Fortnightly Mailing

Autumn 2007 interviews about artificial intelligence

"In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk."

7 similarly structured recent interviews with leading thinkers about (enthusiasts for?) artificial intelligence  have been published on the SIAI web site. Each is available as a video, downloadable video or audio, and, most helpfully, as a transcript. Interviewees range from confident to quite cautious about the imminence of the "singularity" that will result from the creation of a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, with Google's Peter Norvig at the cautious end of the spectrum. Scan reading the transcripts gives you a good sense of the spread of opinion.  If this kind of thing interests you, then this 15 page summary [1.3 MB PDF] of the issues surrounding the singularity, from which the extract below is taken, is worth reading.

"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Several technologies are often mentioned as heading in this direction: Artificial Intelligence, direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, and ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.  A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human."

Becta's process for giving new shape to the e-strategy for education in England

Clickable thumbnail of larger image from Becta document

Harnessing Technology: Learning in the 21st Century, a Call to Action [8 pages, 3 MB PDF] - has just been published by Becta as the introduction for a series of policy seminars concerning the e-learning strategy. These take place between September and November 2007, and they lead up to a National Conference to be run by Becta on 6 November (election, if called, permitting).  Click on the thumbnail image above to see the timetable, process, and some of the people involved.

Thanks to Jacob Blandy for extracting these images from the Becta document.

China's second largest privately held media firm forms partnership with UK e-learning company

According to a press release issued today by LP+  (with quotes from Doug Brown, Head of the Technology Futures Unit at the English Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), Steve Beswick, head of education at Microsoft UK, Mehool Sanghrajka, CEO of LP+, and Bruno Wu, head of the apparently intermittently web site less Sun Media Investment Group) LP+ (whose newly appointed Executive Chairman is Stephen Heppell) and Sun Media "are going to build the largest e-learning platform in the world", providing a learning platform for 20 million Chinese in schools in 20 Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.

The press release makes no direct mention of this, but as I listened blearily to an interview with Bruno Wu on this morning's 6 a.m. national news, I got the impression that Sun Media has bought or taken a stake in LP+, which would be consistent with one of the press release's quotes from Wu: "This is also exciting for me because it’s a partnership with a UK company to bring Chinese technology to the global education market."

ICT in Higher Education: what do prospective students want and expect?

Source: JISC MORI report, published September 2007

"Fundamentally, this age group suspects that if all learning is mediated through technology, this will diminish the value of the learning."

During June 2007 the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned Ipsos MORI to undertake research among prospective university students to understand:

• current levels of ICT provision at school/college
• expectations of ICT provision at university
• differences between expectation of ICT provision and that which is provided by HE institutions.

The study forms part of a bigger piece of research being undertaken by JISC to better understand student expectations of ICT provision.

This is a "must read" report, produced by researchers without an ICT axe to grind, which provides a wide range of current insights into how university-bound late teenagers in a developed country view, think about and use (and not...) ICT.

The full 40 page report is available on the JISC web site as a 1 MB PDF.

Google switches on Presentation, its competitor to Microsoft's PowerPoint

Here is a link to the announcement on the Official Google Blog about Presentation, which is part of the Google Docs family, and which offers a simple web-based "slide" creator. Expect Google to very soon launch its wiki, based on Jotspot (acquired by Google last year). The arguments for educational providers to give all their staff and learners Google accounts are getting steadily more persuasive, even without taking account of the potentially massive savings to be made in infrastructure and support costs.

Big IT is taking notice of One Laptop Per Child

Nortel provides telecommunications infrastructure and services and has annual revenues of around USD 10 billion. Here is a September 12 piece about One Laptop Per Child by John Roese, Nortel's CTO. Nortel develops, makes, and sells the stuff that enables networked devices to connect to each other. So it is no surprise that Roese is keen on "hyper-connectivity", which he defines as "a state in which the number of network connections exceeds the number of humans using the network". But the point about Roese's piece is that the evidence it provides that "big IT" is taking notice of OLPC, and most certainly does not see it is as a the work of a "bunch of well-meaning open source amateurs", as it is sometimes characterised. 

Norvig, Wiliam, and Selinger - keynotes from ALT's 2007 Conference. Plus useful interview with Norvig.

[Updated 13/9/2007 with links in notes section to BBC and Custom PC interviews with Peter Norvig, on 22/9/2007 with this link to a post by Ian Harford quoting in full Norvig's  reply to his question about user involvement in "ranking" web sites, and on 4/10/2007 with this link to Theorising from Data, which is a long presentation about how Google extracts meaning from data.]

You can access the full keynote presentations from the 4-6 September 2007 Association for Learning Technology* Conference as large files that can be viewed within Elluminate from the ALT-C 2007 web site. More open format versions due over the next week or so.

What I found most interesting was the dovetailing between Dylan Wiliam's absolutely gripping talk and Peter Norvig's more laid-back one.

Both concentrated in part on what can improve the progress that learners in formal education make, without increasing costs.

In different ways they each identified the key as "better formative feedback"; and I was left feeling that one particular enabler of progress would be some sustained collaboration between i) academic and industry researchers in the online testing domain, and ii) the engineers behind systems like Google's own translation tools. The reason I think this is that each are concerned with drawing out semantic meaning from large amounts of complex multifaceted data; and I would love to be a fly on the wall at a seminar involving people from both these worlds.

Two other aspects of Norvig's talk that struck me hard were this diagram from Adrian Sannier, of Arizona State University, which illustrates the rationale (on our partner's development curve not our own) behind ASU's decision to make very extensive use of Google Apps (for example Gmail) for its learners (and staff?), rather than providing its own:

Source: Peter Norvig's keynote presentation at ALT-C 2007

and this explanation of the practical meaning of the 2 standard deviations of performance difference that Benjamin Bloom found between learners taught normally, and learners given (unaffordable) individual tuition. (Use of mastery learning produced 1 standard deviation of difference.)

Source: Peter Norvig's keynote presentation at ALT-C 2007

The conclusion to Norvig's talk was that most education should be:

• centred on engaging, real-world projects;
• explored in teams;
• organised so that teachers are facilitators and can point to theoretical knowledge when it is needed  ("which is less than you’d think").

Finally that "Different students learn differently. But let them figure it out from the world full of information, don’t try to create materials ahead of time."

Note. I spent some of the time in the run-up to and during ALT-C organising media interviews with a tolerant Peter Norvig; and with luck these will appear during week beginning 10/9/2007 in Computing, on the BBC's Digital Planet [MP3 file of 10/9/2007 broadcast], as well as in Custom PC, which I am linking to despite its vile pop-up adverts. I also arranged a brief interview between Norvig and Rhona Sharpe (who with Frances Bell is newly appointed as a co-editor of the ALT Journal). When and if the latter is published it will have some news about a Google service that is imminent.

* I have half-time employment with ALT.

TerraNet - a mesh network based on mobile phones

Serendipity led me from a short BBC World Service piece flowing from the ALT conference to TerraNet AB. a Swedish start-up that has developed a way of enabling mobile phones to communicate directly with each other (rather than via the operator's network of masts) and with the internet via any internet-connected device fitted with a TerraNet USB interface. The TerraNet web site, from where the images above are taken, is short on detail, but the interview with TerraNet founder Anders Carlius (whose LinkedIn profile pulls no punches), a few minutes into this BBC Podcast, is worth listening to.

Machine translation methods - help in a crude comparison

Udated 26 April 2008

Something seems to be happening in the machine translation world. I've set up a crude (and methodologically somewhat flawed) comparison of two of the main methods (rules-based, and probabilistically-based). If you can spare 15 minutes, please contribute. [Link no longer active.] View results.

(For more on probabilistically-based machine translation, see 21 minutes into this May 2007 talk "Theorizing from data" by Google's Peter Norvig.)

"University Chapters" - a way to get involved in OLPC

Source: OLPC wiki

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) announced that during Autumn 2007 it will launch a University Programme, under which interested students and staff can create "OLPC University Chapters" at their institutions.

Of the 6 institutions so far mentioned (9 September 2007) on the University Programme area of the OLPC Wiki, 3 are in the US, 1 is in Europe (Macedonia), and 2 are in Latin America (Columbia and Peru).  This is the kind of thing you'd imagine that the British Computing Society, or the Information and Computer Sciences Subject Centre might promote in the UK.

Walter Bender writes in the 8/9/2007 OLPC News:

"University chapters: Olin College started a university chapter on Wednesday, and are drafting a model for other universities to follow. People from other universities are encouraged to help define the model."