Author: Hjalmar Gislason

About Hjalmar Gislason

Founder and CEO of GRID (https://grid.is/). Curious about data, technology, media, the universe and everything. Founder of 5 software companies.

Unified Knowledge

english, Philosophy

I had an exam in the Philosophy of Science this week, so I’m still somewhat on the philosophical note. Science has of course interested me for a long time, but I had not really taken a good look at the foundations before. This should of course be obligatory for anyone that wants to be a scientist. If you really expect to become a scientist, looking at the world with critical eyes – one of the most obvious things to be critical about is of course the methodology or framework you’re working within.

Anyway, that was not what I was going to write about. One of the main subjects of the exam was scientific knowledge, how it’s accumulated and how it is linked, building up our interwoven web of knowledge. Some theories say that all science is one fact building on many others and so on until we reach an axiom, something that is taken to be so granted that it needs no further explanation.

My question here is: if this is the case, shouldn’t we be able to computerize our scientific knowledge? And in any case, are we doing enough to make sure that the web of scientific knowledge is as tightly interwoven as it could and should be?
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Google miner

english, Ideas

Google is an extremely powerful tool. Don’t worry, I’m not joining the “Google is too powerful” debate, it’s outside Wetware’s scope anyway. But Google is more than just the simple text search. One of the brilliant things here being Google’s web APIs. That’s right; Google is allowing us – the nerd herd – to use its powerful search engine and database to make apps of our own.

I wish I had had the time to play around with this somewhat, but a lot of people have with very interesting results. See for example some of the clever Google hacks from Douwe Osinga. One of his projects, Google History, inspired the following idea for a information mining tool using the Google APIs…
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Human vs. Computer – so we haven’t lost at chess?

Artificial intelligence, english

It came as a shock to many of us when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a 6 game match in 1997. A computer had beaten the best human player in this game that to many is a defining symbol of human intellect. Even though it was “only chess”, it had to be a sign of the inevitable. The machines would soon be taking over man’s role as earth’s ruling race.

But wait a minute. The extremely high profile of the Deep Blue match may have been misleading. In an article at ChessBase, Jeff Sonas explains that the battle is not lost yet. In fact, top chess players have taken on computers 7 times since 1997, all of them ending with a draw. Was it just a stroke of luck for Deep Blue back then?
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Grand Challenge: Journeys in Non-Classical Computation

english, Ideas

The fourth and last review of Wetware related Grand Challenge proposals; we take a look at the ‘Journeys in Non-Classical Computation‘ project. This proposal differs from the rest of them in that it does not propose any direct goals, but rather journeys down some of the less traveled roads of computer science to see where they lead.

The proposal has a range of suggestions but in essence, it encourages computer scientists to take an out-of-the-box approach when seeking solutions for problems in computer science. This includes taking into account a lot of things that Wetware discusses, including: genetic algorithms, biomimickry, DNA computing, nanotechnology, chaos theory, quantum computing, fuzzy logic, cellular automata, parallel processing, artificial immune systems, evolving hardware and emergent properties.
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Listening to the walls

Brain technologies, english

BBC yesterday posted an article about blind people who restore rudimentary vision using a system that turns the input from a head mounted camera into sound. The result has enabled a blind woman to distinguish similar objects, roughly make out obstacles in her environment and detect whether the lights in a room are on or off.

These remarkable results are thanks to a system called vOICe (where the three middle letters stand for “Oh I See”), developed by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands.
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Grand Challenge: Architecture of Brain and Mind

english, Ideas

Third in Wetware’s line of Grand Challenge reviews, we take a look at the ‘Architecture of Brain and Mind project‘ proposal.

This proposal, moderated by Mike Denham, Professor of Neural and Adaptive Systems at the University of Plymouth, draws from a number of similar original Grand Challenge submissions. The proposal is to create a computational architecture of the brain and mind on both neuronal and cognitive levels.
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Grand Challenge: Memories for Life

english, Ideas

The second review of Wetware-related Grand Challenge proposals discusses the Memories for Life project, proposed by Andrew Fitzgibbon with the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford and Ehud Reiter lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.

The Memories for Life project is subtitled “Managing information over a human lifetime”. It addresses people’s need for a unified system to store, manage and access the “ever-increasing amount of information about themselves, including emails, web browsing histories, digital images, and audio recordings” one amasses during the life.
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Grand Challenge: In Vivo In Silico

english, Ideas

First in the series of reviews of the Wetware-related Grand Challenges I promised; a closer look at the project In Vivo In Silico, proposed by Professor Ronan Sleep at the School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

“In Vivo” is a Latin term commonly used in biology and medicine to refer to something that occurs within a biological organism, as opposed to “In Vitro”, meaning literally “in glass” e.g. “an egg fertilized In Vitro”. The term “In Silico” is intended to describe the third option for biological observation or experiment. The In Vivo In Silico project aims to simulate the development, cell function, sensory, interaction and overall behavior of organisms accurately enough to allow it to be used in research, adding to and sometimes even replacing the “real thing”.
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Many Grand Challenges Wetware related

english, Ideas

The Human Genome project and the project to create a championship chess playing program are among the projects recognized by the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) as so-called Grand Challenge projects. Inspired mainly by the Human Genome Project “the Committee has noted that the progress of a mature branch of science can occasionally be accelerated by the promotion of a Grand Challenge Project.” To achive a Grand Challenge status, a project must meet a certain criteria, including clear goals, broad participation and commitment of resources by the scientific community and a timescale of completion of around 15 years.

The committee is working to start seven new such projects after receiving research proposals for over 100 possible Grand Challenge projects. Of these seven projects, at least four are highly related to Wetware subjects. This article lists the seven projects. In follow up articles, we will take a closer look at each of those four projects and discuss their possible implications.
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Note to self: Take notes

Brain technologies, english

The single thing in the philosophy of mind that has surprised me the most is the importance of human language in thinking. Its importance in communication is of course quite obvious, but in the inner language we use to “talk to ourselves” its role is more open to dispute. I won’t go too far into the different theories here, but the theories I’ve read range from that it plays no role at all, to the notion that without “inner language”, no planning nor direct recall of experience is possible. We would simply be living in the present, trying to make the most of it based on the general but not specific experience we have accumulated in our lives.

At first I was a little skeptical of the importance of language in thinking, but the more I read and think about it, the more I believe in its central role in human thinking. Words are almost definitely used as references to memories. Try this for an example: Think of a dog. How do you do that without thinking of the word “dog”? Can you imagine? Of course a picture of a dog, hearing a bark or encountering a real live dog would get you there, but in the absence of those it is hard to imagine how you would call a dog to your mind without using the word “dog” as a reference. And what do we do to memorize things? We utter them over and over as if to imprint them thoroughly into our heads.
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