Saturday, September 11, 2004
Background material on why a National Project is required
(comments
and suggested editing are being accepted as of 9:20 AM eastern)
Communication From Richard
Ballard à
Communication from Peter Krieg
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Communication from Ken Ewell
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Communication from Kent Myers
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Recent communications and phone calls have been helpful is laying out where we are in a formative process. This formative processes is directed at creating the knowledge sciences as an independent academic discipline.
A diversity of opinions exists. Dr. Ballard suggests there is a need to delineate the core questions. A diverse number of knowledge scientists are coming to an agreement as to what the core questions are. As Dr. Myers suggest, we need to make references into an independent scholarly literature to support the claim that Human-centric Information Processing is essential to creating anticipatory informational processes.
These questions can be expressed in common terms so that the public may understand what defines our investigation. As planning for a National Project proceeds, we are outlining the content of a K-12 curriculum in the science of knowledge systems.
Three key contextual issues are:
International Aspect: The Project should have an international aspect since the core issues are not simply one’s that concern only American scientists.
Inhibition of the knowledge sciences: The core issues should be defined outside of the economic pressures that have caused the inhibition of the knowledge science during the twentieth century.
Disruption of the status quo: The contributions that a mature knowledge science will make have to be balanced with the disruptions caused to the software industry and to social philosophies supporting the concept of hierarchical control.
Each of these three contextual issues shape the real time activities that our group has made and will make. For example, in the many proposals we have written and submitted for peer review and program decisions:
1) We consistently have to restrict the number of key scholars who we include in the proposal, even if very little money is requested for internal but independent peer review of the intermediate steps.
2) We have to shape the proposal to fit what program managers have defined as the purpose of the work, in spite of our observations that many programs are not asking the correct questions.
3) We have to deal with a peer review that is not transparent, is not iterative, and for which there is no public outcome metric.
4) We have to deal with a core, and significant, group of program managers whose evaluations have consistently, over decades, attempted to move the academic community towards the strong form of artificial intelligence, or towards concepts that assume human knowledge creation and propagation within communities is an computer engineering task. One example is Dr Barbara Yoon’s 40-year legacy in re-enforcing the artificial intelligence methodology at DARPA.
5) We have to deal with a very powerful and hidden business process that using the confusion within a massive federal information technology evaluation and procurement system to extract as much as 20 Billion per year in consulting fees.
6) We have to deal with the behavioral consequences of academic computer science, and commercial software vendors whose interest is in preserving high incomes for a highly opinionated professional community that now numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
The next steps might include the following;
1.0: the continuation of the BCNGroup Glass Bead Games as a means to identify players in the knowledge sciences, and to allow an open and positive discussion to be posted in the Internet for others to read. (See: Glass Bead Game Overview )
2.0: The planning for a conference with the focus as suggested by Richard Ballard, Visions about the Knowledge Age.
3.0: Continuing planning for the National Project seeking federal funding that re-programs up to 1/6 of all federal support for academic computer science.
4.0: Taking the next steps with venture capital groups in bringing knowledge technology, such as the dataRenewal ™ and Readware Provenance ™ software and services to the market.
Processes, and discussions, supporting each of these steps are proceeding independently.