ARDA Challenge Problem
proposal
Draft
Proposed Center of Excellence
Friday, October 08, 2004
Abstract: The Center of Excellent is
responsible for ethical, practical and legal issues that arise from the
application of anticipatory technology by individuals, business and
governments. This mission is addressed
through the development of a distributed collaborative and learning environment
where the foundations of anticipatory technology are made available in
curricular type materials. This
curricular work will be developed for adoption in K-12 education and in
freshman liberal arts training in mathematics and computer science.
Steps to a National Project: 2
Patents and
Simplification of Computer Science 3
Operating
Systems and the Simplification of Computer Science 4
Distributed Network
of Center Scholars 9
Government
Champion and Technology Transition 10
Evaluation 11
Impact 11
Resources 11
Behavioral
Computational Neuroscience Group (BCNGroup.org)
Mission
Statement:
The existence of the Internet and recent advancements in mathematics and
science makes human social discourse available for real time observation. The observation is made via an active
application of methods of science and computer science. The results of the observation can be
compared with a complex polling instrument having many viewpoints and cultural
settings. The Center of Excellence is
the Nation’s first academic center dedicated to ethical, practical and legal
consequences of the measurement of social discourse using anticipatory
technology.
Elaboration: A core group of scientists
have proposed, as of Oct 2004, the anticipatory technology challenge
problem [1]
to bring together interdisciplinary scholarship, existing innovations
in mathematics and computer science, and a management team. We expect ARDA funding of the anticipatory
technology challenge problem between January 2005 and December 2005. A new Center of Excellence (at university to
be determined) will start receiving funding at the lapse of the ARDA challenge
problem. Center funding will be
preliminary to a much larger multi-university program that re-directs 1/6 of
the direct support to computer science departments to newly established
academic departments of knowledge science.
It is understood that a percentage of the existing computer science
department faculty will transfer to new university departments. The redirection is necessary to force a
re-organization of academic departments so as to reflect anticipated changes in
the software industry and in the emergence of the knowledge sciences.
A new paradigm for
information science is in its formative phase.
By January 2006, those scientists involved in formulating the paradigm
will have contributed to a series of challenge problem workshops. These scientists will have expressed a
shared convection that a class of technical problems stem from a number of
non-removable limitations found in computer science. They will have pointed out that the foundations of computer
science are within mathematics, and within mathematics are found the origins of
these limitations. They will have
created curricular work that explains that these limitations have to do with
the difference between the abstractions of mathematics and computer science and
real natural phenomenon.
The new paradigm in
information science suggests some changes to the liberal arts curriculum for
freshman mathematics and computer science.
Perhaps 40% of the curriculum would be altered so as to open access to
the new paradigm. Algebra would remain
an important part of the curriculum.
Topics from the history of mathematics and from pure mathematics; number
theory, topology and foundations, would be included so as to give all
universities students an historical perspective about the nature of abstraction
and computing. The new curriculum will
be offered as an interdisciplinary and intellectually challenging replacement
for the standard two semester liberal arts requirements for mathematics.
The War on Terrorism creates responsibilities for students, teachers and administrators. Public understanding must shift our cultural understanding of computer science, mathematics and the social sciences, so that we are more informed by a liberal understanding of natural science. From that understanding we are able to demonstrate a new form of information science that is consistent with a newly emerging science about human knowledge. Consistent with these responsibilities we propose the following steps.
Step 1: The ARDA Challenge Problem is the first next step in a long process of planning for a National Project to establish the knowledge sciences as an academic discipline. We support its funding.
Step 2: Establish, in 2006, a Center of Excellence at one university or several universities.
Step 3: We propose that funding be made available by action of the Congress and the President to re-direct 1/6 of 2006 federal direct funding of computer science departments to newly established departments of knowledge science.
The National Project is
designed to simplify computer science and help make most of the current
software intellectual property obsolete.
These two objectives go together.
A fundamental difference between computer science and natural science is
that computer science is an investigation about a particular type of engineered
system, one that we have full control over the design. Natural science, on the other hand is about
something that remains, to some extent, a deep mystery.
The current status of
software intellectual property is a mess.
Contradictory and overlapping ownership is given in an environment where
no one has power to fix the problems.
The ability to expend fees for legal services has come to be equal to
obtaining a software patent. Awarded
patents are then often used simply as a means to legally inhibit the other wise
natural competition of ideas. The
overall effect on computer science is confusion. The way out of this confusion is to demonstrate that a
simplification of computer science is possible through a principled study of the
software patent space.
The Center of Excellence
will inventory all software patents as a text collection where newly invented
concept mapping and anticipatory technology can be applied. A map of the patent space will be created
and refined. Scholars will review the
patent space and will produce a detailed conceptual analysis of actual
innovations. All relevant patents will
be indexed using the set of concepts extracted from the entire collection of
software patents. New or proposed
patents will be compared with this index.
In cases where our indexing work leads to new innovations, these innovations will be filed as patents and/or made public domain. In any case, educational materials will be quickly developed to illustrate why the core team felt that the innovation was something worth looking at. We work on the assumption that no more than 100 basic concepts exist in the software patent space. In each case an optimal reduction to practice can be defined. New innovations can be placed in the context of older patents and perhaps suggest even simpler and more refined innovations.
However, the process of simplication is not an infinite process. The computer is engineered to have only finite properties. Nature does not have such a restriction.
We assume that optimal
reductions to software are not patentable because no additional innovation can
occur [2]. The conjecture that there are a limited
number of “use patterns” sets up a process where by the proper foundations to
computer science becomes crystal clear.
Each of these concepts becomes related within the knowledge science
curriculum.
How does the computer work
and what is our understanding of human use of information? These are core questions that every
American citizen should have a complete grasp of.
The completion of the
foundations of computer science is inevitable, and will allow our society to be
served by a highly functional, stable, and low cost information science. Human use of computer hardware will become
better focused and non-wasteful. The
computer will be seen as a tool in which to investigate the nature of the
natural world. The notions that
computers have intelligence will be set aside and replaced with actual
knowledge of what computation is and how humans use it.
In the near future, universally understood and freely distributed software will fulfill basic computer program functions in a stable and optimal fashion. A stable, provably secure, operating system will be provided by universities as a public service. Applications like word processors will be open source and free.
A new stable environment for
using the computer will exist everywhere without the instability and
frustrations that come from commercial manipulation. Citizen control over his or her information space will increase
as the confusion about what a computer can do is reduced and expressed in
school and university curriculum.
Consequences: The old Information
Technology sector is replaced. Which
markets develop will depend on how well the educational system prepares our
children.
Information technology will
simplify in the near future as the confusion caused by the commercialization of
computer science is reduced [3].
Universities have a
choice. Support the rapid growth of
departments and schools of Information Technology or renew the educational
content in freshman liberal arts courses and develop new departments of
knowledge science.
It is a question of
leadership. Will the academy lead or
will monopolies in the business sector lead?
If the academy should lead, who are the responsible departments?
There are illusions that maintain the status quo. Perhaps the most critical illusion is that there is an increasing number of good paying jobs for computer programmers. This illusion creates an increasing internal funding for Information Technology and Information Science departments and schools. These increases in funding are driven by business type reasoning that does not look at the long-term facts about the job market.
Arguments from the natural
sciences support the case that computer science can be simplified and the most
essential software public domain. As this simplification occurs there will be a
decreasing market for those whose training has specialized in Information
Technology.
The job market in
Information Technology has three long-term constraints:
1)
The
actual marketplace is supported by chaotic transitions between one failed
information technology system and the next.
2)
Information
technology jobs are easily outsourced to India and other counties.
3)
The
need for programmers may undergo a rapid collapse is projects like CoreSystem ™
are put into place [4] .
A provably secure and stable
infrastructure for business-to-business, business-to-costumer,
government-to-citizen, etc will provide an ignition point for an economic
expansion. In our opinion, the most
complete vision of this infrastructure is Sandy Klausner’s CoreSystem. CoreSystem is a for profit business in the
last stages of product development and in a position to be deployed either as a
stand alone Information Sharing system for the Intelligence Community, or as
the foundational technology to the new Internet. See Klausner’s Macromedia presentations on this system at the
URL. [5]
A new generation of user
defined application software will have a programmable interface to a universal
operating system [6]. Whether through the adoption of CoreSystem
or not, the scholars and then the public will learn that an operating system
has to perform a specific, and finite, number of types of functions. We will discover optimal data encoding
processes and optimal architectures for operating systems. These concepts will be implemented into a
minimal Linux kernel and/or into CoreSystem.
The wasted effort on closed proprietary computer software will come to
an end. Of course hardware will
continue to evolve. With maturity the
software industry will reach a limiting point and most software designers will
move to some other sector of the economy.
We can make a projection
about the near future. A standard and
simplified application programmer’s interface will reveal the functionality of
any open source universal operating system.
New types of computer applications will be developed. Some of these applications will be human-centric
and will be programmed by the user, or will be used by a community of
users. Some of the applications will
be computer centric and will move information around the networks.
Networks can be separated
from the Internet so that threats from the Internet can be reduced. Cyber threats will be reduced because the
nature of Internet transactions will conform to patterns that are well
understood. These patterns will be
maintained in an inventory of known patterns in which anticipatory technology
is used to create a broad understanding of the real time cyber event
space. Variation from the anticipated
patterns will be seen and checked to determine if this pattern should be marked
as possibly a threat. Spam will be
reduced to near zero. There are
existing innovations that allow the deployment of an infrastructure having these
properties. One only needs to bring
these innovations together in a pilot project.
The Center of Excellence will be able to create this pilot project.
Users will use anticipatory
technology to easily shape personal information spaces. New types of many-to-many communication
systems will develop and human-centric information production will support
various forms of artistic expression.
Many-to-Many networks will assist human communities in the pursuit of incomes,
entertainment, and education.
In summary: The basic plumbing for computers and computer networks can now be completed and made available in a non-proprietary form. There are positive and negative consequences. The marketplace will no longer need hundreds of thousands of programmers. This creates a problem for the software industry and for newly created Information Technology departments and schools. The expected political and economic resistance to a required transition creates a negative.
A technical approach to
anticipatory technology is provided in the two pages of the Approach section of
an industry proposal to ARDA for Anticipatory Technology Challenge
Problem. [7]
A computer network infrastructure called the Knowledge
Sharing Foundation [8] will be
co-located with a number of universities as part of a virtual association
between university professors in several universities. The association will take responsibility
for the renewal of mathematics and computer science education, and will serve
as a professional organization advocating the establishment of university
programs in the knowledge sciences.
Knowledge sharing scholarship is by nature interdisciplinary and technically demanding. The scholarship and the required technical capabilities are diffuse. For example, thematic analysis of social discourse was attempted in the Former Soviet Union. A Russian company using this work fielded a system for the examination of social discourse in 2002. A functionally similar system (NSC J-39) [9] was partially deployed (2002) within the US intelligence community as an open source web based instrumentation and analysis system over Islamic social discourse.
In-Q-Tel Inc, serving the interests of CIA, has funded several American technology start-ups. One of these, Intelliseek Inc, has fielded a fraud detection and a crude market anticipation system. The J-39 project produced an open source system that provides something similar to an opinion poll. The ARDA Challenge Problem will integrate several core capabilities and bring forward curriculum that explains what the capabilities are and how they might be used.
At this point in history, our society should have mature and non-proprietary operating systems and programming languages. The Center of Excellence will make these languages stable and free.
The natural sciences easily
establish certain facts about the current computer science paradigm. These facts are highly consistent with a
strong form of scientific reductionism.
The most visible of the consequences of the current computer science
paradigm is “Artificial Intelligence”.
The Artificial Intelligence
(AI) mythology must be completely dispelled. The
strict form of AI has helped move computer science from the proper status of a
sub discipline of mathematics. Natural
science tells us that computer mechanisms and programs cannot become self aware
and intelligent. A politically
powerful community of computer scientists and government program managers has
simply “left the barn”.
Several failures in the
academy opened the possibility that a monopoly in information technology might
be established. This is precisely what
happened. Business processes capitalized
on the confusion existing in the academy.
It is now the responsibility of the academy to right a wrong.
The confusion in the market
place has allowed, in part, incorrect functional claims to be used in
advertising a broad spectrum of weak solutions to business and intelligence
problems. The monopoly that developed
uses the confusion and the incorrectness of elements of the computer science
paradigm to make money. Because the
business environment reinforces the monopoly, the confusions are supported in
many different ways. Direct federal
funding for academic computer science now runs around 1.2 billons per
year. Social investments in computer
hardware and software are a little over 2 trillion dollars per year, in the
United States. It is time that these
investments produce a stable software environment.
The academy has not assumed
an implicit responsibility to guide the development of the software
industry. Most specifically, our
society must have a functional separation of computer operating systems and
proprietary business applications.
While this separation is easy to argue, the academy’s computer science
and information technology faculty have not made this argument clear. Personal software for writing letters and
creating weblogs should be free. We
have already paid enough for these things!
A mature open source
software movement does exist and has developed non-proprietary operating
systems having high degrees of stability and security. The stability comes from the fact that the
source code for the operating system is available for inspection and evolution
by the open source software movement.
The security comes from the same openness to inspection.
The developers of our new
liberal arts curriculum must look to the soft sciences and allow these
disciplines to be properly reflected in our freshman liberal arts course
curriculum. The foundations of
mathematics must be illustrated within a liberal arts curriculum. Given this foundational knowledge, the
relationship of mathematics to both hard and soft science can be explored.
Given the degree of
interdisciplinary entanglements, how is such a curriculum to be developed and
then provided to schools and universities?
Our proposal is to provide a
number of windows into distributed worldwide scholarship. We will use the new anticipatory technology
to create a global discourse involving all aspects of the knowledge
sciences. This window will reveal core
issues related to science and mathematics as expressed in theories of knowledge
and theories of computing. The
discourse will include the positive exploration of cultural patterns related to
the world’s religions and to social movements and viewpoints.
The knowledge shared will be
represented as textbook curriculum and in data structures called “machine
encoded knowledge ontology”. The
distributed environment will be assessable to those who have mastered the new
freshman curriculum.
The Center of Excellence will also have a Research and Development component. The Knowledge Sharing Foundation will extend technical work that began in the early 1990s at Georgetown University and at George Washington University in the early part of this decade. This work will be supplemented with related works from scholars all over the world. Leading theories related to knowledge representation and representation of complex processes will be reviewed and posted into an on-line library. A software library will be developed and made available. The library and the software will be accessable from any computer, and will be integrated into the Knowledge Sharing Foundation as time permits.
The Center of Excellence will work to fund and endow
university positions for universities around the nation. Grants and gifts would be sought and
received during the years 2006 – 2011 with the goal of endowing several
university chairs, in various universities, and of acquiring distributed
infrastructure supporting virtual sharing of scholarship mediated by
machine-readable knowledge ontology.
The measurement of the intellectual property related to the knowledge
sciences will be mapped and the information about patents awarded will be made
public.
The process has already started. A core group of scientists have developed
patents on behalf of several companies. These patents are placed within the map
of emerging intellectual properties related to the knowledge sciences. Anticipatory technology can be applied to
the set of public disclosures of patents and scientific literatures. The resulting machine ontology will create a
resource that guides the development of new patents, new markets, and the
science of knowledge systems itself.
The Center of Excellence will capitalize this resource as a means to protect individual innovators while making reasonable judgments regarding scholarly citations and the award of property rights to individuals and companies. We see in this resource a means to sustain the development of multiple academic centers for the knowledge sciences.
Those involved in
formulating the new paradigm have sought common principles in mathematical
models of control, models of linguistic variations serving communicative
functions, and models of complex social and psychological phenomenon. The core team proposing the ARDA Challenge
Problem have the beginning of a standard notational formalism on which to
discuss the twenty or so contributing lines of research that has resulted in
data encoding and computer based transformations. For example, work on structural similarity between graphical
constructions will be examined in the context of standard constructions, theory
and notation. Work on notational
representation of declarative knowledge will be discussed using the same
notation and the same data-encoding standard.
Poly logics and schema over logics will likewise be incorporated into
our base theory and expressed as operational computer systems.
The Center of Excellent will
focus on the following tasks
1)
Deployment
a virtual distributed collaborative system;
2)
The
organization of a community of scholars
3)
The
integration of deployable anticipatory technology;
4)
The
development of tutorials and curriculum, and
5)
Objective
evaluations in academic and market environments.
The distributed
collaborative system is likely to be based on the DARPA MUD C core, developed
in the late 1980s but still in use as the core engine for multiple user domains
(MUDs) and virtual massive multiple player game environments. This core is available in open source code
and has a mature Python API that runs in all operating systems. A long term discussion [10]
involving about a dozen principles has established preliminary judgments about
the nature of a new virtual collaborative environment.
In many cases, potential
contributors to a curriculum for the knowledge sciences will not immediately
offer to make this contribution. We
have found that specific social skills must be used to help scholars
collaborate. The funding to assist in
this process does not need to be large, but does need to allow the potential
contributors to define his or her terms.
The core team at the Center of Excellence must understand how to assist
scholars to actually collaborate in an interdisciplinary fashion. This is not easy.
The development of a renewal of mathematics and computer science curriculum is critically needed. The current curriculums have the effect of increasing the level of discomfort with mathematics and computer science. Critical issues related to the nature of abstraction and the nature of computing is not addressed in the current curriculum.
Several Senators have called for a Manhattan-like Project to produce Information Sharing capabilities. Our project addresses these Senator’s concerns and does so in a fashion that brings a broad consortium of academic scientists into a single-minded project. The development of the knowledge technology sector will create challenges that will be addressed objectively in academic environments.
The organization of a diverse community is essential to the successful planning of a Manhattan-type project to develop and deploy knowledge technologies. We have identified a community of scholars and scientists who agree that a clear exposition of the knowledge sciences is needed. This community will take additional steps to increase public understanding of anticipatory technology and minimize the costs associated with capitalization of supporting start-up companies.
We are pleased to be able to identify champions in the government.
Anticipatory
technology depends critically on human experience of data invariance in real
time data. But how is such a technology
to be understood?
1)
Participating
university faculty will begin the development of a curriculum about essential
concepts like stratification, emergence, abstraction, natural language,
ambiguity, data structures, and foundations of set and category theory.
2)
Long-term
empirical evaluation will focus on how well humans work with an open formal
construction. Soft cognitive
engineering principles will be used to structure the display of discourse and
the access to those parts of discourse that are difficult to understand or have
some levels of restriction.
Open peer review will occur in the context of classical science and the best traditions of scholarship. University based knowledge science curriculum will reinforce personal experience with consistency and completeness, demonstrating that the complexity of real systems require something more that a single set of strongly held opinions.
The ultimate evaluation is a marketplace for products. Part of our previous work has been to develop a template from which innovators develop patent rights at low cost. Using the anticipatory technology, scholars and innovators will know how specific innovations fits within an “event space” of patent disclosures and the related scholarly literature. The Center of Excellence will develop a similar low cost template for creating a corporation, finding initial seed capital, and in finding the least costly route to start-up offering of publicly traded stock.
The planning process for a National Project will be accelerated. Natural science and mathematics faculty will develop tutorials. Business and legal faculty will develop economic and social theory. The members of the academy will work together to provide the foundation for economic expansion. New corporations, unburdened by the current dysfunctional venture capital processes, will be brought to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). As was the case early in the development of the stock markets, real markets themselves will make an evaluation of products based on knowledge technology.
Others will join the core members of the team and continue to develop intellectual property that defines the knowledge technologies. University coursework will be developed. A K-12 curriculum will be developed that renews mathematics and computer science curricula in the context of knowledge science. An existing, informal, community has made contributions to an emerging science of human knowledge and human knowledge systems. Our workshops will develop an exposition of commonalities and open questions and open access to this work. We estimate that the knowledge science community will grow rapidly once an enabling technology is demonstrated. We recognize that knowledge science has a principled grounding in natural science.
Estimated resources are $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 for five years.
[2] Court case, Microsoft vs Apple Computer made the judgment that the dest top metaphor was optimal and thus not patentable.
[3] The current growth of information technology programs may be inhibitory to the development of a clear-minded information science that is based on the knowledge sciences.
[5] http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/safeNet/one.htm
[6] There may be more than one “universal operating system” however, if the reduction of computer science to a small set of principles is enforced, then each of these operating systems will have to have the “same” API, or interface to other systems.
[11] We do not provide names in the public version of our proposal. The public version is made available with certain parts absent.