Life is short; I wish I had more time – things that you hear all the time. I feel the same way and at my age there is an even more sense of urgency to attend to things that I want to do and learn. So, here are a few select items related to work. I have a long and unrealistic bucketlist for my personal life which shall remain where it is now…
Learn and use AI (Artificial Intelligence) – AI (Artificial Intelligence) is in the news a lot recently. Many of us will vividly remember IBM Watson winning Jeopardy in 2011. This was an awesome way in which the power of machine intelligence was demonstrated. I vividly remember the AI class I took in 1985 at the CUNY Graduate Center when I was doing my MA in computer science. It was the craze at that time. The language of choice for AI at that time (and it still continues to be) was LISP. Even though many programming languages are strange in their own ways, this is an extreme one, where the use of parentheses is so pervasive that they are annoying.
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Watson won handily, and many disappointed humans were blaming him for his answer that Toronto is a US City. Several humans blamed the outsourced programmers in India for this mistake. Blaming is so human, so it is understandable. However, I was very happy to see that companies like IBM are still interested in some of the fundamental research in computing. For the next 6 weeks, I will be preoccupied with Cricket World Cup which is being played in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So far, no surprises, though England had a scare against Canada (yes, the country where Toronto is, plays cricket) yesterday.
On to the topic at hand… Library and Technology Services (LTS) is in the business of maintaining and supporting the consumption of information. Whereas we also create some of the information ourselves, that is a much smaller portion than making sure that we develop the appropriate mechanism for our users to get access to the information. It is sort of what Google does – billions of people create content, but it facilitates the consumption of this information through search frameworks that makes it easy to get access to information (though some would argue that it does a poor job!). And makes billions of dollars in the process… The question is, who actually is responsible for the information?
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