Cognitive Assistants of the

SemanticWeb
Assisted Cognition
Principal Investigator: Raman Kannan
The Human Brain, on one hand, is an active medium where we store
data, detect relationships, connect them and synthesize higher order
percepts, as needed and on demand. Connecting and leveraging
information from multiple brains all at once is a challenge, even
under the supervision of a master of brain-storming.

The Internet, on the other hand, is vast federated data store, growing
at a rate defying our abilities to make sense, necessarily, curated by
multiple brains, all at once. This untapped data offers a lot of
promise to enrich our lives, if only the relationship between the data
can be identified, connected, summarized and synthesized,
just as our brain does.

The vastness and observed growth rate demands that the process of
identification and synthesis be automatic, without
human assistance for the most part. However, occasional and
intermittent curation are desirable, as in wiki, but not required.
In this we present a collection of supporting illustrations to harness
more out of the internet.

The aid we are proposing to help cognize the internet, is not a single step,
that will harness all of the internet, on its own, even if such a thing were
possible. We are proposing simple agents each accomplishing a trivial
aspect of cognition, some specializing in understanding the context of the
conversation taking place between the human and this active internet
agent, some specializing in extracting the semantics, NLP, extracting the
essence, and others specializing in how best to convey the essence
(visualization) and all, while making entire interaction contextually
relevant and appropriate.
Contextual Help

Illustration :
Subway map – contextual help
B:another view of the world
 Choice is context sensitive
If I were to ask you
how far is Central Park North,
Our brain would choose View A and say 11 stops
on the line

If on the other hand if the question how to get to

Museum of Natural History, our brain would
choose B.

Our goal is to construct a web service that can construct a context sensitive solution ...
Visualization and comprehension help
Cognitive assist

Illustration: Africa
Illustration: USA GDP
 Two experiments

Suppose I wish to know how big is the us economy relative to world economy

Or

How big is the continent of Africa in land area relative to other regions...

Information exists but not in a form that can answer this readily.

It is in a form conducive to computing not reasoning or

comprehension.
Tabular and volumonous
 Wiki gives me accuracy, not
comprehension
But it is tedious...
This picture
tells me US
Economy is
equal to the
sum of 52
nation states.
Africa – wiki again tedious table
Visualized differently

Answer is
obvious

Source:
Private wealth magazine
 Visualization

Specialized topic beyond charts and plots
with lot of foundation relating to human
cognition and how the mind/brain works

We will continue with

Edward Tufte – Principles

Doing Is Knowing segments starting with charts
and plots

70% of all the information we consume is visual
 Comprehension help
Cognitive assist

Taxation in retirement and States

There is lot of information available over the internet, often confusing

conflicting and overwhelming

We could say so, for just about any topic

It has become impossible to find the information we need

and in a form suitable for human consumption or
comprehension in general

Make no mistake, this is all nothing but old wine in new bottle...
starting from Bush-Memex(1950s), DARPA DICE (1980s),
I-DAM/DISHA (1990s), DOOLLI and now cOgS.
 Deja vu

http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/weti96ff.htm
 Power of Information

http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/w3cf.html
 Requirements for cOgS

http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/w3cf.html
 steps to realization

WWW

Semantic Data Mining

Machine Learning

Semantics
Comprehension
Cognition
 PATHWAY to REALITY
User Agents/Display Renderers

CONTEXT ANALYSERS
Marvin's Society

CONTENT ANALYSERS

Unified Canonical Representation

Formatting/translation agents

Native Advances in DSC+NLP+ML+KR

 Pie in the Sky? Or What?
Does the world need it? If so what is it worth?

Getting a Grip on Data Sprawl Through Enterprise Indexing & Search, a whitepaper from virtualworks.com
 Thank you
IBM POWER ACADEMIC INITIATIVES
NYU Tandon School Of Engineering –
• MoT program – Bharat Rao, Bohdan Hoshovsky
• Tandon MoT MG7173 Students – since 2011
Tandon CS9223 and CS6083 Students -2015
Professor Torsten Suel and Nasir Memon Tandon
Professors Sumitra and Ramana Reddy – WVU, CERC-DICE 1988-1992
Professor Jeff Parsons – Memorial University
Charlotte Walker, Jeff Lenker, & the Doolli Tribe
Chad Mollekan, anycard.ca Tribe
Dean Naik – Monmouth University, Software Engineering 94-1998
EMBAG-2005 – Columbia Business School Alumini
William J. Sweeney, BillLabs, Class of Byron Nicas citi Tribe

for all your support and encouragement