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Technology Collaboration

 

 

Discussion on Leadership

 

4/5/2004 8:26 AM

 

John

 

A growing community consensus developed around the notion of the Semantic Web (considered broadly) as well as other notions that are conceptually consistent with the notion that the human mind is something similar to a machine that can be engineered.  I was certainly a part of the consensus during the time (1985-1989) while I matriculated as a graduate student in pure mathematics.  I was younger and had not developed an understanding of certain works by a small number of scholars who

 

(1)    Suggested that this community consensus was not “correct” in the sense of being true beyond the fact of a social consensus,

 

(2)    Pointed to specific concepts, research and empirical evidence to suggest an alternative to the, let us call this, “engineering perspective”.

 

As Peter Kugler has said many time to me recently, “we have chosen a hard problem to work on”. 

 

In the recent past, people are hard selected in employment and funding by loyalty to community consensus.  By hard selection, I mean that there is a systemic de-selection of those who offer alternatives.  Specifically I can point to my own experiences and I have testimony from others, if there is ever an opportunity to testify about this.  (In all cases, there is what appears to be clear violation of various laws.)  As a general systems model I have talked about, learned learning disability, selective memory, informal monopolies, and about a collision between fundamentalism { scientific reductionism, religious fundamentalism, and non-Nash economic theory and practice }. 

 

But I would not talk about these things if my work, and the work of others, was not inhibited systemically.  Now I have to talk about two things:

 

(1)      What the alternative is, in great detail and with great specification

 

(2)      That there is a systemic inhibition of this alternative by a very powerful economic mechanism

 

I am looking for a way to move into a positive future, and to leave this conflict behind.  I literally am not equipped to have a public life of this type.  My wife and I, and our three daughters, are suffering personal financial collapse; small in absolute terms ( < $40,000 ) but for us we have to sell the last asset we have left.   

 

But for me, as for the others, there has to be an alternative and a means to make a living working on something productive.  I am asking, again, for the First Conference on the Knowledge Sciences to bring those together who can make a case that an well defined and powerful alternative exists now to machine learning, AI and the narrow paradigm of OWL and Cyc ontologies.  But even more importantly, the well defined and powerful alternative goes not only to the machine algorithms used to engineer an aid to human knowledge experience, but also to how the computer operating system (CoreSystem) and the data encoding of syntagmatic structure (Orbs and Primentia), and data measurement occurs { + }.  One would think that my work deserves capitalization?

 

The alternative is called HIP, and was peer reviewed and deemed fundable by scientists at NIMA; but then not funded due to insider political and corporate pressures.  A second proposal was developed for DARPA, and rejected after four months without comment.  A similar NIST proposal was not peer reviewed, also without comment.  Now we are looking to In-Q-Tel, but they have had the investment package for a few weeks longer than what they said would be taken to make a decision, and no decision as yet. 

 

In my actual research, I lay out principles related to how a semiotic system might “replace” a machine learning system.  I offer an alternative to machine learning systems.  In making this offer, I recognize that work similar to my suggestion has been offered as alternatives to machine learning systems in the past.  In fact, in many cases those who made the offer were destroyed academically or professionally because funding was not awarded for this alternative.  In many of these cases, the individual never became aware that a memetic complex was systematically inhibiting the work.  In other cases, there was persistence on the line of research.  But even in these cases, the work cannot raise to the level of being funded, because of the uniformity of the social consensus.  I do not want to complain here, only to say what my life’s experience has been. 

 

I have developed two operational “software” systems (Orbs and SLIP), both which are horizontal technologies which one might imagine would be recognized by venture capital groups, but this has not happened either.  I have developed over twenty distinct projects, most undertaken while employed to work on specific issues, (bio) but when time came to move the research the management was not supportive. 

 

But my history is not unique, and is in fact far more representative that what one might at first think.  The experience at the FCC, indicated to me that the behaviors involved are memetic in nature.

 

In one specific case, a researcher redeveloped the exact same proposal concept each year for ten years and resubmitted to the same NSF program, only to have the proposal rejected by a committee, and always on a one against the rest for basis.  In each year, the previous criticisms where addressed meticulously – in spite of the criticism being primarily due to the bias of a single negative reviewer.  The institution, this specific NSF program, exhibited no intuitional memory from year to year, inspite of a core of individuals in the review committee form year to year.  The individual has now left his position, as a Distinguished Scholar of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and lives on his family homestead.  He continues to write and work but less that 10 people really know his work.   

 

Had his work been funded, it would have changed my work over the past ten years because there would have been a leader in the field that I felt needed to be developed.  As it has been, I work alone.  I communicate with around 50 other PhDs who likewise work in isolation and have no professional organization and often no university affiliation.