Der nächste Great Escape

Der nächste Great Escape findet nicht am 2.10.2006 statt, sondern eine Woche später am

Montag dem 9.10.2006, ab 20:00 im Glockencafe

Themen sind wie immer: digitale Kultur in Kaiserslautern. Wir haben immer noch Bock, diese Stadt zu rocken. Wenn ihr selber einen Vortrag machen wollt oder eine Idee für ein Projekt habt, was zu uns passen könnte, bitte einfach mitbringen.

liebe grüsse,
eure Digitalcouch

Permanent Breakfast am 7.10.2006

Wir kündigen wieder ein Permanent Breakfast an, ein Frühstück im öffentlichen Raum. Jeder kann ja prinzipiell für sich selbst jederzeit öffentlich frühstücken, aber gemeinsam und angekündigt ists doch schöner.

“Permanent Breakfast” wurde im Mai 1996 vom Wiener Künstler Friedemann Derschmidt und seiner Gruppe initiiert.

Die Regeln sind einfach: einer lädt zum Frühstück ein, alle eingeladenen Freunde bekommen ein ordentliches Frühstück im öffentlichen Raum. Am folgenden Tag frühstücken die eingeladenen und laden wiederum Freunde ein, die Kette setzt sich fort.

Ort und Zeit:
Vor dem Kunstladen “Unicat”
Pirmasenser Str 18
67655 Kaiserslautern

am Samstag, 7.10.2006 ab 10:00
ihr solltet spätestens um 11:00 das erste Ei geöffnet haben, das Frühstück hat ein natürliches Ende wenn wir satt sind.

Der Platz wird uns viel Aufmerksamkeit bringen, die vielen Passanten am Samstag vormittag versprechen einen guten Abend.

Bei Regenwetter! Wird diese Veranstaltung auf unbestimmte Zeit verschoben. Wir werden wohl im Wetterbericht gucken, ob es klappt, wenn nicht, bloggen wir. Für nervöse, einfach bei Leo anrufen oder SMS schicken: 0176/24548974

Mitzubringen ist alles was ihr braucht, üblicherweise ist das:
* ein Tisch
* Stühle
* Tischtuch
* Essen

Das Essen ist meist das kleinste Problem, da wir gerne teilen, Tische und Stühle muss jeder für sich mitnehmen.

Bitte diese Nachricht weiterleiten, bloggen, copy/pasten, ausdrucken, acchiffieren, sprechen, per SMS an alle im Addressbuch schicken, per e-mail weitersenden, lesen. Kommet zahlreich, wenn möglich manisch.

Five issues to think about before you try to do real AI

Gunnar Grimnes pointed me to this article by Roger
C. Schank

Note the best part here on Five issues to think about before you try to do real AI, which is related to my other rants about researchers who should dig into engineering:

1. Real problems are needed for prototyping. We cannot keep working in toy domains. Real problems identify real users with real needs. This changes what the interactions with the program will be considerably and must be part of the original design.

2. Real knowledge that real domain experts have must be found and stored. This does not mean interviewing them and asking for the rules that they use and ignoring everything else that fails to fit. Real experts have real experiences, contradictory viewpoints, exceptions, confusions, and the ability to have an intuitive feel for a problem. Getting at these issues is critical. It is possible to build interesting systems that do not know what they know. Expertise can be captured in video, stored and indexed in a sound way, and retrieved without having to fully represent the content of that expertise (e.g., the ASK TOM system (Schank, Ferguson, Birnbaum, Barger, Greising, 1991). Such a system would be full of AI ideas, interesting to interact with, and not wholly intelligent but a far sight better than systems that did not have such knowledge available.

3. Software engineering is harder than you think. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how true this is. AI had better deal with the problem.

4. Everyone wants to do research. One serious problem in AI these days is that we keep producing researchers instead of builders. Every new Ph.D. receipient, it seems, wants to continue to work on some obscure small problem whose solution will benefit some mythical program that no one will ever write. We are in danger of creating a generation of computationally sophisticated philosophers. They will have all the usefulness and employability of philosophers as well.

5. All that matters is tool building. This may seem like an odd statement considering my comments about the expert system shell game. However, ultimately we will not be able to build each new AI system from scratch. When we start to build useful systems the second one should be easier to build than the first, and we should be able to train non-AI experts to build them. This doesn’t mean that these tools will allow everyone to do AI on their personal computers. It does mean that certain standard architectures should evolve for capturing and finding knowledge. From that point of view the shell game people were right, they just put the wrong stuff in the shell. The shell should have had expert knowledge about various domains in it, available to make the next system in that domain that much easier to build.

Why am I not on google?

“Why am i not on google?” – Asked my Friend and prayer partner Michael Robb. He is missionary in Kaiserslautern and I was drinking beer with him yesterday – actually Gromgull also had one of his beers.

So, the answer is probably: because the website of vision of god in europe is not search engine optimized. So blogging about this site probably helps a little, we will see.

Funny, Michael’s website is made very well, nice colors and many options. For example they have a photo gallery. Browsing a little I find a photo of my bible group, which is hosted in my living room. And – oho – photo of fraunhofers. Well, his wife works there. Something like a blog is also there, but no RSS feeds nor comments, so not a real blog.

He started a page about Katharina, but not much there.

So the answer about “why am I not in findeable” is probably – because nobody blogged about you before. hope this helps, and god bless your stuff Michael.

Aduna goes open source

Aduna, the company that is known for guided exploration of compnay information, and of course for programming the sesame server at openrdf.org, and for autofocus, and and and …. they have swichted their business model to open source.

read their statement on open-source.

They have also changed their name to “Aduna-Software”, giving focus on what they do (software).

This continues what I have experienced working with them together on Aperture, the framework I have been using now in the latest gnowsis system to crawl data from various file-formats and data sources. We developed this together, they use it for the new version of Autofocus.

Aperture raised interest, Henry Story from SUN blogged about how important it is to have projects like Aperture to make the semantic web run.

A new website was created to separate open-source services from company issues, this seems to be their open-source portal: aduna-software.org

and look, they use their own tech to crawl their own website and have a search interface.

So, best wishes for Aduna-Software from my side and looking forward for the release of Sesame2.

about remembering

iddqd
idkfa
idspispopd
idclev

I can remeber these words, since roughly 12 years. What they are, find it out yourself. But I can’t remember Aspect oriented Programming or the names of my colleagues.

dammn it, we need a whole new way of e-learning.

broadcast your podcast – byp

Something we would have needed for the iTrip Disco!

http://www.broadcastyourpodcast.com/

byp

BYP enables and encourages podcasters to break out of the net and into local radio space.

BYP offers podcasters the chance to transmit their podcasts on FM. BYP units are handmade FM transmitters made by BYP following the circuit design of micro radio pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa. By connecting a BYP unit to your computer or mp3 player podcasts can be transmitted on FM to your neighbourhood.

http://www.broadcastyourpodcast.com/

quote: semantic web based research isn’t working

Zack Rosen blogs about why RDF research sucks and has written a mail to the Simile mailinglist for comments. No comments from me, but a general agreement on his suggestions for a way out:

So what can we do about it?

1. Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementors.
2. Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
3. Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and WordPress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.