This entry is adapted from a presentation I did at the University of Iceland today, hence all the decorations.
Using nature as a role model in design is one of my biggest interests. By this notion I’m talking about how we can study nature and use its solutions, designs and methods when making our own designs and technologies, a practice often referred to as biomimickry.
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This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including:
…and more.
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Technologically minded people tend to look for technological solutions to the problems they face. Naturally so, but every technological solution can be improved. There is always another solution, simpler and better than the current one. Most inventors will admit that they know a lot of ways to improve on their solutions – an optimization here a redesign there, etc. The solutions in use are comprimises between the optimal and the practical. Necessarily so, to keep down cost.
But the improvements the designers know about are usually still within the framework originally proposed by the inventor. He or she is too involved in the work to be able to see the big picture and think of a radically new way of attacking the problem. One often overlooked solution: Use people instead of a complex technological solution.
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As I promised, I’m starting a weekly Wetware Trendwatch, linking to Wetware related news gathered during the week. This is by no means intended to be a complete list, just a glimpse at the week in passing.
So here’s this week’s batch, including:
– Programmers’ view on the design of the human brain
– “Daily Me” saved by “Daily Us”
– 10mb transmission speed through human body
– The use of neuroscience in marketing
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Machine translations have been somewhat of a holy grail in AI and language technologies for decades. And for a good reason. In a world of ever increasing international business and cooperation, effective communication is crucial. Fast and reliable, automated translations would therefore be of tremendous value, but despite serious efforts it is still far from realization.
When I was in high-school, I started thinking about this problem and decided to give it a try – making a program that would translate sentences from Icelandic to English and vice versa. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? So off I went – happily ignorant of the enormity of the task. After spending some 2 or 3 months of free-time programming on the task (a lot at the time), I began to realize what I was getting myself into. There had definitely been progress, but the goal seemed to have moved dramatically further away.
The last thing I want to do is to scare off somebody that wants to give it a try, but I thought it could help somebody to share my experience and some of the things I’ve learned since from various sources, mostly from people that have given the problem a lot more time and thought than I have. Remember that this is one of the problems where not knowing it can’t be done is the only way to succeed.
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Through the years, I’ve seen more “value chains” than I care to remember. “Where do you see yourselves in the value chain?”, is a VC question ranking up there with “Are you burning enough?” and “Would you people consider yourselves to be a … [fill in the blank: infrastructure, content-only, aggregator, consolidator, etc.] company?” in a series that look even more amusing in hindsight than they did at the time (BTW. the correct answer to the last question is “Yes” regardless of everything. You’ll just have to find a way to rationalize it later on in the conversation.)
But in reality, there are no value chains. Every single company in the world is a part of the same, huge, value web. And it’s not only money that makes such connections, so does the flow of information and ideas, staff recruitments and mutual board members or financers.
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When I say I’m interested biology because I believe that looking to nature for fresh ideas in software and other technology design, most people look at me like I’m crazy – or even tell me bluntly that I am. But I’m not easily offended nor easily convinced that it’s me and not them that are crazy.
Browsing the media these days, I see more and more reports and news about companies and research institutes that are turning up with interesting results from exactly this mixture. This is especially true for the software industry, where much of today’s cutting edge seems to be biology inspired. Following are just a few examples of this wave of innovation and ideas.
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Do you remember the “scribbling rat neurons“, Wetware wrote about a few weeks ago? In that project, neurons from a rat’s brain were used to control a robot arm, holding a pencil. To add a little dramatic effect, the “brain” and its “body” were on two different continents.
While this sort of thing gives some people the creeps, several people have been experimenting with similar animal brained machinery, and we’ll no doubt see plenty more. Following are a few examples.
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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 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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hjalli.com - Hjálmar GÃslason 