Monday, November 08, 2004
Center of Excellence Proposal
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White Paper on Incident Information Orb
Architecture (IIOA) ŕ
Adi Structural Ontology Part I
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Cubicon language descriptive
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Richard (Ballard)
You communicated:
Paul:
I am going to be out of town until Sunday. Going to Santa Cruz and
Berkeley, to visit old friends and roomies. The course is finishing up and I
come back to review all the nuggets Mills has put on my plate in terms of
proposal opportunities. Send me what you think important. We go into proposal
writing shortly thereafter. Give me a perspective on your best hopes and
ambitions and I will look for multiple fits.
My reply..
Proposal development is often a process in which individuals compete for specific pots of money.
If this proposal thing were really objective and fair, then the activity would bring greater value to the taxpayer. But the evidence is that there is no real claim, anymore, to fairness or to objectivity. It is loyalty and obedience to that which serves the system, in this case, that which allows incumbent defense contractors to stay at the feeding trough. It is not loyalty to the notion that natural science has to be honored somewhere in this process. It is not really loyalty to the nation, although many people may get this impression.
My experiences are not unique at all.
Many BCNGroup community members’ comments have been received about the rejection of the anticipatory technology challenge problem proposal that was submitted to a point of contact at Mitre, Dr David Day. (see previous beads in this tread, and your own remark last week ŕ [151] ) But this one instance is only one of many instances that indicate the same thing.
It is not merely a problem of fairness, it is a problem of an absence of diversity and the continuing funding of AI-type technology that can be reasonably discredited based on past experience and on principled discussions from natural science.
The evaluation has become "internal" to a system that has become less transparent.
It is in this environment that those of us that have worked the issues related to ontology development and use now face. (see previous note ŕ [161] )
The National Project has been suggested.
Such a project would recognizes that large funding awards are going to incumbent entities like Mitre or Cyc Corp, where those who claim to understand how to develop and use ontology can not point to any single publicly review able deployment success using ontology. Such a project would claim 20% of the 1.2 B in direct funding going into computer science departments, and re-program these funds to support the new academic department of knowledge sciences.
Cyc Corp for example, has no deployed ontology that can be peer reviewed by such leading scholars, like John Sowa or any one else that is independent of Cyc Corp or the Cyc Corp groups in the funding agencies. John has written about this.
Mitre has individual like Leo Obrst who create these histories of the research that has been funded and stack these name of systems that were developed up as if any of these systems have found a use anywhere except as a means to obtain funding. He presents these PowerPoint presentations over and over and in such a fashion that no one no matter how knowledgeable can stand up and say:
excuse me , but have these systems been useful to anyone other than
those who received the funding to create them?
I talk a bit about Dr Obrst’s story and assumptions in [161]. I use the term “AI polemic” to make a specific claim. The claim is that Obrst and the others at Mitre and the defense groups have excluded natural science from the funded discussion about the nature of human knowledge and the possibilities that arise from some type of use of computers to amplify human abilities.
So, is there any strategy for forming a community of scientists who are able as a community to go to the Congress and Report on this specific problem in funding practices.
Let me be clear with an example.
I know of a new HDS contract that is worth 22M. This contract is given to a major defense contractor. The program management is now out looking for anyone with experience with ontologies.
Those individuals who have the right to receive 22 M in funding for developing ontology to monitor security do not have anyone that they know that has a clue as to what we in the ontology community have experienced over four decades.
It gets worse. The team that will form is likely to have 8 - 10 average software engineers that have J2EE experience and are willing to behave as if RDF is something they know or can pick up in a week or so.
I may become the senior scientist for this team, but this is to be seen. I am trying very hard to play the game as so that they do not come to know who I am. I have to, to get income, really push the notion that RDF solves all problems and not bring up the known problems with RDF ontologies that Stephen Newcomb, co –developer of the Topic Maps standard, politely talks about. So I focus on where RDF does do a good job.
I am one of the leading experts, but my involvement in new this feeding trough depends strictly on my not exposing my knowledge of Orbs or RIBs or SLIP or structural ontology or differential ontology or n-aries, or even reconciliation over controlled vocabularies. I have to be very careful not to introduce anything that will upset the software engineers, who know ZERO about ontology or taxonomy and yet is the most import group in the team.
Why?
They defense contractor makes more per hour on the software engineer billing than the billing of a single senior scientist. There is also no possibility of bringing in Dr. Murray to help in addressing the real problems that will come up, or asking that those who created the Topic Map standard to serve as paid consultants.
So there we are. Your call.