Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
It’s been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I’ve been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the "semantics" meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word "semantics" in their pitches. And of course there have been some fundings [...]
Read this fun article that lists and defines some of the key concepts that every post-singularity transhumanist meta-intellectual should know! (via Kurzweil) Related Posts:Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous IdeasCollective Intelligence 2.0Simulated Universes and the Nature of ConsciousnessScientists Discuss their Beliefs in the UnknownHuman-Brained Monkeys Pose Ethical Challenge
KurzweilAI.net has published an article I wrote redefining the meaning of Web 3.0. Basically, I am proposing that Web 3.0 include a set of emerging technologies that are all reaching new levels of maturity at the same time. Related Posts:Metaweb and Radar NetworksWhat is the Semantic Web, Actually?New York Times Article About the Emerging Semantic [...]
John Markoff’s New York Times article discusses the term "Web 3.0" and equates it with the next evolution of the Web, in which he predicts a move towards more intelligent applications. First of all I want to say that I hope the use of the term "Web 3.0" in the article doesn’t distract from the [...]
I’ve read several blog posts reacting to John Markoff’s article today. There seem to be some misconceptions in those posts about what the Semantic Web is and is not. Here I will try to succinctly correct a few of the larger misconceptions I’ve run into: The Semantic Web is not just a single Web. There [...]
A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt: Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But [...]
NOTES Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93 Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST License — This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed. If you would like to distribute a version of thisarticle, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from yourversion, thanks. Printable version — Click here to download [...]
This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness — providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers. Related Posts:Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous IdeasSimulated Universes and the Nature of ConsciousnessThe Metaweb: The Global [...]
Below is the text of my bet on Long Bets. Go there to vote. “By 2050 no synthetic computer nor machine intelligence will have become truly self-aware (ie. will become conscious).” Spivack’s Argument: (This summary includes my argument, a method for judging the outcomeof this bet and some other thoughts on how to measure awareness…) [...]
This article discusses a new research project at Google where they are working on a way to run contextual ads on your computer that reflect what is taking place in the room around you. The technology works by using the computer microphone to make brief snippet recordings of your room where you are. It then [...]
Sorry I didn’t post much today. I pulled an all-nighter last night working on Web-mining algorithms and today we had back to back meetings all day. I just came back from a really good product team meeting facilitaed by Chris Jones on our product messaging. It’s really getting simple, direct, clear and tangible. Very positive. [...]
My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join [...]
Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel’s perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It’s still a [...]
A new mathematical technique provides a dramatically better way to analyze data, such as audio data, radar, sonar, or any other form of time-frequency data. Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory [...]
Researchers continue to make progress in fusing living neurons with computer chips: The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to [...]
Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization [...]
Yesterday, the first public open-source release of Open IRIS was annnounced. IRIS is a Java-based desktop semantic personal information manager developed by SRI (with help from my own company, Radar Networks — we provided a some of our early semantic object libraries and a native triplestore, and some work on UI; note that our own [...]
Introduction: This article proposes the creation of a new open, nonprofit service on the Web that will provide something akin to “collective self-awareness” back to the Web. This service is like a “Google Zeitgeist” on steroids, but with a lot more real-time, interactive, participatory data, technology and features init. The goal is to measure and [...]
The Edge has published mini-essays by 119 "big thinkers" on their "most dangerous ideas" — fun reading. The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about [...]
I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary here. This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for using biofeedback to guide brainstates, in order to improve memory. Here’s a [...]
A group of computer scientists have come up with a mathematical technique to detect surprising features in dense information streams. They tested their method by comparing it to what human’s considered surprising, and the results were… surprisingly good! A mathematical model of surprise could be very useful in next-generation information systems, user-interfaces, situation rooms, and [...]
Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS — an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my [...]
Amazon has launched a new service that seeks to create a marketplace for human intelligence on the Net. The idea is to utilize humans like one might utilize intelligent agents, to help complete tasks that humans do better than computers — for example like image adjustments, formatting, tagging and marking up content, adding metatdata to [...]
George Dyson wrote a nice piece on his impressions from a visit to Google, and some speculations about the future of AI on the Net. Related Posts:Collective Intelligence 2.0Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous IdeasMust-Know Terms for the 21st Century IntellectualNew Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the NetAmazon Launches new Service that Harnesses [...]
Here is a good article from IBM that provides decent, not-overly-technical, overview of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web, and the value they offer. Related Posts:Radar Networks Profiled in Technology ReviewWeb 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…How the WebOS Evolves?Folktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology DistinctionNew Version of My "Metaweb" [...]
A cutting-edge research program is injecting human brain cells into monkey brains, to investigate whether this causes their brains to become more "human." This poses a potential ethical challenge: If the monkeys do become more human, would they be considered "human subjects" and be protected by ethical guidelines governing research onto humans? At which point [...]
Alex is a very smart parrot indeed. To the surprise of researchers, he understands the concept of zero, something which human children don’t grasp until they are 2 or 3 years old. Read more about Alex here. Related Posts:A Universal Classification of IntelligenceMust-Know Terms for the 21st Century IntellectualIs There Room for The Soul? – [...]