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Why the 'Star Trek Computer' Will Be Open Source and Apache Licensed
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have a new blog post positing that there is a trend towards advanced projects in NLP, Information Retrieval, Big Data and the Semantic Web moving to the Apache Software Foundation. Considering that Apache UIMA is a key component of IBM Watson, is it wrong to believe that the organization behind Hadoop, OpenNLP, Jena, Stanbol, Mahout and Lucene will ultimately be the home of a real 'Star Trek Computer'? Quoting: 'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had “access to all the data in the known Universe”, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. Jena provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. ... In addition to supporting the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data - specifically textual data in an unstructured (or semi structured) format. An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article. OpenNLP combined with Jena and other technologies, allows “The computer” to “read” the Web, extracting meaningful data and saving valid assertions for later use.'"
Speaking of the Star Trek computer, I'm continually disappointed that neither Siri nor Google Now can talk to me in Majel Barrett's voice.
In the words of William Shatner: Get a fucking life.
I've spent more time than I care to remember moving content from:
http://www.shapeoko.com/forum
to
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki
Why can't it be automated?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I'd rather have this software developed in the open at Apache than closed in directories called "Secret business I.P." at Google or worse, Facebook. It's good to see its potential, and would also act as a warning what can be concluded from bits and pieces of personal, private details people tend to give away.
I'm OK with it as long as it's not in freakin' PHP or JavaScript.
'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had âoeaccess to all the data in the known Universeâ, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud.
The Enterprise computer was not hampered by being in another galaxy, nor was Voyager's computer hampered by being in the Delta Quadrant. They had local copies of all the data at all times.
you pick it up, face the back, and say, "Computer..."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
From somebody who spent a few hours working a show with Gene Roddenberry before his ashes got the cosmic brush off... Having run film clips and sound for his famed "lecture" on Star Trek's past and how that changed our future, I thought he was nuts (1987).
Science Fiction has foreseen future events, but it is NOT an accurate representation of what is going to happen. So how on earth (or in space for that matter) can we tell what software will be used in the future for some yet to be designed hardware? Add to this that we are not even sure when or even if such a theoretical machine will ever exist and how can we figure any kind of useful debate will come from this?
Oh yea, this is star trek.. Home to the group that thinks some group of two bit "B" list actors are somehow for tellers of the future
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What tools are the Borg supposed to use then?
(Oh wait - Googleplex, nevermind...)
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
LCARS any version will never be open sourced because Paramount/CBS will never release their rights to the design.
Now the original 23rd century design, which was all voice interface and blinky lights, would be neat, but pretty damn hard to implement until we can get a computer to "recognize speech" instead of "wreck a nice beach".
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Google's 'Star Trek computer' voice search is cool, but Siri is already here. Scanadu's Scout, "the first Medical Tricorder" could be another Trek-inspired innovation that will make the world a better place.
That was only a problem because you were trying to talk to a Klingon interface. Klingon computers interpret everything as targeting orders.
Paramount doesn't hold the rights. Gene Roddenberry made the LCARS interface open source long ago, for anyone to use in free projects.
CBS Studios Inc. claims to hold the copyright on LCARS. Google was sent a DMCA letter to remove the Android app called tricorder [8] since its use of the LCARS interface was un-licenced. The application was later re-uploaded under a different title, but it was removed again.
Silence is a state of mime.
I swear that when they demonstrated voice search with Google Now on desktops during Google I/O last week, the computer read out the resulting query in Majel Barrett's voice.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
And in a ironic twist, the algorithms used to manifest a cup of Earl Grey tea will be closed and patented.
/* No Comment */
The original post about the takedown request can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20111130013603/http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder. It says in part,
It's far from clear that CBS has any copyright on LCARS, it's more that any entity like CBS with enough money to throw at the legal system can get away with claiming such, and random people just have to go along with it thanks to the way our legal system works.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Now the original 23rd century design, which was all voice interface and blinky lights, would be neat, but pretty damn hard to implement until we can get a computer to "recognize speech" instead of "wreck a nice beach".
Oh but we *have* that already... Never mind the error rate.... Ever called an IVR based phone tree? Yea, they can recognize speech *just* fine. Personally I go for the DTMF interface, it's usually faster.
Speech recondition that is speaker independent generally has to be vocabulary constrained. It's usually easy to tell the difference between "Yes" and "No" but if the speaker says anything else, it's going to go off the rails pretty quick. The more things you are listening for, the less confidence you are going to have between all the options.... That's why these systems are always prompting you to say certain words and phrases. If you want large vocabularies, you will need to either train the system to be speaker dependent, train the speakers to be consistent or be able to live with incorrect detections.
"He's too far Jim!".. or was that "He's Foo Bar Jim!"? I guess that one doesn't matter..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If you have ~$200k to perform this test, and were willing to do it, I would love you for it.
Justice is *not* cheap. :(
the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data... An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article.
Warning: Other examples of "unstructured data" include 4chan and Conservapedia.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
LCARS was the coolest looking shitty UI anyways. Honestly. It only looked awesome because there was limitations on how detailed you could get a picture broadcasted in 480i. That and pastel colors on black made them stand out. When you get right down to it, TV is artful entertainment first and foremost. I seriously doubt LCARS was based on any recommendations by those in UI design. But then again, this was before the .COM rise in 1997.
Life is not for the lazy.
Did the transporter just drop me into the middle of some poetry jam?
Yeah, the LCARS UI wouldn't really 'work', but the touch interface depicted was 20 years ahead of it's time, which is generally good enough for a sci-fi show.
Meanwhile the Star Trek movies still had big red buttons and low-res 1980s computer displays.
TROI: Computer, search for the term Darmok in all linguistic databases for this sector.
.
.
.
COMPUTER: Searching. Darmok is the name of a seventh dynasty emperor on Kanda Four. A mytho-historical hunter on Shantil Three. A colony on Malindi Seven. A frozen dessert on Tazna Five. A
TROI: Stop search. Computer, how many entries are there for Darmok?
COMPUTER: Forty seven.
DATA: Computer, search for the term Tanagra. All databases.
COMPUTER: Searching. Tanagra. The ruling family on Gallos Two. A ceremonial drink on Lerishi Four. An island-continent on Shantil Three
TROI: Stop. Shantil Three. Computer, cross-reference the last entry with the previous search index.
COMPUTER: Darmok is the name of a mytho-historical hunter on Shantil Three.
TROI: I think we've got something.
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
Or perhaps you remember the Dumarest stories, each of which had a Cyber with "the trained voice which contained no irritant factors" . . .
Seriously, there must be enough audio of Majel Barrett to synthesize a decent copy. Sounds like an open source Kickstarter to me.
Ok, I'm only going to say this once. If it's going to be the future according to Star Trek. Then all computers have to sound like Majel!!!!! It's been that way for almost 50 years, it's set in stone. I've thought about this for years, even before she passed away. We need to digitize EVERYTHING SHE EVER SAID and make a standard open source dig chip that all computers, phones, tv's, microwaves, cars...everything has to sound like her. She's the voice of the computer!
Siri can go @#!% it.
No.
It's patently absurd to say we "know" what technology a Star Trek class computer will be built upon. Even assuming that some successful FOSS model will be the design space of the system is... overreaching at best, and blissful ignorance of the problem at worst.
The Star Trek computers were not merely able to understand free-form speech, access vast databases, and resolve linguistic irregularities, assumptions, and unbounded problem areas. In some cases the crew asked the computer whether the computer was even able to solve certain problems, and the computer figured out for itself whether it could or not. This is a primitive form of self-awareness.
I suggest that the Star Trek computers were displaying signs of full-fledged intellingence, even in TOS. By the time of TNG the computer was able to project Minuet as a fully realized personality. By the time of Voyager the computer supported an independent personality, in control of it's own power switch, in the form of the ship's doctor.
No amount of wishful thinking, handwaving, and quoting of buzzwords like NLP, Big Data, Semantic Web, and Apache, and the like, can bridge the yawning gulf between what those systems and technologies bring, versus what the Star Trek computers were doing. True artificial intelligence is still decades to centuries down the road.
WARNING: Fatal exposure in 69 minutes!
I like my all knowing computers to constantly remind humans of their insignificance and gross inferiority. No computer personified this more than ORAC from the 1980's British Sci-Fi "Blake's 7".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoHkaFDTiD8
and remember "modesty would be dishonesty" for such an intelligence!
To my joy, I notice that no-one actually tries to support or refute the claims from the OP. And that's a good thing. It is talk from someone who considers himself visionary because he says something very 2.0 based upon acronyms and projects he doesn't understand. The kind of tech in OpenNLP has been around for 20 years now, and adding a few components that can brokerage and leverage and whateverage unstructured data is not going to improve it.
Some developers like liberal copyright licenses too.
Like all the Star Trek Enterprises, it will never fly except in your fantasies.
Sure, if we don't bother to *build* them. Let's face it, we have the technology right now to build an Enterprise, even if it can't do much yet. Will it have warp drive, transporters, and food replicators? No. But we CAN build one if we really wanted to, with at least some formerly-ST-only tech, and actually make it move, however slowly.
Even money isn't that big of a problem. It's all a matter of wanting it badly enough to overcome the greed that keeps it from happening.
> Some developers like liberal copyright licenses too.
Sure. The greedy ones that have a toddler's mindset.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ha, I know the proper place to get "Tea Earl Grey Hot(TM)".
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It is now "SciScanner" and the interface vaguely resembles LCARS, but isn't. It also has had much of its original functionality removed, unfortunately.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So the Star Trek computer will had access to "All the data in the known Universe" ?
Will someone ever ask: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?"
Or will the question first be posed in 2061?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I figure this is as good a place to ask as any, since the buzzword keeps being paraded around every chance people get.
What is the difference between the Semantic Web and the existing Meta Element system in HTML? As far as I can see from descriptions, the Symantec Web just wants to attach metadata to every single object on the web. This improves on the Meta Element (per-page descriptions only), but it's hardly a sea-change.
Also, how are you going to entice authors to write all that metadata? The only reason they bothered was to improve their search rankings back in the 90s. Now that search engines ignore the Meta Elements, their use is discouraged, and you're back to finding a way to get lazy developers to document things.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Or the ones that contribute code under those licenses. like me.
Open-sourced next generation intelligent solutions still need the expertise and big data that are out of reach for many. Take a look at this blog post -- Why The “Star Trek Computer” Needs Open DataAnd Scotty, Too -- http://blog.primal.com/2013/05/why-the-star-trek-computer-needs-open-data-and-scotty-too/. Knowledge models and the data that drives a personalized experience can be generated on demand, today.