Shaping Network Society

Tonight at 8 pm New York time, Stephen Wolfram will launch WolframAlpha life on television/webcast. You can be there from the comfort of your home and do not have to be there in person like the people waiting in line for 24 hours to be the first in the Best Buy 5th Ave for the Green Day Autograph session tonight (we were driving by there on Thursday night and they had put up their tents). Of course, the webcast is a marketing gimmick, but it also shows how radical transparency is being mainstreamed as a strategic management tool. And watching a few old English men turning on the light in a data center with more than 3.800 CPUs sounds like fantastic friday night fun, doesn’t it? – To prepare you can watch the trailer.

in case you did not have the chance to watch the presentation at the Berkman Center yesterday, Stephan Shankland’s Cnet-article:

• Data curation. Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. “At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it,” Wolfram said.

• Algorithms. Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. “Inside Wolfram Alpah are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models,” he said.

• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed. “I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would (have) huge amounts of ambiguity,” for example figuring out whether “50 cent” had to do with musical artists or money. “That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected.”

• Presentation. “There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?” Wolfram asked.

Issues that are not clear yet, are (a) does it work in the real world, (b) does it empower us or “the experts,” (c) is it really something new or does google already do it better with trendalizer (or Ralf/Martin with Eyeplorer), and (d) how important is the approach for data management? What do you think?

For a while, we have been trying to develop a MECE framework to think about how we want to access data in our mediated environments. We started out with search (google), but missed that what was at the tip of our tongue, namely discovery (think any recommendation engine or stumbleupon), then where awed by the global thought stream (twitter and the facebook stream), but had always hoped for a chance to mine “real” knowledge.

There is the Eyeplorer, a startup from Berlin you might want to take a look at and today Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame will speak at the Berkman Center about his new venture Wolframalpha. Do watch it here at 3PM EST today (9 PM Erfurt time) Or watch and interact in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4

No matter the merits of the announcement, the argument is sufficiently interesting to be re-stated. Stephan Wolfram of Mathematica fame has just announced another contender to how we organize human knowledge. His approach is based on his thinking in A New Kind of Knowledge (2002) and Mathematica.He argues:

(a) all/most knowledge today is digitally available, however, we are not able to question and do stuff with it [compute it].
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(b) there is hope that by semantically tagging it, this could be achieved. Stephan Wolfram does not believe so [think anything from delic.io.us to twitter].

(c) A new kind of science reminds us that instead of reverse engineering our theories from observation, we should simply enumerate systems and then try to match them to the behaviors we observe [build the world from simple automata].

(d) This means we can model the data relationships that we have available to create knowledge.

(e) However, data is not data, therefore, it is necessary to curate the data [have experts decide on what matters].

(f) Assuming this works, we have created an intelligent system, but how do we interact with it?

(g) Humans use natural languages, so we would need to get the system to answer “real questions.”

Clearly, an amazing project – we will see in May how well it does on all seven points. And there is more than just epistemology involved, this is about political theory too… :) Let us see how google responds..