The Scenarios for the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web has been a very popular topic in the popluar press and technical and academic resesarch literatures. This promising extension to the current Web has raised a number of expectations. These expectations could be potrayed as three different perspectives of the Semantic Web as follows:[1]

• a universal library, to be readily accessed and used by humans in a variety of information use contexts;
• the backdrop for the work of computational agents completing sophisticated activities on behalf of their human counterparts;
• a method for federating particular knowledge bases and databases to perform anticipated tasks for humans and their agents.

[1] Marshall, C. C. and Shipman, F. M. 2003. Which semantic web?. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Nottingham, UK, August 26 - 30, 2003). HYPERTEXT '03. ACM Press, New York, NY, 57-66.

Bottom Down and Bottom Up

Categories systems undoubtely make the data, information and knowledge easily to combine and communicate each other. They are two kinds of categories systems:

• Bottom down categories: the normal categories like Google's and Yahoo's.
• Bottom up categories: emerging tagging systems, user-generated labels created in free association with an object like a photo or a webpage.

Semantic Web Comes

The widespread use of internet technologies has created a wave of innovations and interactions leading to a major impact in almost every areas of human activities, albeit a large number of these applications were not foreseen thirty years ago, when the Internet architecture was developed. Besides, in only 14 years the World Wide Web became the greatest network accessible repository of human knowledge. It contains around 3 billion documents, which are accessed by over 500 million world-wide users. Moreover, the Internet is continuing to evolve to integrate other technologies such as multimedia and mobile technologies. On the other hand, information overload and poor aggregation of contents make the current Web inadequate for automatic transfers of information. As a consequence, the current Web is evolving for a new generation called Semantic Web, in which data and services are understandable and usable not only by humans but also by computers. "Moreover, the Semantic Web may further evolve to a Sentient Web, which is a further new generation of Web with capabilities for sentience. As a consequence, new technologies and concepts are being developed and new ways of utilizing or integrating older and new technologies are being constantly developed." [1]


[1] Mário Freire and Manuela Pereira, Eds., The introduction in: "Encyclopedia of Internet Technologies and Applications", Department of Informatics, University of Beira Interior, Portugal

Challenge to Traditional Software Engineering

Microsoft and Google have combined with Sun to fund an new Lab in University of California, Berkeley to the development of new approach for software development.

In traditional software engieerning, work is completed in sequential stages starting from system concept design to development, assessment or test, deployment and operation. This approach is often too slow. Instead of infrequent, well-tested upgrades, code for internet services is continually being modified on the fly. This fix-it-as-you-go approach enables speedier deployment, but it also requires a large technical support group to make sure operations are not disrupted as bugs are resolved.

The message from Prof. David Patterson in UBC, the founding director of this lab: "right now, it takes a large company employing hundreds of really smart people to support internet service". The new approach from the lab is to develop technology that eliminates the need for such a large organization, opening up innovation opportunities for small groups or even individual entrepreneurs. It is obvious that the big software companies, such as Microsoft and Google, welcome the birth of this new approach. Thus they could save lots of human resources and financial resources for the company.

According to Prof.David Patternson, the new approach could achieve this goal by applying statistical mahine learning - the same technology used successfully in the recent antonomous vehicle grand challenge - to the development of computer systems.

Disciplines in Artificial Intelligence

I have seen a discussion about the disciplines (a.k.a. the academic fields) that comsist of the strong AI research (strong AI is the implemenation of real intelligence; weak AI is the mimic of the intelligent behaviours) on the usernet comp.ai.philosophy. Summarising the discussion, there are seven distinct disciplines as follows:

• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Computational Neuroscience
• Electronic Engineering (a.k.a Eletronics and Computer Science)
• Information Retrieval
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computer Science (emphasis on Artificial Intelligence)

To my knowledge, what I am wondering is whether the researches related to robotics are missing here. If not, which one or more of the disciplines above spots it? Or should we list it as the eighth? Robotics is the first impression for the people to understand the disciplines/technologies within the AI research. Although the research of robotics include many of the disciplines above, we could not decouple every piece of them. If that is case, I think the list should have only one item, i.e. mathematics, because mathematics is foundation of all of the disciplines listed, even for the robotics. The our discussion about the discipline in the Strong AI research is meaningless.

Pizza Order in the Semanic Web?!

Untamed fever has been annoying me for nearly 3 weeks. That is too bad! I even could not do any work at all. At this time, I really understand the truth value of health, in particular for a young energic man. I have no any ideas how the virus could visit me and stay here for so long time this time. For the sake of God, it happens during Xmas, this should-be-lovely season:(

I have to choose reading as my normal life because I really feel that is only thing I can do except eating the medicines. Occasionally I picked up this piece from some website (playing with sound please). It gives me a really strong injection at this time. One thing, it is very happy to see this kind of application people could imagine in our future life, which combines many technologies together to deliver the services in such an intelligent fashion. The customers would not only get satisfactory services but also get considerate "unexpected" care. That is so cool! But on the other hand, I doubt how many people are willing to accept this application. It seems to integrate too many sensitive data into the applications. In the other words, too many sensitive data should not be open in such "wildness". The Semantic Web make the existing web to be a hugh data storing base. The applications built upon it could communicate and understand each other with the great assistance of the large amount of available structured data. However, it does not mean that everyone could not easily hold the control of the data without the authorisation, in particualr the sensitive data. Taking this example, I believe that nobody expect that their medical records are unveiled for the public, even used by the third party in their real applications. Sound horrible! Maybe I exaggerate this issue.

US Computer Science Eager for Funding

A report issued by the Defense Science Boards earlier this year describes computer science as having outgrown the Defense Department's capacity to support and fund the industry it largely created. In the absence of a transition strategy, the possibility of the United States losing its competitive edge in university research is now very real. Over the past four years, DARPA estimates that it has cut funding for university research for computer science by almost half. In congressional testimony, DARPA director Anthony Tether said that some research projects have moved out of universities and into industry, and described DARPA funding as having remained "more or less constant." At the NSF, funding has actually increased, though the portion of the proposals for computer science projects it sponsors has dropped from roughly one-third to 14 percent. "We are looking at a situation where perhaps 40 percent of the good proposals we get, we don't have the money to fund," said the NSF's Peter Freeman, citing the war in Iraq and natural disasters as higher priorities for government funding. The lack of university funding has shifted much of the burden for supporting research to the corporate realm, which typically only supports short-term projects that have an evident business value. Since 1999, MIT's computer science department has seen the portion of its funding supplied by DARPA drop from 62 percent to 24 percent. As research funding becomes a lower priority for a government grappling with an escalating budget crisis, there is widespread concern that other nations, particularly China, could supplant the United States in the next 10 years as the world's leader in technological innovation. Evidence of this trend can be found in the facilities that many companies are establishing in China, India, and other countries, as well as the appearance of large new universities, such as one China recently opened with a capacity for 30,000 students.

[Source: ACM TECHNews Volume 7 Issue 873, December 2, 2005 ]

New Home is Coming!

Here will become my new home for my personal website. The original one is heavily out-of-date. I had thought for a long time to re-build it. What's more, I will blog and update my flying thoughts or any ideas from the research work at any time. Very nice! The only thing I am worrying about is the site is not my product. I could not control it totally even if I could edit the template. I don't wish that there is something wrong with it some day. Is that the really giant shoulder I could lean against?

Recently there have been a lot of discussions related to the fact that whether the blog could replace the traditional personal website in the era of Web 2.0. I have no clear ideas about it. At least I could not see any down sides of the traditional personal websites for Web 2.0. What I like of the blog is you could write the news(information) in the format of chronological records. That is one of the fashion I think helping to track the thinking process, which is very useful and precious for the academic research.

I have three blogs combined together to form my new personal website. They are David Liang | Home on the Internet, David Liang's Research, and David Liang's Knowledge Repository. More sites could be added later. Currently I will maintain these three. The descriptions of each site could be found in the anouncement section of the sites. The migration is still in the process!

Turst through Internet

What about trust between strangers who have no contact except through cyberspace? EBay claims more than 100 million registered users who buy and sell millions of items each day on the Internet.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston used hyperscan functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of subjects 1,500 miles apart engaged in a trust-based financial transaction game.

“Hyperscanning is the simultaneous scanning of the socially interacting brains of two or more people,” said P. Read Montague, a Baylor neuroscience professor. “We were very interested in how trust evolves when subjects are not near one another and anonymous to each other,” he said.

Montague and colleagues Brooks King-Casas and Steven Quartz measured how and when their subjects made trust decisions by measuring changes in blood flow where the “intention-to-trust mechanism” occurs in the brain.

Over time, subjects became less reactive and more proactive in their willingness to trust one another.

“The most intriguing results were that the intention to trust shifted in time and developed in a part of the brain that also does very basic reward learning,” Quartz said. “We have shown that trust, one of the highest-level concepts we possess, is a reflection of basic brain mechanisms.”

There are many different aspects of trust research activities. For example, happy people are more trusting than the sad people; altruism increases the trust; trust behaviours are correlated to naturally increased level of reproductive hormone oxytocin in the blood (neurobiology aspect of trust), etc.

[Trust Game--players exchange certain amounts of money they are initially given with the possibility of a greater return from their partners. Researchers study how much a person is willing to risk in assuming the other will play and pay by the rules — in effect how much trust can be created between the players.]

Google's Colorful Technologies

This paper introduced a list of the companies that Google has bought and will buy in the future. To my first impression, Google is a fast learner and a technology director. He could adapt the various, and even dying, technologies into its own technology blueprint and develop them into Google-featured packages, and then deliver speically cool Google services to users.

It seems that Google acquires the small companies to expand his services range, however, actually, it is a revolution and integration in the industry. Google could look out the perspectives of the dying technologies, save them, use them and finally earn money on them. That is the "D-Day" for those dying technologies. Is it a revolutionary turn?

Robots: True Face of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is the researchers' long-lasting dream to make computers/machines to act like human beings. Robots are the direct and explicit "product" to implement human's dream. Scientists make robots "playing" in the real life to replace persons' work. For example, robots can be used to find the victims in the collapsed buildings after earthquakes, or find the victims down inside the mines after collapse, or search for the livings after terrorists' attack. Robots become more and more intelligent. However, the tough job for the AI scientist is still to writing the software/programming to make smart robots. RoboCup US Open is an important annual event for the development field of robots. The example of this year event is that computer-programmed Sony Aibos look for the ball using cameras on their noses, communicate with each other over a wireless network and attempt to score goals, with the exception of the specially-programmed goalkeeping dog.

Magically, American researchers devised a small robot which can cope itself with the spare parts recently. This is the ever big step to prove that the ability to reproduce is not unique to biology. Their long-term plan is to design robots made from hundreds or thousands of identical basic modules. This report gave out a detailed story. Combining this with the biology of self-repair and of replication would make huge changes to the field of robotics. More important, I think, is that scientists have decreased the distance between robots and human to some extent. I.Rotot probably becomes really true in our future life. What will happen then?

Computer could not Liberate Human from Grading

In my previous blog "Can Machine Understand What You mean?", Qualrus was introduced to be used to grade student's assignments, in particular essay. I could not agree this brave experiment. The reason is to my current knowledge computers don't hold the abilities to give out a judgement for the rightness or wrong. As for the personal subjective ideas in the essay, it is impossbible to be graded by machines.

Similiar news about Brent's software makes me believe with no doubt that computers could not replace humans/teachers to do essay grading work. It is a big challenge, but will not succeed under the currrent circumstances due to the machine's lack of re-birthing and evolveing of new concepts from old concepts, and connecting between relevant relationships to compose reasoning process naturally (to my sense). The huge backend behind this grading software must be a huge knowledge base, or simply a huge database, which provides information sources (example sentences, already-scored papers) for the comparison work between students' essays submitted to the system and sample essays in the backend source then give out a score finally based on those similiar-quality examples. There are different ways to express the same idear! How we could guarantee the consistency and integrality of the sources will be unresolvable with our current technologies!

To the end, computers are still machines! They are operated by the human beings. Actually the origins of this kind of software/systems, I think, are coming from the people's desires to seek the equity. They do not hope that "different teachers grade different papers differently". I really don't want to know that the real answers for this kind of software is to free human beings from responsibilities. That will make us learn much faster how to cheat computers than human beings. It is the tragedy of advanced technologies!

First Site of Google

What a different feeling when I saw the raw Google! It was a coincidence when I surfed Internet Archive

This blog was just used to keep record for the first Google website!

What is relativism?

Moral relativism is the idea that moral principles have no objective standard, so states its dictionary definition. In its extreme, the view that there are no hard and fast rules on what is right and wrong, on which values are set and should be fought for. It is in contrast to absolutism, that there is one truth.

Currently relativism was being under attack in the British general election campaign. Under it, said Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative Party, traditional British values are "being trashed" as "the victims have become the agressors and the agressors have become the victims". It seems that Michael Howard is absolute not a relativism fan at all. How about British people?


[source: BBC News]

Over 200?!

I really could not find any reasons to refuse myself to go for a PowerBook for my next laptop. 200+ features in the new update to the OS X was unveiled to me. It really shocked to me. More than that, it enhanced my determinations to touch the fresh Apple and feel the real art in the science world.

Want a Powerbook!

It has been a long wish for me to have a Powerbook! That is so cool to operation on that machine and write your ideas on that beautiful machine. It seems like flying freely in the sky. Apple is a real art piece in the computer world!

All of my computer are all coming from Windows family. Windows is simple and efficient actually to our life and work. That is enough at all to our routine organizing and processing tasks, which is the real part of computing. However, Apple is more than that. It is not just limited on the computing, more about arts. Not any computer could do it. Apple bring us the enjoyments in front of cold machines.

I want to change. Only Apple could give me this opportunity. With the release of news that Tiger will turn up soon, many new features, including Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, etc, definitely will bring a new revolution to the concepts of computing.

Limited Access to the Information?

What kind of information should be accessed by the public and what is not? I believe that it should depend on the countries. Different countries have various beliefs for this problem, also have different mechanisms to control the access right. Every country has her own privacy. That means some information must be protected by the government, not be accessed by the public.

This news reported that China still retains a tight control on the public access to some sensitive information sources, such as some information describing Tiananmen Square in 1989, Dalai Lama, and even Falun Gong, as well as some world famous media, for example, BBC.

In addition, the news said the filtering technologies in China is pervasive, sophisticated, effective, and dynamic in nature, changing along a variety of axes over time.

As a child when in China, it was true that I was always eager to listen to BBC radio about the world news and keen to find out the true side of the news. I still remembered during those years I did not know whether the news from BBC is subjective or objective though I know the principles of the news reporting is truth comes first always because I occasionally found out that some news from BBC radio was different from what I heard in our radio. I felt very strange about that because I did not know which source I should trust. That attracted me to listen to BBC more. What's more, it is not very easily to receive the signals of BBC, which covered a secret mask on BBC radio for me. Later, with the involvement of Internet in the exchange and communication of information, I could easily find the answers on the WWW. With the time being, everything seemed normal to me.

From the view of the technologies, information should be independent of any media and should be available to collect and process at any time. In my point of view, what we should do is to make sure the information sources themselve right. As for how to control them, it is an artificial and external factor. In the individual view, It is not appropriate to decide whether it is right to open the access to all the information to the public. Seriously governments should have their respective rights to cover a limited amount of information related to the security, which was decided by the country's constitution. We could not measure this issue with a standard accepted by most of the countries in the world.

Can Machine Understand What You mean?

Can machine really understand what you really want to express? Currently a computer program developed at the University of Missouri could grade essay and offer students writing advices. This program cost 6 years, called Qualrus, and has been testing on the pupils. It works by scanning text for keywords, phrases and language patterns. What students need to do is to load the paper into the program via the Web, like the common web-based submitting systems, and then they will get the instant feedback.

This news described this program in details. I believe that Qualrus is not the first such program, as I know, some colleges in the State use e-rater system to give students scores. I doubt the precision of such program. As for the choice questions in the exams, such as GRE, GMAT, LSAT, we could still discuss the future of such programs further. However, as for the essay student express their personal ideas and feelings with a paper, how does a cold and electrical machine differ between unadulterated and adulterated sentences, understand affecting feeling expressed within each line, and infer a conclusion by reasoning the strong logics in the arguments, etc.? If Qualrus really could give marks based on those stuffs, then he should be able to think itself as we do.... I don't know...

But Qualrus is a truly brave breakthrough in driving computer to think!

Ontology is Overrated?

This news reported that ontology, far frome being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of his useful life. I really do not believe this view.

Ontologies, as the backbone of most of the existing and potential application, is becoming more and more important. They are mainly used to organize the fractal knowledge in our routine life by providing a structure "tree" whose branches and nodes are the knowledge points. What we have is a vast and increasing number of the information. What we do not have is the well-organized knowledge distilled from the information sources, which is the real internal energy to drive the application running. Ontology provides us an infrastructure for this internal energy. The applications built on the top of it will not only run intelligently but also collaborate seamlessly.

I don't think ontology is overrated. The truth is ontology is rated and needed badly!

The Rule is Life is not fair

Being nice is the way to the success!

1. Life is not fair, get used to it.
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
3. You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car, until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to your talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Google' s Desktop Search--Beyond Search

Google has introduced a full version of its desktop-search software, with a developer's kit and support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers.

The Mountain View, Calif., company on Monday released a PC application for searching Microsoft Office documents, images, e-mail and Internet Explorer Web pages. Google Desktop, which had been in public beta for nearly five months, now includes search capabilities for video and music files, full PDFs and Web surfing history in three Web browsers, including the fast-growing Firefox.

It also includes a software developers kit, or SDK, so that outsiders can build new search plug-ins. Already, Google has built a plug-in to search conversations in the Trillian chat software.

Security plays a bigger part in the full version. Because the tool had been able to index privacy-sensitive documents--against users' wishes--the final product avoids indexing those Word and Excel files that are password-protected. It also allows people to block indexing of secure Web sites. Google previously had to update the software because of the potential for malicious hackers to capture some personal data.

More information

[Source:C|Net]

AI expert calls for e-defence for the UK

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’

20 Year Usenet Timeline

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.

Among the list, First mention of Microsoft, First review of the IBM-PC, First mention of Michael Jordan, First mention of the term 'search engine', First mention of Google and many interesting topics are mentioned. It is a good collection and stories house to retrieve the history!