Homework for IST590

Here I would like to introduce some academic communities which are related to me at present or in the future.

The first communitiy I would like to introduce is AAAI. Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines [1]. The community of AAAI publishes books, proceedings, reports and grants.

The second community I may joint in in the future may be HCI community. Although my research is more close to technology, the current trend is combining technology and people. HCI as an interface between people and machine will achieve more and more attentions from technical persons. One community in HCI is CHI conference, which is the leading international forum for the exchange of ideas and information about human-computer interaction (HCI). [2]

The third community related to me is a community around NLP (natural language processing). Now more and more contents represented in an electronic form are availabe on the internet. Search engines provide us a convenient tool to find the webpages we want to read. However, in order to achieve better results, NLP should be used in order to understand the detailed information embeded in webpages. One community about NLP is conference, which covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction.[3]

Reference:

[1] AAAI, http://www.aaai.org/home.html

[2] CHI,  www.acm.org/pubs/contents/proceedings/series/chi/

[3] ACL, http://www.aclweb.org/

 

 

In this article, I would like to introduce one of my elders, whose name is Shizhuo Zhu. He is a Ph. D. student at School of Information Sciences and Technology in the Pennsylvania State University.  He is currently working in the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents of IST. His advisor is John Yen.

His research work focuses on medical informatics, which is a inter-disciplinary research area combing areas like computational, informational, cognitive, organizational, and other sciences. The main target of medical informatics is the acquisition, storage, and use of information in the health/biomedical domain. He has publish several good papers in some related conferences and journals.

There is a relationship between his research and mine. Because the research work in IST is inter-disciplinary in nature. It is hard for us to say their research work is different from one to another for any two students in IST. Inter-disciplinary is also advantages for the development of IST. His research needs to analysis electronic medical record in a free text form. Such analysis needs the technology of text mining, which is my research area. 

In this article, I go on introduce my supervisor's research interest - information visualization. The great fun of information visualization is that it helps you to understand the information and find hidden information you do not realize before. What is new is that information visualization is becoming a mainstream tool. Just as we now expect everyone to be familiar with search engines, we will soon expect everyone to be familiar with information visualization tools. Maybe one important aspect of next-generation search engine is visualization. It will provides information visualization tools to help users filter and organize search process and results in a very efficient way. Another trend of information visualization is that intelligent technologies, like artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language process will be cooperated into information visualization system. In a conclusion, no matter how information visualization develops, one certain thing is that it will shape how we work and interact with the world over the next years and decades.

My advior is Dr. Zhang Xiaolong. Here, I would like to talk about his research work. His research area is in Information Visualization. Information Visualization is to help people underand and analyze data by using graphical techniques. Different from scientific visualization, information visualization focuses on abstract data, like text, and high-dimensional data. His representative research is multiscale visualization. Multiscale visualization means visual representation changes as user pans and zooms. It helps users to navigate and understand data at different levels. In the future, Dr.Zhang will explore information visualization by involving more intelligent elements, like machine learning, to help users to understand data more easily.

 

IST is an abbreviation of information science and technology. Several universities has a college of IST, such as PennState University, Drexel University. The college of IST in PennState was setup in 1999.

DIfferent from some other I-School from other traditional programs like library science, IST in PennState is a new built inter-disciplinary program which investigates information from all angels: technology, people and society. In such an context, information is not alone research object, and is placed into a triangle of information, people and technology.

The reseach in IST is around the core element information from different levels and different angles. Research at theory anlge of information is more close to philosophy, like philosophy of information. Research at technology anlge of information is focus on how to store and retrieval information efficiently and precisely. Research at people angle of information is focus on how people use information easily and efficiently. Other than on different angles, research can be done from different levels, such like from individuaul level, group level, organization level and national level, to investigate relationship between information and people from these levels.

IST is still in developing. With the development of our society, the research of IST will include more rich and intersting areas.

I-School is an abbreviation of Information School. Just as the name implies, I-School is a school at first. Educating people for the development of our society is always the most important task of a school. Hence, educating people is an important aspect of nature of I-School. However, the key point is what kind of people to educate for I-School.

I-School is a product of information age, which is a result of the global economy's shift from the production of goods to the manipulation of information. Hence, I-School needs to eductate people who can make contribution to the information age. More specifically, I-School need to mainly cultivate three kinds of people: scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. Scientists cultivated by I-School are to develop theories for our information society, help people to understand the information age and predict the future of our information society. Engineers are to develop tools which make people life easier and better. And entrepreneurs are to build informaiton companies to lead the development of our information society.

Summary on "Methdology matters: Doing Research in the Behavioral and Social Science":

This article highlights three points for research in the behavior and social science. The first point is that all methods have limitaions. Hence, any set of results is limited. The second point is that it is not possible to maximize all desireable features of method in any one study and thus tradeoffs and dilemmas are involves. The third point is that each study must be interpreted in relation to other evidence bearing on the same questions.  This article also illustrats that each piece of information gained through those techniques is not certain and not general. Each piece information is contigent on other information and can only be viwed in the context of the accumulated body of information.

Summary on "Writing Good Software Engineering Research papers":

This article highlights that a good software engineering research paper should answer a number of following questions. The first is: what, precisely, was your contribution. The second is what is your own results. The third is why should the reader believe your results? and the last one is that what concrete evidence shows that your result satisfies your claim. The main point is that how to convince readers using your own results. Those results may be piece information, and thus should be interpreted in an accumulated context.

Compare between them:

Both in social science and software engineering, it is importance to organize your findings or results to convince your readers. Those findings and results may be piece information and need to be accumulated in a certain way to present to readers. So the same problem faced by both social science and software engineering are how to organized seperated results and findings to an accumulated context.

 

reference:

[1] Joseph E. Mcgrath, "Methdology matters: Doing Research in the Behavioral and Social Science",1994

[2] Mary Shaw, "Writing Good Software Engineering Research papers", IEEE Computer Society, 2003

 

Summary on "The science of Doing Good":

This article introduces that science and technology transfrom the practice of humaniarian aid. This article introduces the advatanges brought by the development of science and technology. Information technology, satellite imaging and research carried out in disaster-relief areas have begun to transform humanitarian aid into a more efficient and less haphazard endeavor. Take the war in Kosovo as an example, the author present that judicious deployment of computer and communications technology, DNA analysis and social science survey technology have greatly assisted the multitude of aid organizations that arrive on the scene in location people who need help, as well as avoiding duplication of efforts and labors. Further more, with the expandition of web access to the poorest areas, endangered remote villages may one day gain early warning of impending attackes, enabling evacuations or expediting calls for help. However, this article also said that the failure of using communications equipment by aid officials may exacerbate the inherent chaos of a crisis.

 

Summary on "I, Robot ":

I, Robot is a science fiction film produced in the United States, filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, and released on July16 2007. The tone of the movie is based on the Asimov's Robot stories.  This movie is a kind of reflection of modern popular culture, particularly with respect to science fiction and technology. Human's fear comes from the fact that our own evolution to be static, while intelligence tools progress. The emergence of artificial intelligence has made it possible for human beings challenged by the man made creatures with high intelligence.

Comparison: These two articles are both about the impact of science and technology on our modern society. Science and technology themselves are neutral. The impact of them on our society, whether good or not,  is decided by ourselves.

Summary on: What if string theory is WRONG?

This article introduces the string theory, which is based on three key ideas that remain experimentally unproven after 30 years of research: the principle of supersymmetry; additional spatial dimensions; and gravity as a force defined by the exchange of quantum particles. If it is true, the string theory will bring us the birth of the first unified description of the physical world, and there are trillions of other universes exist paralleled with ours. However, if it is wrong, string theory would be the most spectacular wrong-turn science has ever taken. Even it is wrong, the string theory bing us the intriguing philosophical prospects for the multiverse, with its infinite and eternal creativity in spawning new universes.

Summary on: String Theory and the Unification of Forces

This article introduces that string theory will help us to reach unified theories, which was a dream of Einstein. Einstein was among the earliest to propose that such a unified field theory must exist. However, even if that beautiful theory exists, we are not yet sure that it correctly describes nature. However, if it exists, it broadly describes a world similar to ours, and is endowed with beauty and consistency to an astonishing degree.

Comparison:

These two articles introduce the most front theory in physical science. If the string theory is correct, we would have ``explained'' one of the most deep and abiding mysteries since the dawn of civilization: why does our world have the dimensionality that it has? If string theory would be the wrong theory of nature, we may still learn something about the right theory.

Reference:
1. Sten Odenwald, What if string theory is WRONG?"
2. Sunil Mukhi, String Theory and the Unification of Forces" by Sunil Mukhi,  http://theory.tifr.res.in/~mukhi/Physics/string.html