Aegis: Research and Overview: March 2009

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Fwd: Aegis in Action >

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mohit Gupta
Date: Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 7:56 AM
Subject: Re: Aegis in Action >

I have ordered many books (about 50-60) for the library that relate to memory, remembrance, cognition and histories. obviously Language and representation are a very important part of the problems we will be facing. But it would not be right to presume that we will have a decent understanding of the material directing the issues of memory and remembrance let alone an understanding of the issues of ethics, history and augmentation (and many more)

Reading all these papers/ books and websites individually maybe would not help us, as unless the group collectively understands (rather feels) the issues and the concepts, communicating them during meeting oversimplifies and mutates much of the contents. Also the use of tools we talk about, rave about or deprecate should be used by us, over extended periods. This I think is one of the things that Microsoft has done very right, which might have helped them create popular products even though they may not be the most user-friendly, emotive or expansive. They know (by using their products) what features are absolutely essential, and how much efforts will people put to understand the software. Apple on the other hand seeks high-usability, aiming for the point where users will enjoy using the products, they also strive for a point where software actually increases productivity and makes things faster for experts. Many users will never reach those levels of expertise, and most are actually turned away in the beginning as they do not realize the finer refinements which will help them later. A balance needs to be sought. Biswas sir's methods of having iterations of collective reflection over texts that are deemed important for the project or team learning seem to be an interesting (rather the only) option.

Books: Human Memory: Roberta Klatzy (library) and another white one just next to it titled _ __ __ Memory.
another one that looked at issues faces and the nature of archiving called Archive Fever by the great Derrida (i have issued)

some products(from tanushree's article):
DEVONthink - your supplementary brain.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/index.html (me downloading trial)
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonagent/index.html - Research Agent

The Remembrance Agent - Bradley Rhodes
A tool for associative memory. It is probably the first tools that explored the ideas that explored indexing and prompting links from the past to help in the current contexts.

FIXIT - they call part of our idea (query-free information retrieval) inspired from the Remembrance Agent
http://rii.ricoh.com/~jamey/fixit.html

Ricoh Communications - they now employ bradley rhodes and have very interesting projects on information processing and communication.
http://rii.ricoh.com/projects.html

MindManager - a tool for Concept Maps / Mind Maps - not as interesting - a Visual Thinking Aid
http://www.iaresearch.com/store/Products/MindManager6/MindManager6.htm

Tools for Teaching

http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html

Primarily fueled by the myLifeBits project Microsoft Research is doing a lot of research on information processing, modelling and representations. Some labs and projects which are looking at technologies and issues which can directly benifit us:

Models of Human Memory
by Suzanne Ross
http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=687

SIS (Stuff I've Seen) is a prototype tool that makes it easy for you to find information has ben seen before. (is a very old project)
http://research.microsoft.com/research/adapt/sis/index.htm

new tool (plugin for Windows Desktop Search) http://research.microsoft.com/research/adapt/phlat/default.aspx

Adaptive Systems and Interaction the group doing all the research that we need.
http://research.microsoft.com/research/adapt/#tools

Social Computing Group - Great ideas on Visual representation for information - remote collaboration - multi-user prototyping
http://research.microsoft.com/scg/

mohit

PS: i did not find links on my own, searched for books, but still clueless about their actual relevance.Since only links from the Fastcompany article are included you must have seen them all, just wanted to archive.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Links: Collaboration, Workspaces, Teamwork

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mohit Gupta
Date: Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis in Action >

some links - collaborative workspaces - nice ones i think

Collaborative Spaces

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mohit Gupta
Date: Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 3:53 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis in Action >

please have a look at this, it is naive, trite and jumpy. Bad language. unclear and incomplete thought. please tell me if you see some sense. i had blabbered about this idea once (early morning) in the food court. sorry for sticking to it.

collaborative spaces for workplaces (and home)

In the workspace, the last major revolution was the availability of modular furniture that allowed for open configurability. Such offerings though not appreciated by the very creative organisations who focussed on building their 'own' workspaces, it did for a decent price allow people to have a sense of control over their immediate work environment.

Knowledge management, and group support systems have been promoted as an important and neccesarry part of a modern organisation looking to build on ideas. But these systems, that are primarily computer-based, have faced problems of information or knowledge translation, motivation, and control (or quality). Some problems such as a loss of context, or the inability to find relevant peolpe or information are being tackled through research and use of systems such as social bookmarking, tagging, semantic web, OCR technologies, pen-based input and others.

Many organizations that have capitalized on their creativity and created valuable knowledge assets such as 'pixar', 'ideo' have not relied so much on formal ICT based knowledge or innovation management. Traditional knowledge driven spaces such as universities are created by active collaboration, serendipitous meetings and the blurring of lines between fun and work, and more importantly these spaces act as a bridge or a container for both the public and private life of indivisuals and teams.

Computing devices, digital networks and knowledge management systems are seen as a support structure for capturing information-knowlegde along with the traditional models for encouraging innovation. The knowledge-base or the company-groupware are still remnants of the hierarchical, firm structure based organisations that have since made a transition to fun-loving, open, creative crossroads for play and work. There has been a recent shift in such systems to adapt them to fluid teams and an open work environment, but still not enough to capture knowledge dynamics, and playful interactions which lead to creative innovations.

For digital Knowledge systems to effectively capture team knowledge, interaction models used have to move from being PC based to active devices that allow group inputs. Such devices that can capture the interactions in natural spaces, such as cafeteria tables, or meeting rooms are now possible due to the cheap availability of touch based computing and extensive research in ink-technologies. Sprawling touch-sensitive displays that allow teams to scribble, doodle, and take notes during meetings will allow the ICT systems to create a better sense of corporate knowledge. These active interactions and notes can latter be tagged, or partially converted to text (through OCR technologies) for better archiving.

A detailed study of the workspace can provide insights into the need, and structure for the design of digial collaborative spaces, the kind of input and response mechanisms that will allow a natural interaction. Modular soft-furniture also provides an opportunity to create systems which capture the dynamics and motion of interactions in an organization.

The design of collaborative workspaces leveraged through computing will build on research on public spaces, social networks, information dynamics and also urban ethnography. The systems in workspaces should leverage organisational culture and through the use of sensor networks, wireless connectivity and natural interaction systems (language processing, handwriting recog, annotations etc) to seamlessly integrate the knowledge repository to the motion and dynamics of team interactions.

Cure for Memory Ailments: Life Logging.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tanushree Jindal
Date: Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis :: Ideas

About MyLifeBits and LifeLog

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,58909-0.html

Picked up a few relevant lines from the first one. Both the projects are different, huge and maybe useless, but the issues of memory can be compared.

"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."

Personal-productivity guru David Allen also has long argued that the frailty of everyday memory is the primary source of stress for overburdened corporate types. We sit around anxious about our to-do lists because we can never entirely remember them (while we're at work) or entirely forget them (when we're not).

It gives his mind the chance, he says, to be more playful, to have more energy for creative thinking. But it is also a double-edged sword. Bell suspects MyLifeBits might be slowly degrading his real, carbon-based brain's ability to remember clearly. When you have an outboard mind doing the scut work, you tend to get out of practice.

I'm a big fan of forgetting," says Frank Nack, a German computer scientist who published a critique of lifelogging experiments last winter. "It's how we make sense of life, how we interpret things. Everybody is building a life story; we all need to forget certain stages. I don't want to be reminded of everything I said." Forgetting, he points out, is key to cultural concepts like forgiveness and nostalgia. Sure, we lose track of most of what happens to us--but that natural filtering process results in what we call knowledge and wisdom. When memories are only a click away, Nack says, they're cheapened.

Pictures

Yet here's the problem with the pictures: They pose an even bigger search dilemma, because computers can't "see" the contents of a photo.
So are all those photos a waste of memory? Or can that kind of exhaustive visual record actually be worth something?

You actually remember things you'd already forgotten," Smeaton says. "You'd see somebody you met in a corridor and had a two-minute conversation with that you'd completely forgotten about. And you'd go, 'Oh, I forgot to send an email to that guy!' It's bizarre. It improves your recall by 100%."

In fact, "refresher" imagery is so powerful that it seems to help restore recall in people who have very little memory, or none at all.

Collaboration, Learning, Sharing, Memory

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mohit Gupta
Date: Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 8:51 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis :: Ideas

The Advanced User Resource Annotation system (A.U.R.A.) is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal. Users may selectively make the items they have scanned public to other AURA users resulting in a collectively authored database rating, reviewing and commenting on a wide range of objects, products and places. Physical annotations can be shared with other users and selected by users reputation statistics and other properties. http://aura.research.microsoft.com/

Keywords, Tags:
Collaborative Learning -> Collaboration and Sharing -> working together
Online Productivity -> Collborative Annotations and Link Sharing.
Social Bookmarking - Online Spaces and Communitiies for Learning and Information (Knowledge??) sharing
Organic Computing. Contextual (collaborative?) systems
Learning Software and Evolving Interfaces.
Information Aggregation to Knowledge based Interface(aggregation)

____

Some links:

StumbleUpon.com
reddit.com (a similar website)

Digg.com - i was blabbering about this: http://labs.digg.com/swarm

Diigo.com (new and not so much newPhodness)

del.icio.us

shadows.com

Google Docs

Google Reader

Microsoft Discuss (in IE) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255085/

JotSpot.com

Coil-OS.com (Orgainc Computing)

ThinkFree.com (online Office)

Microsoft ConferenceXP - collaborative learning and interactive distance learning
http://research.microsoft.com/conferencexp/

________________________
context specific communities and learning (sharing)
Flickr.com
Amazon.com
Last.Fm (music)
Technorati.com
-some others which are like(somewhat) technorati
tailrank.com
Google Answers (maybe Not)

Maps

Frappr.com - used by a lot of bloggers. friends and photos
Platial.com - second wave. - shae your life . geographically
Plazes.com - geographical Orkut

________________________
some new ones

Auto Tagging for video, pictures etc. based on object and facial recognition
http://www.ookles.com/

The Persistence of Memory

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mohit Gupta
Date: Fri, Jan 5, 2007 at 10:09 AM
Subject: Re: Aegis :: Ideas

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

How the brain records new memories is a central question in neuroscience. One attractive possibility involves a process called longterm potentiation (LTP) that strengthens connections between neurons. Many neuroscientists suspect that LTP is a memory mechanism, but proving it hasn't been easy. Several findings reported this year strongly bolstered the case.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1850a

Online Extras on LTP

Papers and Articles

A. Gruart et al., "Involvement of the CA3–CA1 Synapse in the Acquisition of Associative Learning in Behaving Mice," J. Neurosci. 26, 1077 (2006)

J.R. Whitlock et al., "Learning Induces Long-Term Potentiation in the Hippocampus," Science 313, 1093 (2006)

E. Pastalcova et al., "Storage of Spatial Information by the Maintenance Mechanism of LTP," Science 313, 1141 (2006)

T.V.P. Bliss et al., "ZAP and ZIP, a Story to Forget," Science 313, 1058 (2006)
Perspective article highlighting the Whitlock et al. and Pastalcova et al. studies.

T.V.P. Bliss and T. Lomo, "Long-Lasting Potentiation of Synaptic Transmission in the Dentate Area of the Anaesthetized Rabbit Following Stimulation of the Perforant Path," J. Physiol., 232, 331 (1973) [PubMed Central]
Original article describing LTP in the rabbit hippocampus.

Interesting Web Sites

Learning, Memory, and Long-Term Potentiation
A section from Kimball's Biology Pages.

How Memory Works: Long-Term Potentiation
An overview from B. Dubuc's The Brain From Top to Bottom.

The Molecular Basis of Learning and Memory
A section in the neurobiology unit of Annenberg Media's online textbook Rediscoving Biology.