Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Identity - The Philosophical Challenge For the Web

I work in local search at Microsoft which means, like all those working in this space, I have to deal with an identity crisis on a daily basis. Currently, most local search products - like Bing's and Google's - leverage multiple data sets to derive a digital model of the world that users can then interact with. In creating this digital model, multiple statements have to be conflated to form a unified representation. This can be extremely challenging for two reasons. Firstly, the system has to decided when two records are intended to denote the same real world entity. Secondly, the designers of the system have to determine what real world entities are and how to describe them.

For example, if a business moves is that the same business or the closure of one and the opening of another? What does it mean to categorize a business? The cafe in Barnes and Noble is branded Starbucks but isn't actually part of the Starbucks chain - should is surface as a separate entity or is it 'hidden' within the bookshop as an attribute ('has cafe')?

Thinking through these hard representational problems is as much part of the transformative trends going on in the tech industry as are those characterized by terms like 'big data' and 'data scientist'.

Another example can be found in my recent interaction with spotify where I have the option of the following albums from Rush:

The only distinction I can see here is, upon drilling down, the tracks appear to have been published by different sources. They are, as far as I can tell, identical in all ways. There is a slight variation in the cover art that, if you squint a little you may be able to perceive.

As the online world continues to move towards knowledge the Ph in PhD will become more and more useful.

Strings are not Meanings : Part 5

I'm still chewing on Nöe's book (criticism of which has to revolve around his statements regarding 'the world [just] showing up [for us]'). In the meantime, I'm back to reading Turney's blog, and this post which covers a few of the points that I first read in Pinker's books. Turney (and those he quotes - Minsky, Quine) are certainly working with the model-the-world-then-reason approach to consciousness. In reading Nöe, I definitely get that feeling that he's defining a club that we're just not cool enough to join.

To better understand the book, and its position in the discussion, I'm looking for any reviews that summarize it and connect it with other work.

• Uncommon Descent
• American Scientist: "Out of Our Heads is a manifesto of hyperbolic claims resting on sketches of argument"
• Stark Reality

Strings are not Meanings: Part 4

I’m still making my way through the Alva Nöe, but some thoughts that came to mind when reading Fernando’s update:

1. An ontology may well be considered a reduction (of the infinite kind). We might just be replacing one system of symbols (strings) with another (‘semantic objects’). However, this may still be a very useful thing to do. In addition, these new symbols can still be related to the external world of objects.
2. I don’t think that I disagree with our integration/leveraging/exploitation of the world ‘out there’ as a point of reference for our ‘internal’ processes. That being said:
1. We do have to make a link to those external things, and if a more compact or mnemonic ‘internal’ symbology is a useful and efficient mechanism, why can’t that be related rather than ‘raw’ strings?
2. There are plenty of things that we think and talk about that have no external reference at all.
3. Language itself requires linkages (referents), but I can’t point to language.

Regarding Nöe’s book, my current reaction is that he struggles with language and metaphor from the very beginning.

• “Mind is life” page 42
• “Mind is the lower boundary of consciousness” page 45
• “I use the term ‘consciousness’ to mean, roughly, experience” page 8
• [consciousness is something we do] page 8

Do we ‘do’ our experiences?

Regarding the apparent duality of attributing minds to those with whom we interact (children, lovers, colleagues) and the scientific approach of cold objectivism – I have no problem with this at all. Perhaps I’m a lobster…

At any rate – it is a very stimulating read. @Fernando – I’m looking forward to your thoughts on the book.

Update it is interesting to see how Nöe makes claims about neural plasticity in building up his arguments that are the central theme (to be refuted) of Pinker’s book The Blank Slate, and yet Nöe doesn’t cite Pinker. Nöe’s account of the ferret visual cortex experiments is (if memory serves) not in line with Pinker’s account in terms of the perfection of mutability. I believe Pinker indicated that the experiment produced some sort of visual system but not a perfect solution.

Ethics of Climate Change

I found this article in Scientific American to be very engaging. It clearly shows the relationship between ethics and economics, and shows that how we approach climate change is not 'just' a scientific challenge, but also a philosophical one - in this case gated on a simple economic principle.

Searching for Turing

Some times I find myself parking blog posts in Bloglines that I intend to go back and re-read and post on, but never quite find the right angle. This was the case with this post found on BattelleMedia:

When A Visual Search Engine Is No Longer "Proof of Concept..."

...we'll know we're close to cracking the Turing Test. For now, here's Tiltomo, another proof of concept visual engine, courtesy Silicon Beat.

Why did I park it? Well, I care a lot about the Turing Test - so any mention of it by influential journalists gets scrutiny. In this case, Battelle seems to be saying that a viable image search engine requires the same sort of machine intelligence that the Turing Test requires. One might think that Battelle got things the wrong way around, and that he meant: any machine capable of passing the Turing Test would be a suitable platform on which to build an image search engine. This is not the case as it would require a component for visual interpretation to translate the image to the UI for the test (text). Secondly, it is not we who would crack the test - it is a test of a machine. We could certainly create the machine (or a machine capable of creating a machine capable of ...), but the machine itself would be required to pass the test.

There is also the argument that a machine may be intelligent without being capable of passing the Turing Test. I mean, R2 could probably host a pretty good visual search engine but he isn't much of a conversationalist.

The genius of Turing's formulation of the problem was that it replaced the ill defined and unsatisfactory question 'can machines think?' or 'are machines intelligent?' with a performance based question which requires social context (dialogue). The task of image search has a different, utilitarian setting which - in analogy to current search interfaces - requires no conversation or dialogue of any kind.

How important is it to preserve the scope of the test by requiring that it be text based? Clearly, I believe strongly that it is important, so look for a follow up post on that one.

Barney also writes about Tiltomo.