In our current work, we base snowflake personalization mostly on recommender techniques or matching between metadata that describe you and metadata that describe learning resources, music, etc. We sometimes also factor in context, like where you are.
One of the issues is of course to obtain detailed information about you- 23andme is a new company that takes this a level further by enabling you to have your personal DNA analyzed, so that you can “unlock the secrets of your own DNA”. There are some interesting medical research opportunities there as explained in the video clip from the d6 conference above.
I wonder if this could be the start of really personal services that are literally driven by your DNA, kind of like “other people with a DNA similar to yours also bought…” In any case, this is VERY fascinating – just think of what we could do if we knew your DNA, where you are, what you’re doing, whom you’re with, what you’re trying to achieve, etc. What cool services could we provide? What new opportunities for learning could we realize? How could we empower you to live the life you want?
Suggestions..? Thoughts..? Would love to hear from YOU!
It was great fun to keynote at the Moodlemoot in Antwerpen today. Maybe this was the first time I got to be on stage in my hometown
Martin Dougiamas (“best known as the guy who started Moodle”) kicked off over skype from Down Under. He talked about the success in uptake of moodle (44.000 sites, 20.000.000 users, 1.900.000 courses, …) which connects well with my intro a bit later on exponential growth. He then mentioned that he was a bit disappointed about how moodle is used pedagogically. Mostly, it is being used for handouts, forum, quizzes, assignments, … and there is not enough deep thinking about learning activities, sharing ideas, active research, etc.
VERY interestingly, moodle2.0 will include support for external repositories. The first release will include support for Mahara and the OU-UK’s mystuff (apparently locked behind a login screen). Martin was somewhat (understandably, for this audience) short on technical details, but I’d LOVE to know more… Please send me pointers!
This message connected well with the part of my talk where I presented our moodle-GLOBE bridge (slide 62 and beyond) – which you can try out for yourself (please do)! The basic idea is that it should be possible to upload content to a repository from moodle or to download content from a repository in moodle. We are interested in this because the moodle course context offers excellent opportunities for personalization. Martin didn’t mention that, so I changed that part of my presentation to “Moodle 2.0 3.0″
In any case, this was a fun event with a group of people who are actually trying – as someone mentioned – to look for opportunities to improve things rather than for excuses to do nothing! My kind of crowd…
As announced, I did a talk on the snowflake effect at the Academy of Science last Tuesday. The slides are below. You will notice that, after an introductory note about how bad we are at understanding exponential growth, I tried to connect to the theme of “brain, consciousness and mind” by starting from the Turing test, bridging to the need for intelligent support in order to deal with abundance, and then talking about the snowflake effect as a way to realize that. In typical Internet serendipity style, I had just read Paul Lamere’s blog post about his music recommender Turing test results: that gave me a nice way to tie the end of the presentation back to the start.
It seems like someone is actually reading this blog, because I was introduced as probably the youngest person in the audience – a comment triggered by my earlier blog post …
The talk went rather well, if I can believe the feedback from the audience… After me, Dirk Van Dyck talked about AI and neural networks. He emphasized the importance of feedback loops to create exponential growth, a nice addition to what I had presented. He also mentioned that we, humans, share 98.5% of our genes with a chimpanzee and 50% with … a banana – a nice factoid!
Beatrice de Gelder concluded the presentations and started by explaining that we will not understand how the brain works if we ignore emotions and the body. I think that is correct: there is a form of intelligence embodied (!) in my body. Of course, that doesn’t imply that all forms of intelligence must be contained in a body in a similar way. Her research focuses on how our brains deal with “body language” – a topic that previously apparently was hardly studied as everybody focused on how we deal with faces… Interesting. I am also quite puzzled by the notion of emotional contagion: we apparently feel happier in the presence of happy people – seems to me like that could create a feedback loop that results in exponential growth of happiness?
As often, the discussions afterwards were at least as interesting as the talks. The first question from the floor was whether blind people dream. I was not sure how that connected with the presentations, but it sure did make me think of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?“. I’m a bit annoyed that I didn’t demonstrate the collective intelligence I mentioned in my own talk by just googling the question and finding out that, of course, blind people do dream. Another participant asked whether I was in favor of open peer review and more transparent forms of democracy. I answered that I was, but that we need to organize that in such a way that we actually get wisdom of the crowds, for instance by making sure that we get independent opinions rather than group think.
As so often, there was some apprehension about using software to filter out more relevant stuff from the abundant sources, nicely formulated by the president of the academy as a potential cause of the decline of civilization I often get this question and I am not sure that I really understand it. Somehow, people are comfortable with the idea that they can’t talk with everybody, or read everything, or listen to all music ever produced, etc. when this is caused by a lack of physical access to everybody or everything. Now that we more and more do have access to everybody and everything, and need help to filter out what is most relevant and valuable to us, that help is a treat to our identity or civilization?
The most to the point remark I got was from Irina Veretennicoff, who raised the issue that I only talked about the 1 billion of us who live in abundance and not about the 5 billion who have more pressing needs like shelter, food and physical wellness. Point taken. I should have made that point myself early on.
Finally, I really appreciated the nice comments I received over the reception: thanks! And I am very intrigued by some comments on the reasons why people feel uncomfortable with the notion of abundance. There may be a link to christian history and the notion of sin? Someone also recommend “The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age” by Simon Schama. This is certainly a theme I would like to explore further: what is it that makes so many people so uncomfortable with the notion of abundance. I’d be very interested in any other suggestions you may have!
And before I forget: many thanks to the folks who took me to dinner. That was Serious Fun!
A few days ago, I attended a session of a series on “Brain, Consciousness and the Mind“, organized by the Royal Flemish Academy of Science and the Arts. If that sounds like a super venerable institution, then that is probably because I guess it is a super venerable institution. The venue is a spectacular neo-classical building next to the royal palace in the heart of Brussels. An interesting side effect is that the average age of the audience was about double my own – or at least that’s how I felt. I guess that you only become a member of the academy after a long and productive life in the arts or sciences. That’s ok with me. But it doesn’t result in a grouping that is very representative of active practitioners, it seems to me. Two of the other much-yuonger-than-average people in the room were the speakers .
Never mind, this was quite an interesting evening. The first speaker was Dirk Hermans, from my own university. His research has shown that people who are susceptible to develop a depression typically have more general memories, which may be caused by a trauma that people avoid remembering, by not having specific memories at all. What I found interesting is that this was based on sound empirical research with many repeated experiments with slightly different groups and detailed analysis. That is something I see so little of in Technology Enhanced Learning! Also, for an outsider like me at least, this struck me as a highly unexpected observation. I wonder how many of these observations could be made in learning…
The second speaker was Dirk De Ridder from the University of Antwerp, who talked about how implants in the brain can maybe some day be used to treat pathological criminals or pedophiles. Some of the things he talked about were quite a bit beyond what I had imagined neurologists do: for instance, did you now they take pictures of the brain while people are having sex (in a scanner!) ? And no, there is not one region of the brain that is responsible for X or Y, but there definitely seems to be a network of modules that are interconnected and it is possible to influence those networks, for instance to treat phantom pain… I wonder how much research of this kind has been done on effects in the brain when people learn. Really: please do let me know if you can point me to any such research!
Overall, I very much liked the more multi-disciplinary nature of this evening. I also had an extra reason to attend, as I will be speaking at the next session this Tuesday. Of course, the snowflake effect will be the theme of my talk. I think I may start from the Turing test – this is after all a series on the brain, consciousness and the mind. Maybe I will say a few words about why I am not so interested in traditional AI, which reminds me too much of Descartes. I guess that I will then try to make the point that, in a world of abundance, some help is needed that could pass the Turing test in that it is as good as humans are in assisting us with the selection of music, food, clothing, media … and learning opportunities. I might end with some remarks on privacy. Any suggestions for approaching this in a different way? Examples I could show?
Anyway, I look forward to the opportunity to talk to this audience about some of the topics that keep me busy. I wonder what will be the reaction in this rather different than usual audience…
Grid-based, heavy-weight computing infrastructures, driven as they largely have been by the needs of researchers requiring High Performance Computing or High Throughput Computing, do not necessarily address the different needs of scientists across the full range of research areas and disciplines. Consequently, what we now observe is a ‘grass roots’ led appropriation by these latter groups of more flexible, lightweight, easily configurable and rapidly deployable technologies originating from the Web sphere.
Scientific American calls it science2.0. They write:
A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.
In Scientific American, the spokesperson for Nature seems to get it: “Our real mission isn’t to publish journals but to facilitate scientific communication,” he says…
IEEE is also trying to make progress in this area, with its “computing now” initiative:
I saw a tremendous opportunity to finally catch up with the rest of the community that is living and breathing Web 2.0, social networking, long tail, and global knowledge. Could we finally convert the one-way, broadcast model of IEEE CS publications into two-way communication between the authors and the community?
This is going to be so much fun, and we’re certainly planning to try some things – more later. For now, I think that Boris Zivkovic sums up my ideas quite well:
“About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread. I wouldn’t like to predict where all this is going, but I’d be happy to bet that we’re going to like it when we get there.”
In any case, this is VERY fascinating – just think of what we could do if we knew your DNA, where you are, what you’re doing, whom you’re with, what you’re trying to achieve, etc. What cool services could we provide? What new opportunities for learning could we realize? How could we empower you to live the life you want?
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