Mark Olsen: Toward meaningful computing

Mark Olsen and Shlomo Argamon have just published a viewpoint in the Communications of the ACM titled, “Toward meaningful computing” that argues, (among other things)

Current initiatives by Google, Yahoo, and a consortium of European research institutions to digitize the holdings of major research libraries worldwide promise to make the world’s knowledge accessible as never before. Yet in order to completely realize this promise, computer scientists must still develop systems that deal effectively with meaning, not just with data and information. This grand research and development challenge motivates our call here to improve collaboration between computer scientists and scholars in the humanities.

They set an ambitious, but I think, doable agenda for us.

Eugene Roman

Eugene Roman, the Group President of Bell Canada Systems & Technology, came to talk to a Communication Studies class about The Digitization of Everything: The MODern Era. In his talk and conversations after he asked us to look up and think about Holons. He asked us to think in the inverse – ie. not to ask how to make a better Google, but what an anti-Google would be like. He also talked about viral thinking and how to “infect” others. When we got talking about wireless (and he sees it all going wireless) he made the interesting observation that a barcode is a form of wireless communication, even if the distance is not great. What will we be able to do with barcodes if taking a picture of a barcode with a wireless camera-phone can trigger things?

Too Much to Read: Science and City

McMaster has a great lecture series supported by the Hamilton Spector called “Science in the City”. Yesterday I gave one of the talks on “Too Much To Read: Using Computers to Cope With Information Overload” (see the Spectator article beforehand, Spectator interviews Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell.) It was encouraging how many people are interested in a topic like this. There really is broad interest in questions around information, reading, and the Internet. The questions at the end ranged from “should I switch to Firefox?” to “how can I use a concordancer on the information I have?”