Archive for the 'Computer technology' Category

Research funding myopia

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-16
in Argumentation, Computer Science, Computer technology, Computing-as-interaction and Science
. Closed

The British Government, through its higher education funding council, is currently considering the use of socio-economic impact factors when deciding the relative rankings of university departments in terms of their research quality, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), held about every five years.   These impact factors are intended to measure the social or economic impact of research activities in the period of the RAE (ie, within 5 years). Since the RAE is used to allocate funds for research infrastructure to British universities these impact factors, if implemented, will thus indirectly decide which research groups and which research will be funded.    Some academic reactions to these proposals are here and here.

From the perspective of the national economy and technological progress, these proposals are extremely misguided, and should be opposed by us all.    They demonstrate a profound ignorance of where important ideas come from, of when and where and how they are applied, and of where they end up.  In particular, they demonstrate great ignorance of the multi-disciplinary nature of most socio-economically-impactful research.

One example will demonstrate this vividly.  As more human activities move online, more tasks can be automated or semi-automated.    To enable this, autonomous computers and other machines need to be able to communicate with one using shared languages and protocols, and thus much research effort in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence these last three decades has focused on designing languages and protocols for computer-to-computer communications.  These protocols are used in various computer systems already and are likely to be used in future-generation mobile communications and e-commerce systems. 

Despite its deep technological nature, research in this area draws fundamentally on past research and ideas from the Humanities, including: 

  • Speech Act Theory in the Philosophy of Language (ideas due originally to Adolf Reinach 1913, John Austin 1955, John Searle 1969 and Jurgen Habermas 1981, among others)
  • Formal Logic (George Boole 1854, Clarence Lewis 1910, Ludwig Wittgenstein 1922, Alfred Tarski 1933, Saul Kripke 1959, Jaakko Hintikka 1962, etc), and
  • Argumentation Theory (Aristotle c. 350 BC, Stephen Toulmin 1958, Charles Hamblin 1970, etc). 

Assessment of the impacts of research over five years is laughable when Aristotle’s work on rhetoric has taken 2300 years to find technological application.   Even Boole’s algebra took 84 years from its creation to its application in the design of electronic circuits (by Claude Shannon in 1938).  None of the humanities scholars responsible were doing their research to promote technologies for computer interaction or to support e-commerce, and most would not have even understood what these terms mean.  Of the people I have listed, only John Searle (who contributed to the theory of AI), and Charles Hamblin (who created one of the first computer languages, GEORGE, and who made major contributions to the architecture of early computers, including invention of the memory stack), had any direct connection to computing.   Only Hamblin was afforded an obituary by a computer journal (Allen 1985).

None of the applications of these ideas to computer science were predicted, or even predictable.  If we do not fund pure research across all academic disciplines without regard to its potential socio-economic impacts, we risk destroying the very source of the ideas upon which our modern society and our technological progress depend. 

Reference:

M. W. Allen [1985]: “Charles Hamblin (1922-1985)”. The Australian Computer Journal, 17(4): 194-195.

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Social surveys in the developing world

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-24
in Anthropology, Argumentation, Computer technology and marketing data
. Closed

Robert Chambers, sociologist of development, writing about social science surveys in the developing world:

As data collection is completed, processing begins. Coding, punching and some simple programming present formidable problems. Consistency checks are too much to contemplate. Funds begin to run out because the costs of this stage have been underestimated. Reports are due before data are ready. There has been an overkill in data collection; there is enough information for a dozen Ph.D. theses but no one to use it. Much of the material remains unprocessed, or if processed, unanalysed, or if analysed, not written-up, or if written-up, not read, or if read, not remembered, or if remembered, not used or acted upon. Only a minuscule proportion, if any, of the findings affect policy and they are usually a few simple totals. These totals have often been identified early on through physical counting of questionnaires or coding sheets and communicated verbally, independently of the main data processing.”

Reference:

Robert Chambers [1983]: Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London, UK: Longman. p. 53.




The websearch-industrial complex

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-08
in AI, Computer Science, Computer technology, Science and economics
. Closed

I think it is now well-known that the creation of Internet was sponsored by the US Government, through its military research funding agencies, ARPA (later DARPA).   It is perhaps less well-known that Google arose from a $4.5 million research project sponsored also by the US Government, through the National Science Foundation.   Let no one say that the USA has an economic system involving “free” enterprise.

In the primordial ooze of Internet content several hundred million seconds ago (1993), fewer than 100 Web sites inhabited the planet. Early clans of information seekers hunted for data among the far larger populations of text-only Gopher sites and FTP file-sharing servers. This was the world in the years before Google.

Continue reading ‘The websearch-industrial complex’

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Straitjackets of Standards

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-23
in Computer Science, Computer technology, Creativity and Forecasting
. Closed

This week I was invited to participate as an expert in a Delphi study of The Future Internet, being undertaken by an EC-funded research project.   One of the aims of the project is to identify multiple plausible future scenarios for the socio-economic role(s) of the Internet and related technologies, after which the project aim to reach a consensus on a small number of these scenarios.  Although the documents I saw were unclear as to exactly which population this consensus was to be reached among, I presume it was intended to be a consensus of the participants in the Delphi Study.

I have a profound philosophical disagreement with this objective, and indeed with most of the EC’s many efforts in standardization.   Tim Berners-Lee invented Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), for example, in order to enable physicists to publish their research documents to one another in a manner which enabled author-control of document appearance.    Like most new technologies. HTTP was not invented for the many other uses to which it has since been put; indeed, many of these other applications have required hacks or fudges to HTTP in order to work.  For example, because HTTP does not keep track of the state of a request, fudges such as cookies are needed.  If we had all been in consensual agreement with The Greatest Living Briton about the purposes of HTTP, we would have no e-commerce, no blogging, no social networking, no easy remote access to databases, no large-scale distributed collaborations, no easy action-at-a-distance, in short no transformation of our society and life these last two decades, just the broadcast publishing of text documents. 

Let us put aside this childish, warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely seeking after consensus.  Our society benefits most from a diversity of opinions and strong disagreements, a hundred flowers blooming, a cacophony of voices in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes.  This is particularly true of opinions regarding the uses and applications of innovations.   Yet the EC persists, in some recalcitrant chasing after illusive certainty, in trying to force us all into straitjackets of standards and equal practice.    These efforts are misguided and wrong-headed, and deserve to fail.

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Myopic utilitarianism

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-23
in Computer Science, Computer technology, Forecasting, History, Logic, Mathematics and Rhetoric
. Closed

What are the odds, eh?  On the same day that the Guardian publishes an obituary of theoretical computer scientist, Peter Landin (1930-2009), pioneer of the use of Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus as a formal semantics for computer programs, they also report that the Government is planning only to fund research which has relevance  to the real-world.  This is GREAT NEWS for philosophers and pure mathematicians! 

What might have seemed, for example,  mere pointless musings on the correct way to undertake reasoning – by Aristotle, by Islamic and Roman Catholic medieval theologians, by numerous English, Irish and American abstract mathematicians in the 19th century, by an entire generation of Polish logicians before World War II, and by those real-world men-of-action Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alonzo Church – turned out to be EXTREMELY USEFUL for the design and engineering of electronic computers.   Despite Russell’s Zen-influenced personal motto – “Just do!  Don’t think!” (later adopted by IBM) – his work turned out to be useful after all.   I can see the British research funding agencies right now, using their sophisticated and proven prognostication procedures to calculate the society-wide economic and social benefits we should expect to see from our current research efforts over the next 2300 years  – ie, the length of time that Aristotle’s research on logic took to be implemented in technology.   Thank goodness our politicians have shown no myopic utilitarianism this last couple of centuries, eh what?!

All while this man apparently received no direct state or commercial research funding for his efforts as a computer pioneer, playing with “pointless” abstractions like the lambda calculus.

And Normblog also comments.

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Computer science, love-child: Part 2

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-12
in Computer Science, Computer technology, Fiction, Logic and Mathematics
. Closed

This post is a continuation of the story which began here.

Life for the teenager Computer Science was not entirely lonely, since he had several half-brothers, half-nephews, and lots of cousins, although he was the only one still living at home.   In fact, his family would have required a William Faulkner or a Patrick White to do it justice.

The oldest of Mathematics’ children was Geometry, who CS did not know well because he did not visit very often.  When he did visit, G would always bring a sketchpad and make drawings, while the others talked around him.   What the boy had heard was that G had been very successful early in his life, with a high-powered job to do with astronomy at someplace like NASA and with lots of people working for him, and with business trips to Egypt and Greece and China and places.  But then he’d had an illness or a nervous breakdown, and thought he was traveling through the fourth dimension.  CS had once overheard Maths telling someone that G had an “identity crisis“, and could not see the point of life anymore, and he  had become an alcoholic.  He didn’t speak much to the rest of the family, except for Algebra, although all of them still seemed very fond of him, perhaps because he was the oldest brother.

Continue reading ‘Computer science, love-child: Part 2′




Computer Science, love-child

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-11
in Computer Science, Computer technology, Fiction and Mathematics
. Closed

With the history and pioneers of computing in the British news this week, I’ve been thinking about a common misconception:  many people regard computer science as very closely related to Mathematics, perhaps even a sub-branch of Mathematics.  Mathematicians and physical scientists, who often know little and that little often outdated about modern computer science and software engineering, are among the worst offenders here.  For some reason, they often think that computer science consists of Fortran programming and the study of algorithms, which has been a long way from the truth for, oh, the last few decades.  (I have past personal experience of the online vitriol which ignorant pure mathematicians can unleash on those who dare to suggest that computer science might involve the application of ideas from philosophy, economics, sociology or ecology.) 

So here’s my story:  Computer Science is the love-child of Pure Mathematics and Philosophy. 

Continue reading ‘Computer Science, love-child’




Alan Turing

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-11
in Computer technology, Heroes, History, Intelligence and Mathematics
. Closed

Yesterday, I reported on the the restoration of the world’s oldest, still-working modern computer.  Last night, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for the country’s treatment of Alan Turing, computer pioneer.  In the words of Brown’s statement:

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.”

It might be considered that this apology required no courage of Brown.  This is not the case.  Until very recently, and perhaps still today, there were people who disparaged and belittled Turing’s contribution to computer science and computer engineering.  The conventional academic wisdom is that he was only good at the abstract theory and at the formal mathematizing (as in his “schoolboy essay” proposing a test to distinguish human from machine interlocuters), and not good for anything practical.   This belief is false.  As the philosopher and historian  B. Jack Copeland has shown, Turing was actively and intimately involved in the design and construction work (mechanical & electrical) of creating the machines developed at Bletchley Park during WWII, the computing machines which enabled Britain to crack the communications codes used by the Germans.

Turing-2004-Poster

Perhaps, like myself, you imagine this revision to conventional wisdom would be uncontroversial.  Sadly, not.  On 5 June 2004, I attended a symposium in Cottonopolis to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Turing’s death.  At this symposium, Copeland played a recording of an oral-history interview with engineer Tom Kilburn (1921-2001), first head of the first Department of Computer Science in Britain (at the University of Manchester), and also one of the pioneers of modern computing.   Kilburn and Turing had worked together in Manchester after WW II.  The audience heard Kilburn stress to his interviewer that what he learnt from Turing about the design and creation of computers was all high-level (ie, abstract) and not very much, indeed only about 30 minutes worth of conversation.  Copeland then produced evidence (from signing-in books) that Kilburn had attended a restricted, invitation-only, multi-week, full-time course on the design and engineering of computers which Turing had presented at the National Physical Laboratories shortly after the end of WW II, a course organized by the British Ministry of Defence to share some of the learnings of the Bletchley Park people in designing, building and operating computers.   If Turing had so little of practical relevance to contribute to Kilburn’s work, why then, one wonders, would Kilburn have turned up each day to his course. 

That these issues were still fresh in the minds of some people was shown by the Q&A session at the end of Copeland’s presentation.  Several elderly members of the audience, clearly supporters of Kilburn, took strident and emotive issue with Copeland’s argument, with one of them even claiming that Turing had contributed nothing to the development of computing.   I repeat: this took place in Manchester 50 years after Turing’s death!    Clearly there were people who did not like Turing, or in some way had been offended by him, and who were still extremely upset about it half a century later.  They were still trying to belittle his contribution and his practical skills, despite the factual evidence to the contrary.

I applaud Gordon Brown’s courage in officially apologizing to Alan Turing, an apology which at least ensures the historical record is set straight for what our modern society owes this man.

POSTSCRIPT (2009-10-01):  The year 2012 will be a centenary year of celebration of Alan Turing.

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Switch WITCH

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-10
in Computer technology and History
. Closed

The Guardian today carries a story about an effort at the UK National Musem of Computing at Bletchley Park to install and restore the world’s oldest working modern electric computer, the Harwell Dekatron Computer (aka the WITCH, pictured here), built originally for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in 1951.  The restoration is being done by UK Computer Conservation Society.

Note:  The Guardian claims this to be the world’s oldest working computer.  I am sure there are older “computers” still working elsewhere, if we assume a computer is a programmable device.  At late as 1985, in Harare, I saw at work in factories programmable textile and brush-making machinery which had been built in Britain more than a century earlier.

 WITCH Computer

“One of the things that attracted us to the project was that it was built from standard off-the-shelf Post Office components, of which we have a stock built up for Colossus,” says Frazer. “And we have some former Post Office engineers who can do that sort of wiring.”

Frazer says he can imagine the machine’s three designers – Ted Cooke-Yarborough, Dick Barnes and Gurney Thomas – going to the stores with a list and saying: “We’d like these to build a computer, please.”

Dick Barnes, now a sprightly 88, says: “We had to build [the machine] from our existing resources or we might not have been allowed to build it at all. The relay controls came about because that was my background: during the war I had produced single-purpose calculating devices using relays. We knew it wasn’t going to be a fast computer, but it was designed to fulfil a real need at a time when the sole computing resources were hand-turned desk calculators.”

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Computing-as-interaction

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-09
in Computer technology and Computing-as-interaction
. Closed

In its brief history, computer science has enjoyed several different metaphors for the notion of computation.  From the time of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s, most people thought of computation as calculation, or the manipulation of numbers.  Indeed, the English word “computer” was originally used to describe a person undertaking arithmetical calculations.  With widespread digital storage and processing of non-numerical information from the 1960s onwards, computation was re-conceptualized more generally as information processing, or the manipulation of numerical-, text-, audio- or video-data.  This metaphor is probably still the prevailing view among people who are not computer scientists.  From the late 1970s, with the development of various forms of machine intelligence, such as expert systems, a yet more general metaphor of computation as cognition, or the manipulation of ideas, became widespread, at least among computer scientists.  The fruits of this metaphor have been realized, for example, in the advanced artificial intelligence technologies which have now been a standard part of desktop computer operating systems since the mid-1990s.  Windows95, for example, included a Bayesnet for automated diagnosis of printer faults.

With the growth of the Internet and the Web over the last two decades, we have reached a position where a new metaphor for computation is required:  computation as interaction, or the joint manipulation of ideas and actions.  In this metaphor, computation is something which happens by and through the communications which computational entities have with one another.  Cognition and intelligent behaviour is not something which a computer does on its own, or not merely that, but is something which arises through its interactions with other intelligent computers to which is connected.  The network is the computer, in SUN’s famous phrase.  This viewpoint is a radical reconceptualization of the notion of computation. 

coveral3roadmap

In this new metaphor, computation is an activity which is inherently social, rather than solitary, and this view leads to a new ways of conceiving, designing, developing and managing computational systems.  One example of the influence of this viewpoint, is the model of software as a service, for example in Service Oriented Architectures.  In this model, applications are no longer “compiled together” in order to function on one machine (single user applications), or distributed applications managed by a single organisation (such as most of today’s Intranet applications), but instead are societies of components: 

  • These components are viewed as providing services to one another rather than being compiled together.  They may not all have been designed together or even by the same software development team; they may be created, operate and de-commissioned according to different timescales; they may enter and leave different societies at different times and for different reasons; and they may form coalitions or virtual organizations with one another to achieve particular temporary objectives.  Examples are automated procurement systems comprising all the companies connected along a supply chain, or service creation and service delivery platforms for dynamic provision of value-added telecommunications services.
  • The components and their services may be owned and managed by different organisations, and thus have access to different information sources, have different objectives, have conflicting preferences, and be subject to different policies or regulations regarding information collection, storage and dissemination.  Health care management systems spanning multiple hospitals or automated resource allocation systems, such as Grid systems, are examples here. 
  • The components are not necessarily activated by human users but may also carry out actions in an automated and co-ordinated manner when certain conditions hold true.  These pre-conditions may themselves be distributed across components, so that action by one component requires prior co-ordination and agreement with other components.  Simple multi-party database commit protocols are examples of this, but significantly more complex co-ordination and negotiation protocols have been studied and deployed, for example in utility computing systems and in ad hoc wireless networks.   
  • Intelligent, automated components may even undertake self-assembly of software and systems, to enable adaptation or response to changing external or internal circumstances.  An example is the creation of on-the-fly coalitions in automated supply-chain systems in order to exploit dynamic commercial opportunities.  Such systems resemble those of the natural world and human societies much more than they do the example arithmetical calculations  programs typically taught in Fortran classes, and so ideas from biology, ecology, statistical physics, sociology, and economics play an increasingly important role in computer science.  

How should we exploit this new metaphor of computation as a social activity, as interaction between intelligent and independent entities, adapting and co-evolving with one another?  The answer, many people believe, lies with agent technologies.  An agent is a computer programme capable of flexible and autonomous action in a dynamic environment, usually an environment containing other agents.  In this abstraction, we have software entities called agents, encapsulated, autonomous and intelligent, and we have demarcated the society in which they operate, a multi-agent system.  Agent-based computing concerns the theoretical and practical working through of the details of this simple two-level abstraction.  

Reference:

Text edited slightly from the Executive Summary of:

M. Luck, P. McBurney, S. Willmott and O. Shehory [2005]: The AgentLink III Agent Technology Roadmap. AgentLink III, the European Co-ordination Action for Agent-Based Computing, Southampton, UK.

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