Tim O’Reilly‘s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo touched upon this. I have written about this before as well, and Nova Spivack adds his voice to a trend that you can call uqbiquitous computing, ambient computing and many other words. I just call it computing everywhere.
It’s easy to make all this sound very scifi. It’s easy to bring up fears of Skynet. What I like to think about is the potential for such efforts to have an impact in so many different areas. In a recent episode of Cranky Geeks, Whitfield Diffie, VP at Sun and a guru in the Crypto world talked about Street View and about people adding their own images, which would allow us to revisit a region after a period of years, to build the kind of composite images that something like photosynth enables. The challenge will be how we make all these streams of data available, how we leverage them, and how we protect them. No trivial task, but one we can address. We must. I missed most of Clay Shirky‘s talk at Web 2.0 Expo, but the point he made right in the beginning was that we don’t suffer from information overload, but rather a “filter failure”. In other words, the problem is not from the volume of information available, but the inability of the filters we have used over the years to keep up with the information explosion. Now image this information coming to us everywhere. Now imagine how critical good filters will be. The challenge of the petascale era, whether in science or the general information age is going to be how we harness these information streams, and how we keep them suitably democratic. Should be very interesting to watch all this happen
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3 Comments
Passive filters or smart agents ? I vote for the latter, and cite as an example the spam filtering, which sometimes has you looking at your spam folder to pick messages from website registrations, ebay sellers that try to contact you etc. An intelligent software agent must be an extension of yourself; learn your habits, preferences, moods at various times of the day and week, and allow through the filter what's most appropriate.
A mix. Smart agents are the preferred solution, but passive filters have their place as well and can be quite effective.
A mix. Smart agents are the preferred solution, but passive filters have their place as well and can be quite effective.
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[...] appropriate analytic systems data collection is somewhat meaningless. We have talked a lot about computing everywhere, about research streaming, etc. We haven’t talked enough about filter failure. We also [...]