english

SETI@home Interview: Tapping the Grid

english, Uncategorized

Here is a most interesting interview with David Anderson, Project Leader for the SETI@home distributed computing program. Among the interesting facts:

  • SETI@home now involves 0.1% of the world’s total computing capacity
  • 4.7 million volunteers in 226 countries are chipping in with computing power
  • SETI@home has performed 1.6 million years of computer processing time
  • The network is managed be a group of only 6 people

(via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)
– Tapping the Grid: Interview with David Anderson – Astrobiology Magazine

MIT’s Picower Center: Brain Sciences with Broad Backgrounds

english, Uncategorized

MIT is opening the Picower Center for Learning and Memory in 2005. It “focuses the talents of a diverse array of brain scientists on a single mission: unraveling the mechanisms that drive the quintessentially human capacity to remember and to learn, as well as related functions like perception, attention and consciousness.” How come the kids at the MIT always get to do the cool stuff? (thanks Magga)
– The Picower Center: About the Center

Personal Blogs are the Public Life Bits

english, Philosophy

A few months ago I wrote about “Memories for Life“, a proposal for a Grand Challenge in computer science. The aim of that Grand Challenge was to find ways to store, index and secure our digital memories, i.e. the digital trail that we’re constantly building in the form of digital photos, email correspondence, browsing history, etc. Microsoft calls this MyLifeBits, but I find David Gelernter’s term, Information Beam, even more descriptive.

One of the issues addressed in the proposal are the access privileges to our memories. Who should be allowed to access our memories and how do we control the access. Some memories we want to share. Let’s use photo albums as an example. Some of our photos we want to (or at least are ok with) sharing with everybody, others we might want to allow the family to access and others might be even more private.

I just realized that there is already a tool that allows us to manage our public memories: Personal blogs. With additions to the basic blog functionality, notably mobile blogging, it is actually quite good as such a tool.
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Games With A Cause

english, Ideas

Some time ago I wrote about various attempts to gather common sense, the lack of which is believed to be one of the main hurdles to creating successful AI systems capable of human-like interaction.

A few weeks later I wrote about people as parts of computer systems to make them cheaper or more intelligent. Some of the best examples are when you can tap into the normal usage of Internet users to create something valuable as in the evolving banners example.

I began wondering if there was a way to make an incentive for Internet users to build a common sense database and actually giving them something in return. My suggestion: “Games With A Cause” – you play, we get a bit of common sense.
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