Geet Duggal

This is a sort-of half-baked notion that may have some flame war started somewhere on the net, but I can’t resist.

The combination of a noble call for better Wikipedia articles in a specific subject with a recent example of someone blogging to correct his own entry makes me fantasize: what if individuals wrote blog-like entries that were, in effect, articles like those on Wikipedia?

Why not just create an HTML page or contribute to Wikipedia?  As far as contributing to Wikipedia, don’t get me wrong: I think that’s great. But as outlined in linked “noble call”, there are some legitimate issues–most notably that of authorship.  Blogging allows one to retain authorship and control but, unlike HTML, it facilitates commenting and allows RSSee updates to interested readers and contributors.

In the second link, the creator of Bittorent is correcting his own Wikipedia entry. This makes sense at some level for the sake of clarification and posterity.  There’s no guarantee that if he edits his own entry (say anonymously), the changes will persist, and it may not be appealing to constantly keep watch of minor changes to articles either.

In the days of web one point yore (say before Wikipedia and Wolfram’s Math/Physics pages), if I Googled “Maxwell’s equations”, any page put up by some schmuck like me would probably be dicey at best.  But now, I can just feel lucky and get some pretty decent information from Wikipedia.

But due to the number of people editing the entry, there is a certain lack of authorship and potentially unwillingness to even contribute in the first place.

These days, we see lots of academic bloggers posting their lecture notes on specific topics online (some even making the lecture notes themselves posts rather than linking to PDFs), so parts of me feel like we’re already seeing this kind of behavior, though lectures tend to be less encyclopedic.

The thing I like about this approach is that it’s decentralized and personable in the sense that we can use the fact that we trust/value certain people’s discourse more than others to our advantage.  Potential downsides: (1) we’re that much more reliant on a YourFavoriteArticleRank algorithm to rank the articles for us (for example, when you link to another article, do you link to your favorite one? the top-ranked one? eh hem, Wikipedia?), (2) more people/groups would need to get blogs, and (3) the notion of a “collaborative article” is substituted with a “first author” (the writer of the post) and “contributers” (commenters).  But those concerns don’t seem that dire.

Prodded by prof Tao’s post, I spent a little too much time sifting through official documents on the congressional budget as well as other articles related to NSF funding and the stimulus amendment.

Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has a nice post discussing the issue and outlines recent attention given to this subject by Science and Nature. Something I thought I’d forward on….

</politic>

It seems that there’s been a lot of hype lately about blogs selling out and the more personal touch being lost (so much so, that it’s not even worth linking to articles). It’s as if there’s this big trend and direction that we’re attempting to extract for where things are headed. To me, the partition between a blog with a personal twist and a more professional media one is quite clear (and it certainly doesn’t have to happen when you’re sponsored by a company).

For the obviousness it’s worth, I certainly prefer the random thoughts over the “professional updates”, and there’s of course still room for both.

Two Crocodiles have emerged from the water.

so here’s to thinking for yourself.

Leo has recently posted on our interpretation of the chances that it will rain. While I was bit caught up on how we may actually arrive at that probability, his question was even more fundamental in nature. The answer is surprisingly straightforward–so much so that you may kick yourself if you didn’t think of it right away.

So after a bit of a break from logging, I’m back. The home page has gotten a new look: that is, this log is my new home page. A significant addition is the start of a del.icio.us account (from which rss feeds are made available for particular tags or the bookmarks page in general). On the side bar you can see the tags I use often. I will also be using del.icio.us for bookmarking preprint papers of interest, so it serves a few handy functions for me. Satisfying a request, I will be extracting tags from del.icio.us for a new bookmarks and shoebox page shortly.

One of my favorite profs from school has resurfaced with a web log. Known for his robotics and vision work (e.g. Sony Aibo), he’s currently spearheading the Animate Arts program at Northwestern.

One of his recent position papers presents some examples from psychopathology that may be valuable to look at when developing AI for interactive narratives. He argues that this is a good playground for thinking about these examples in concrete computational terms and that current architectures aren’t particularly designed for this type of play.

The first example is self-medication:

What’s interesting about self-medication is that although it is generally caused by some outside stressor, its goal is not to alleviate the stressor, so much as to regulate one’s own affective response to the stressor. If you get drunk because your spouse left you, the goal of drinking isn’t to get your spouse back, but to restore some sort of emotional equilibrium.

…

Although we can always add the rule to an agent’s program that says (IF NO-DATE EAT-ICE-CREAM), current architectures don’t account well for the systematicity of this general phenomenon. Not everyone will eat ice cream in response to perceived rejection, but nearly everyone will respond with some sort of self-soothing behavior.

The next example he brings up is limerence (the pattern of obsession, idealization, and fear most commonly associated with “falling in love”):

One of the most paradoxical characteristics of limerence is driven in large part by uncertainty. People don’t become limerent toward those who indicate unambiguous interest or rejection toward them, but toward those whose behavior is ambiguous or inconsistent…. Once limerence begins, perceived rejection by the beloved actually increases the amount of time spent in limerent fantasy rather than reducing it (although sustained rejection will reduce and ultimately eliminate it).

…

this is interesting for AI because current architectures don’t allow agents to [satisfy] goals (albeit temporarily and unsatisfactorily) through fantasy.

He notes how authoritarian personalities can predict behavioral patterns associated with group affiliation and how social rank, though this particular aspect was far less clear on my reading:

Authoritarianism also predicts certain aspects of behavior. For example, when asked to choose punishments for others’ crimes, high authoritarians will in general choose more severe punishments than low authoritarians, and report greater pleasure in administering the punishment. However, their assignment of punishment will depend on the identity of the perpetrator; an accountant who started a fight with a “hippie panhandler” will be given less of a punishment than if the subject is told the hippie started the the fight with the accountant.

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Modeling these traits computationally requires build[ing] reasoning systems in which (1) reasoning processes depend on the social status and affiliation of those being reasoned about, yet (2) the system itself is unaware of such dependencies.

Don’t really appreciate the reasoning for item (2) up there…. I also feel that although this is a position paper on perhaps a more esoteric subject, I got little context about what the current AI architectures look like, or at the very least, a few more concrete details on how they’re inappropriate for this type of thinking. Nonetheless, I think his point is that these things are important to start exploring at a computational level when considering AI models for narratives…interesting.

He also has recently posted an essay, “What is computation” that definitely seems worth a glance when I get the chance…it is written at an introductory level and should therefore be accessible to anyone interested.

The release of Google Gears will hopefully ignite some interest in focusing more on the distinction between a web application for a web service (i.e. essentially a GUI that runs completely within your browser communicating with a server hosting a web service) and a desktop client for a web service (e.g. Google Talk, ecto, IMAP clients, etc.).

While keeping the browser as the center of application activity has the benefits of being cross-platform, easily accessible, and having “the same look and feel wherever”, it would seem that we have gone through great pains simply to account for differences in browsers and to make the process a little more manageable.

This of course raises the question of how valuable a within-browser application is, especially for a well established company like Google. Would it be more valuable (though it will likely take more resources) to focus on desktop clients for web applications–clients that play friendly with the host operating system and desktop environment? Somewhat impractically, what if Mac Mail, for example, had a Google plugin where a few interface changes like conversation views (web applications like Gmail are of course not just a protocol for data exchange, they provide an interface specification) and Mac address-book synchronization took place? This kind of thinking isn’t unheard of.

Gears certainly gives us a little more of a practical playing field for designing web applications to be resilient to “flaky” network activity. Though the underlying principles are not completely unexplored, it will be nice to see progress on the application-design standpoint. The various decisions on how to handle the synchronization activities from a UI perspective will be challenging. For example, it is fairly intuitive that the level of “local” activity and roughly the “rate” of synchronization has basic relations to the “collaborativeness” of the application. For highly collaborative applications (e.g. Google Docs), much emphasis would need to be placed on network storage and fast synchronization, whereas for more personal applications this is not the case. Getting this kind of application to work “intuitively” well, and better yet, withstand critique are both tall orders.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to see where things head…whether the browser takes the monopoly for many apps or not. Microsoft’s solution appears to be still heavily focused on the browser, and I too find GNOME’s proposed plan a bit unclear.

I have recently discovered two of my good friends from school have recently made web logs. Mark is a math grad student at Cal Poly.  He was an EE as an undergrad.  He’s slept through more midterms than me, and somehow takes the Putnam on a whim only to score remarkably well and gets unexpected awards from the math department. When away from math, he codes some particularly diverting javascript games, is on the development team for Fluxbox, and can occasionally be found sitting on a lawn chair in a tree.  His log is far more entertaining than mine.