I love the informatics program at Irvine
That may come as a shock to you since I bitch about it on a regular basis, but there is nowhere else I would rather be. The program challenges and rewards me every day for the work I put into following the trail, and I know that I am building the strength to one day blaze my own out in the mental wilderness.
Soldiering on with the landscape metaphor, the program itself exists in the borderlands between the hard and soft sciences. It is a place in which one can discuss Heidegger and network topologies in the same sitting. The junction of these two sides of academia, along with the passionate belief shared by everyone in the department that life can become richer through interaction with computers is… well, it brings me hope.
Computers will never solve the world problems on their own, and technology will never prevent people from having to work. Perhaps, even, those are facile goals to begin with. What computers can do, however, is make solving the world’s problems a little bit easier to understand. And if we can make people understand, they are better equipped for the tasks ahead.
In that respect, today was an excellent day at school. Professor Jain held a provocative lecture on search that provided me with new insight into ontologies, and Marvin Minsky held another on intelligent machines that provided a suitable complement in understanding the proper way to analze data in a system. It turns out that in both cases the proper way to handle the organization and analysis of information is to handle it several ways. Having multiple representations of the same set of data better equips us to understand how to solve our problems.
Miller’s magic number comes to mind as a starting point... but it's already late and I have to stop telling myself stories to put my weary head to rest.
P.S. I am converting a swath of Java to C# at work currently, and I have to say it is an excellent method of re-learning both languages in thier intricacies. I had totally forgotten about static constructors.
Soldiering on with the landscape metaphor, the program itself exists in the borderlands between the hard and soft sciences. It is a place in which one can discuss Heidegger and network topologies in the same sitting. The junction of these two sides of academia, along with the passionate belief shared by everyone in the department that life can become richer through interaction with computers is… well, it brings me hope.
Computers will never solve the world problems on their own, and technology will never prevent people from having to work. Perhaps, even, those are facile goals to begin with. What computers can do, however, is make solving the world’s problems a little bit easier to understand. And if we can make people understand, they are better equipped for the tasks ahead.
In that respect, today was an excellent day at school. Professor Jain held a provocative lecture on search that provided me with new insight into ontologies, and Marvin Minsky held another on intelligent machines that provided a suitable complement in understanding the proper way to analze data in a system. It turns out that in both cases the proper way to handle the organization and analysis of information is to handle it several ways. Having multiple representations of the same set of data better equips us to understand how to solve our problems.
Miller’s magic number comes to mind as a starting point... but it's already late and I have to stop telling myself stories to put my weary head to rest.
P.S. I am converting a swath of Java to C# at work currently, and I have to say it is an excellent method of re-learning both languages in thier intricacies. I had totally forgotten about static constructors.
1 Comments:
At 12:34 AM,
Jatindar Tiku said…
Back about 30 years ago, just a little bit before your time an interview with a professor at Caltech was published by TIME magazine on the occasion of some body's unveiling of a computer that was given an instruction to push the block off the platform. The machine equipped with wheels and cameras wheeled itself down the hall looking into rooms till it found one where there was a block on a platform, it then wheeled itself in and carried out the instruction. The question posed to the expert was, "Sir it looks like computer intelligence is going to be competing with Human intelligence pretty soon, If this happens where will your allegiance lie. The man calmly replied "to the superior intelligence ofcourse." In the same conversation commenting on the over reliance on computers he was asked what he thought of that phenomenon and if this state of affirs wouldn't lead to a situation where the computers would take over. He agreed and said we are voluntarily handing over more and more stuff to the computers and at some point they would probably feel all powerful and want to take over and the only recourse we would have would be to pull the plug and we wouldn't dare.
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