I was at the NERCOMP Annual Conference last week. There were some really interesting presentations that I attended, but I should say that the first keynote by Gerard Senehi was less than optimal for a conference to open. Danah Boyd, on the other hand, was fantastic, talking about how even the younger members of our society care about privacy, contrary to the myth that they don’t.
One particular talk that I liked and want to follow up has to do with open educational resources. The powerpoint presentation is available along with the abstract, so please review it. Though some of the panelists are from institutions that are very different from us, we feel that there is something here for us to learn from and educate our community.
Artificial Intelligence has been in the news recently and frankly, trying to define it in clear terms is something I am not capable of. It has morphed over the years thanks to advances in computing. Is it possible for machines to emulate humans in the way we think? This is a loaded question as you can imagine.
Theoretically speaking, an artificial intelligence system must pass the Turing test. This test involves a party game where a man and a woman play with a third person who is trying to guess the genders accurately. The man provides all answers to convince the third person that he is a man while the woman provides tricky answers to convince the third person that she is the man. Turing proposed that if you switched one of them with a machine then the person needs to guess who is a human and who is a machine. If the person failed to guess correctly more than half the time, then the machine will be declared having passed the test (that it has enough intelligence on its own to fool the third person).
There are a lot more underlying details to this of course, because of the availability of massive amounts of data and the computing power, even the “brute force” computing can be confused with intelligence.
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As we are beginning our transition to Workday, yet again, the issues surrounding data integrity, definitions etc. which I am fond of writing about, are surfacing. Despite the fact that Chaos theory in itself is a huge field and I don’t necessarily understand all aspects of it, its vastly simplified definition struck a chord with me.
“Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. […] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.”
and
a quote from Edward Lorenz “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
The take home lesson (a stretch, I understand!) from this is “We are beginning a major administrative systems project and we are essentially dealing with a lot of (deterministic) dynamic data and we have a golden opportunity to get our initial conditions right so that at least for a long time to come we can avoid divergence and chaos”. (more…)
Apparently, in the 1990’s a student from UC Berkeley by name Bernstein developed an encryption software that he wanted to publish and government tried to stop him. He successfully argued that software is a form of speech and therefore is protected by the first amendment. I came to know about this when I read the details about the current controversy involving unlocking of an iPhone by Apple.
As you know, the FBI is asking Apple to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooters and Apple is supposedly invoking this first amendment argument to refuse to oblige. In the new iPhones, the content is encrypted and when a lock is set, you have a maximum of 10 tries to get it right. After 10 failures, the phone self destructs the content. Obviously if you don’t know the password, you can’t keep trying. FBI is asking Apple to modify and install a new version of iOS on the phone that bypasses this 10 try limit. One always wonders why not ask Apple to get the password from the phone? Because, the password is always encrypted and Apple doesn’t know it!
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