Just click on my SlashDot username (directly above) and read my posts attached to "Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language". There you'll find links to Steels' work. Google him, too.
While the slide's simple FOAF example works, in general that is not true. The ontologies for the FOAF example are well-defined and consistent. But that is not the general case. In general, human intervention is required (here I mean people arguing about definitions). There is no "magic" in SW. The emperor has no clothes.
The SW doesn't work and won't work. Give it up. The real future is in the nouvelle AI as demonstrated by Luc Steels' research, wherein negotiation of language and negotiation in language in a real-world environment establishes the semantics of communication.
Berners-Lee's insistence that his Semantic Web ideas can work has kept him in a backwater of the WWW. Berners-Lee developed the SW ideas early, without outside critical thought and the SW remains a pipe dream.
The basic problem with the SW is that the use of separate ontologies defies any exchange process that does not include human intelligence. IOW to do it properly there must be human intervention. But Berners-Lee keeps thinking that there is a shortcut - there isn't. Better men have trod this path and know what's at the end of the road.
Some of the first info on ADS was revealed when IIS users were notified by Microsoft that the full source code of any ASP URL, e.g.
http://www.mycode.asp
could be downloaded to a browser by appending ":$DATA" to the URL, e.g.,
http://www.mycode.asp:$DATA
Little explanation of ADS or the special ADS keyword "$DATA" was revealed in the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS98-003. At the time I could not fine a full list of ADS keywords or an explanation of ADS on Microsoft's site, merely references to making a filename "canonical" (whatever that meant - no explanation was provided).
Microsoft has been less than forthcoming about ADS, it's function and it's mechanism. ADS has been used in the past to hack into web servers and now appears to be useful for rooting any system with NTFS.
The concept of "Portals" was abandoned several years ago despite Oracle and Microsoft arriving after the party ended. Why are we having a technical discussion about portals now?
The enhanced AIBOs used in the experiments have defined inputs (perceptions) and defined actions (outputs). The best way to think of this is to pretend there's a "little man" (homunculus) inside your brain: he only see the inputs from your eyes and controls the output signals to your limbs. Then replace the little man with a computer program. Yes, the computer program can only do what it is programmed to do, but as "Good Old Fashioned AI" has shown, the program can also can alter itself, so there is no lack of variety in resultant behaviors. The key is to choose an appropriate set of initial behaviors for the particular environment.
You should skim some of the papers of Luc Steels, who is the primary researcher behind this work. Don't dig into the details; look for the summaries and the insights. Steels is a good writer and has gone out of his way to encourage research. Here are two sources:
There is no "one" language developed. If you rerun the experiment the robot dog culture will most likely develop a different language. So indeed as you suspect the language is not a known human language but it has all the aspects of human language: syntax, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, etc.
And so in the experiments new words are created; old less useful words decline in use. At any time, there may be multiple words for the same thing in the population, but eventually one of those words mostly "wins over" the other words (although the older word may continue to be used by a small part of the population).
BTW what's an IPC? [See, here we're attempting to resolve terms in our separate "ontologies" (dictionaries): doing what the W3C's Semantic Web cannot do and what the enhanced AIBOs _can_ do].
Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.
Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.
Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.
Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.
Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses
Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.
Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their
Slashdot Mirror
Relax. Works for me!8-))
Just click on my SlashDot username (directly above) and read my posts attached to "Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language". There you'll find links to Steels' work. Google him, too.
The SW doesn't work and won't work. Give it up. The real future is in the nouvelle AI as demonstrated by Luc Steels' research, wherein negotiation of language and negotiation in language in a real-world environment establishes the semantics of communication.
The basic problem with the SW is that the use of separate ontologies defies any exchange process that does not include human intelligence. IOW to do it properly there must be human intervention. But Berners-Lee keeps thinking that there is a shortcut - there isn't. Better men have trod this path and know what's at the end of the road.
Microsoft has been less than forthcoming about ADS, it's function and it's mechanism. ADS has been used in the past to hack into web servers and now appears to be useful for rooting any system with NTFS.
Is ADS a Microsoft backdoor?
Luckily you can buy Viagra today at
Uphold!
The 2003 article Is the Portal Dead? discusses Gartner's announcement that "the portal is dead, long live the portal." And more recently, Portals are Dead reiterates that. But of course, there's plenty more about the death of the portal.
The enhanced AIBOs used in the experiments have defined inputs (perceptions) and defined actions (outputs). The best way to think of this is to pretend there's a "little man" (homunculus) inside your brain: he only see the inputs from your eyes and controls the output signals to your limbs. Then replace the little man with a computer program. Yes, the computer program can only do what it is programmed to do, but as "Good Old Fashioned AI" has shown, the program can also can alter itself, so there is no lack of variety in resultant behaviors. The key is to choose an appropriate set of initial behaviors for the particular environment.
You should skim some of the papers of Luc Steels, who is the primary researcher behind this work. Don't dig into the details; look for the summaries and the insights. Steels is a good writer and has gone out of his way to encourage research. Here are two sources:
A favorite, How to do Experiments in Artificial Language Evolution and Why. For an example that addresses your question, scroll down to Figure 3 which shows the AIBO and a plot of what it "sees" with it's rather primitive visual system.
And so in the experiments new words are created; old less useful words decline in use. At any time, there may be multiple words for the same thing in the population, but eventually one of those words mostly "wins over" the other words (although the older word may continue to be used by a small part of the population).
BTW what's an IPC? [See, here we're attempting to resolve terms in our separate "ontologies" (dictionaries): doing what the W3C's Semantic Web cannot do and what the enhanced AIBOs _can_ do].
Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.
Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.
Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.
Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.
Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses
Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.
Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their