2011 Turing Award Lecture - Judea Pearl - Part 1

Judea Pearl presented his Turing Award Lecture at the AAAI-12 Conference on July 24 2012. The title of his one hour talk,

The Mechanization of Causal Inference: A “mini” Turing Test and Beyond

gives both a brief overview of the history, and a glimpse of the future of a field of work that holds much promise in advancing the discipline of AI. A video of the talk can be found at the ACM Turing award site here.

Pearl's earlier work in the 80's on combinatorial search lead to the book, Heuristics:Intelligent Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving published in 1984. This was followed by, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference in 1988, and Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference in 2000 of which a second edition was published in 2009.

More On-Line Courses

Following up with my previous post, Some on-line courses, here are few more:

• Human-Computer Interaction by Scott Klemmer
• Game Theory by Matthew Jackson
• Computer Security by Dan Boneh
• Natural Language Processing  by  Dan Jurafsky and  Christopher Manning

There are also two courses coming up at Udacity taught by Dale Evans and Sebastian Thrun

• CS 101: Building a Search Engine
• CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car

Some On-Line Courses

At the end of last year I took part in the online version of the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course presented by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig from Stanford University. I participated partly out of interest, and partly to see how the course was presented. In the end it was a great experience, learning from two experts in the field who are passionate about what they are teaching was well worth the time spent. The format was simple; weekly video lectures split into roughly 10 minute segments. A great inclusion were the small quizzes during the talks, which helped test your understanding of what had just been shown or challenged you to think about a topic which was coming up. The weekly on-line assignments and two exams really added to the overall enjoyment and satisfaction of knowing how well you understood the content.
There are several interesting on-line courses now on offer starting from around February 2012. I've listed a few of them below.

• Design and Analysis of Algorithms I by Tim Roughgarden
• Computer Science 101 by Nick Parlante
• Model Thinking by Scott Page
• Machine Learning by Andrew Ng
• Software as a Service by Andrew Fox and David Patterson
• Probabilistic Graphical Models  by Daphne Koller

I'll follow up with a few more on-line courses in the next post. 

CRITIC

This is a useful check list I found on Massimo Pigliucci's Plato's Footnote page.

• C - Claim : What claim is being made?
• R - Role of the claiment: Who is making the claim and why?
• I - Information backing the claim: What is it?
• T - How can the claim be tested?
• I - Independent Testing: Has the claim been tested by others?
• C - Cause: What explanation, if any, is being proposed?

The diagram on the site is attributed to Wayne R. Bartz, adapated from Skeptical Inquirer Sep/Oct 2002 pp 42-44

WCCI Competitions

Computational Intelligence is a field that encompasses many techniques for attempting to solve problems, well... , intelligently. Algorithms from neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, and swarm intelligence, as well as, hybrid approaches and formal AI techniques are used to solve problems ranging from bioinformatics and bioengineering, economics, robotics, data mining, and games. The IEEE-CIS Society plays a major role in bringing researchers together across the numerous disciplines that are involved in the field.

The IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) is an annual event that allows for the dissemination and exchange of new research in the area. This year it will be held in Hong Kong. One the really cool things WCCI do, is host a series of competitions that explore the effectiveness of various techniques. These range from creating a controller for Ms Pac-Man, to solving multi-objective optimization problems. Competitions like this provide a great introduction to what computational intelligence is about.

Binary Form

As a software developer binary means only one thing ;) A base 2 counting system using the digits 0 and 1. However, in music, the term binary general refers to the structure of a piece, and, not surprisingly, pieces that have two distinct but related sections.

For example; I've recently started playing the piano again, and the current piece I'm working on is a simple Gavotte in G major by Handel. George Frideric Handel was born in 1850, the same year as J.S. Bach. Both composers worked during a period now know as the Baroque era, which extended roughly from 1600 to 1760, and is followed by the Classical period.

During this time binary forms where a common musical structure and a number of variations on this theme exist. The Gavotte piece by Handel is typical of this style, and can be classed as having a 'Rounded Binary' form, A B A, where A and B represent the two sections of music, and the A section is repeated. A free pdf of the sheet music can be found here.

Biological parts

What could be more fun than playing with Lego? Playing with Living Lego.

At the Registry of standard biological parts you will find a wiki that documents various biological parts. These components can be used together to build up more complex structures, or genetically engineered machines. OpenWetWare.org tells us to think of DNA as a low-level programming language and the genome as a program. Just as programming languages provide libraries of routines for developers to use, so the idea of making libraries of biological parts, or BioBricks, exisits to allow people to share and use constructions that exhibit some, hopefully, well defined behaviour.

Some examples that are mentioned, are making a yeast cell that counts to three and then turns red, or making a bacterial cell that expresses lots of human insulin. See, told you it would more interesting than Lego. Of course trying to debug your creation may be bit of a sticky problem.

And if you like a challenge, you can always try and participate in the iGEM Synthetic Biology competition.