
tooling, but we don't have much encoded knowledge. We haven't been
training commercial knowledge engineers; doing that doesn't get advanced
degrees. But generating more AI tooling for toy knowledge bases does.
If we want to bring the benefits of AI to commercial data processing, we
have to train students to do knowledge engineering, instead of tool
building, and pay them to get their hands dirty. FP7 is doing some of
that in Europe. What US funding source is? (Jus' askin'.) (019)
-Ed (020)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (021)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (022)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (023)
|