Mª Pilar Guerra-Arias

Obligatory and only start of term post

mpguerra — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:14:24 +0000

So, this blog might be turning into a collection of lists…

Of interest today is the number of programming languages I have to/want to learn this term:

C++
Matlab (for the second time)
Android
Processing for Arduino
Iqr
I feel like I’m missing something else here…

On other news the new term has started and I’ve given up trying to keep the blog up to date.

Pili is…

mpguerra — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:42:36 +0000

Seeing as my attempt at keeping up to date with blogging my lecture notes has failed miserably and I’m procrastinating on finishing an essay on Turing’s “imitation game,” I leave you with a text file I found on my computer (presumably from doing some sort of search online)

pili is a swahili term for a chili pepper
pili is literally hanging from mount dikaios
pili is not surprising for a bicolano
pili is as useless as a post
pili is virulent
pili is the attractive one
pili is quite different
pili is not the regions center of trade and commerce
pili is not affected
pili is highly unreliable
pili is the secretary
pili is seeking first and second year law students for its summer internship program
pili is frequent and fruits ripen through a prolonged period of time
pili is needed ; understanding how pili are built will help us design effective anti-bacterial vaccines

Yikes!

2011.09.21 – Cognitive Science & Psychology: Mind, Brain and Behaviour – Week 1

mpguerra — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:10:10 +0000

This is where I attempt to pull together all the different ideas from the first lecture into one post. This is mainly for myself, but you never know who else will find it interesting…

Reading back on my notes it all seems a bit disjointed, but let’s see how this goes. This is just my understanding of what we heard so it might be wrong or misguided in places, but as we were told yesterday if you never make any mistake you will never learn… I’m sure someone will set me straight.

I guess the place to start is with what is the goal of CSIM and that is: How do we introduce technology into society in a way that it works for everyone? One good example of this not being fulfilled is mobile phones. They may be very powerful and have hundreds of features, but very often these are buried in so many menus and submenus that unless you read the manual cover to cover you will not be able to use it to its full potential. This may seem a bit of a trivial example, but one familiar to many people.

One proposal to solve this is to build technology that is sentient and therefore understands our needs and can fulfill them for us without the need for special expertise on how to interact with these machines. This would in turn make it accessible to everyone.

However, in order for us to build sentient machines we first need to understand what it means to be sentient. Back in 200AD the philosopher Plotinus came up with this question: “And we, who are we anyhow?” This question is still not understood and has remained unanswered to date. Now, how does building sentient machines help us to answer Plotinus question?

I’m going to park that for a minute (mainly because my notes from the lecture park that for a while) and talk about the two views on how we can achieve the goal of building sentient machines. The two views being:

Comptutational
Biological

The computational view is mainly being championed by a guy called Ray Kurzweil. He believes that there are 6 epochs of evolution that humanity has (we’re currently in Epoch 4) and will go through. This is best explained by the below image:

Ray Kurzweil's 6 Epochs of Evolution

As far as I can gather from the little reading I’ve done on this, he essentially believes that evolution into the next epoch will be driven by computational advances which will enable us to master the methods of biological evolution and use them to evolve ourselves in conjunction with technology.

The biological view centres around the brain and the idea that in order to “replace” a physical, biological brain, you first need to fully understand it. This could be through building a physical model, as was done many years ago when DNA’s molecular structure was discovered, or perhaps some other way we haven’t yet thought of.

The SPECS (Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems) research group at UPF is working towards the goal of building “robots” to insert into society so that they can co-exist with and help humans to improve their welfare and quality of life. There are 5 aspects in which welfare can be improved by sentient machines:

Physical environments

Help with natural/man made disasters: use of sentient machines to understand what needs to be done and execute it. When the Japan earthquake struck, there was a need to go into the Fukushima nuclear plant and take a radioactivity reading. Simple as that might sound, there was no technology “sophisticated enough” to go in, take the reading and come out. Something that would be a very simple task to a human but physically impossible due to the environment.

Economic environments

Production and manufacturing capabilities: We have lost most of our manufacturing capabilities in Europe due to pressures from much cheaper goods produced outside of Europe. These in turn will eventually increase in price as well. We can turn to technology in order to produce goods cheaply throughout the world

Urban environments

Transportation systems: Sensors in roads, traffic lights, etc… to optimise traffic flow

Social environments

Aging Populations: “Robots” to help care for and augment capabilities of elderly people

Private environments

Human life and capabilities: Extend and augment these through technology

One of the goals of SPECS is to solve and address these issues in a practical sense through the use of sentient machines as an enabling technology for sustainable welfare.

Taking a huge step back to the beginning, in order to understand sentience and how that came about, we need to think about the 3 BIG questions:

What is the origin of matter and the universe?
What is the origin of life?
What is the origin of consciousness?

I’m going to concentrate on the question of consciousness as that is what we discussed in class. One way to try to understand consciousness could be to build machines of different levels of complexity (from microbes, to insects, to vertebrates, etc…) in order to approximate the different levels of complexity found in nature. This could in theory allow us to understand how evolution arrived at consciousness for humans. Since evolution conserves organizational principles (50% of DNA shared between all living organisms,) if we can understand the design principles of biological systems we should be able to re-create them.

This creates the following positive feedback loop:

If we can Understand nature by
Building machines that mimic it
this will allow us to Repair and Augment human capabilities
which will in turn give us more insight and Understanding into nature
and so on and so forth…

This all leads us to the fact that we need to understand what is a mind in order to be able to build one. The problem is that the “mind” is a label that we humans have invented and placed on a particular phenomenum that we experience. However, that label could be inexact and might not be identical to the actual phenomenum (or could in fact be a collection of phenomena.) The fact is that the concept to describe mind has been invented at some point. However, just because we universally use a particular concept, does not make it “true.” How can we know what aspects of reality these concepts actually capture?

There is a guy called Julian Jaynes that came up with the following hypothesis through studying ancient texts. According to him, 3000 years ago humans lived in a schizophrenic state where their behaviours resulted from instructions by “external voices” which they called Gods. This was due to the fact that they had bicameral brains, in which cognitive functions were split between one half which commanded (the external voices or gods) and a half that followed those commands. Studying texts from before 1000BC he found that there were no literary references to cognitive processes or evidence of self awareness, which meant that humans felt like they were at the mercy of the gods and merely pawns without free will. All their actions were controlled by these external voices. However, from 1000BC onwards, humans start to rely on instrospection and consciousness and “Gods” become external actors that can influence human destiny but are not directly controlling human’s wills.

Still, the brain is a story teller and will come up with reasons why its “owner” has made a particular decision, when in fact it could all be down to instinct, so maybe we haven’t come so far into self awareness yet.

Well, there you go. Quite disjointed and probably full of gaps but this is what I absorbed from the first lecture. It’s become clear that I have a lot of reading and thinking to do in the next few days and I’m really looking forward to it!

I leave you with some relevant material from this first lecture:

Homework

Read the paper: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, find another matching paper (to support or refute it) and write a 1 page essay on both.

Reading list

Plotinus
The Singularity is near – Ray Kurzweil
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep – Philip K Dick
In fact, anything by Philip K Dick (which I was planning on doing anyway before I started this Masters and now it seems too much like homework…)
The Serpent and the Rainbow – Wade Davis
The Ego Tunnel – Thomas Metzinger
The Theory of Affordances – James J. Gibson
The Illusion of Conscious Will – Daniel M. Wegner
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes

Back to School

mpguerra — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:17:21 +0000

I had my first lecture of my Masters in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media yesterday and all I can say is: Wow!

I’m a little bit daunted, but very excited to get stuck in.

I’m going to attempt to use this blog as a place to organize my notes on the various lectures that I’ll be attending in an attempt to crystallize the knowledge a bit better. Hopefully I’ll keep at it even when the workload gets heavier!

Long conference call…

mpguerra — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:50:42 +0000

…so I designed a typeface.

Not bad for 1 and 1/2 hours if I do say so myself.

Apparently I’m not allowed to drink on my own when on an evening out with friends

mpguerra — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:16:21 +0000

Went to Kingly Court to kill some time before our dinner reservation and sat outside one of the brasseries to have a drink.

Waitress waits 10mins to take our order. Mili orders an orangina, Nick orders another soft drink (it was so unremarkable I don’t remember.) I order half a pint of Peroni (weak, I know…)

Waitress comes back after 30s: “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to have an alcoholic drink if it’s just you drinking”

I laugh hysterically. This is the 3rd place we had visited after discarding:

a) a coffee shop due to no alcoholic drinks,

b) pubs due to me not wanting beer or wine

b) a bar due to all of us ending up ordering soft drinks because I didn’t like the look of any of the cocktails and Nick going to the gym early tomorrow so he didn’t want to drink alcohol.

d) finally going to this brasserie because we thought their soft drinks would be cheaper than at the bar we were just at (but they weren’t…) and me ordering a beer!

I change my order to a juice. Waitress comes back saying if we’re only going to have soft drinks we have to a) order some food or b) take a table indoors.

We left…

Overheard at work…

mpguerra — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:50:42 +0000

Two guys on their way to lunch, a third one left behind:
“If x calls, tell him I’m in a meeting”
Gotta love office bullsh*t.

Spanish Queueing

mpguerra — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:04:51 +0000

We don’t form a proper queue in Spain.

We just ask who the last person in the queue is.

Then we wander off.

2010, a taxing year…

mpguerra — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:47:41 +0000

So, I decided I should probably work out how many days I’d spent in which country during 2010 in order to work out my various tax statuses for the year. The numbers below are for 2010 only (not the 2010 – 2011 British tax year.)

Spain: 148 days
France: 133 days
UK: 63 days
Other: 21 days

I’m exhausted just thinking about it….

Golden Oldies

mpguerra — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:46:45 +0000

As part of renewing my blogging effort I have imported my old blog entries into here and my travel site.

Please don’t judge my younger self too harshly, she had her tongue firmly pressed against her cheek most of the time…