Open-Source Models to Enhance the Internet User Experience

Date and Time: 
2011 Mar 31st @ 3:00pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Bruce Long

This talk will be about an open source project to create a radically improved notion of modeling to rewrite how we consumers interact with our digital stuff, our friends, and our World. Using a personal, distributed model to enable rich, generalized interaction with the World lets us pool knowledge, separate our stuff from individual devices, and write safe, private, distributed public resources as an alternative or wrapper to sites like Facebook, eBay, or Google. Users can always use centralized sites like Facebook or interaction software like iOS. In fact, companies providing such services are encouraged to integrate this system into their devices. Personal models allow us to also have alternatives where privacy, security, and trust/rogue-entity-monitoring are under personal control. Distributed models allow us to create a formal Wikipedia that can 'auto peer review' by validating the models. Distributed public resources means that there is no corporate overseer we must sign up to and trust not to go out of business or begin charging money. And I should add, the modeling language and distributed computing system will be great for modeling things like massive climate systems.

Speaker Description: 

After studying computer science Bruce Long obtained a Master's degree in Philosophy. Specifically his interest is in modeling the more complex features of our world such as how parts contribute properties to the whole, how to represent intensional states such as beliefs, desires, plans, and how to then do useful things with the models. Bruce has produced a computer language for modeling complex systems which models the world as a complex state-system in the form of "pieces of information" or "infons" for short.

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