Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Thinking inside the box

2010; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-0394.2010.00556.x

1468-0394

Jon G. Hall,

Cognitive Science and Education Research

It is increasingly easy to imagine a future in which services are delivered through virtual worlds, such as Linden Lab's Second Life. Whereas one might always have to visit the dentist for a filling, the preliminary examination can be conducted through a mash-up of virtual and real images. In fact, with the right technology, nothing purely analytic is impossible virtualized: observation is simply the internalization of an item or an event. Even certain physical products, released from the need for distance-spanning delivery, will shuffle off their physical existence and join the virtual party: virtual visits to the cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. For physical synthesis, however, the situation is more complex: building in a virtual world with the intention of changing the real world is difficult to countenance. In one area, however, synthesis is as easy virtually as it is in the real world: knowledge engineering provides the perfect product for virtual-world synthesis. Knowledge, of course, is already a virtualized product running in the brain. Unfortunately, traditional notions of engineering do not easily translate to the virtual. Consider Rogers's (1983) practice-based definition of engineering:1 [Engineering is] the practice of organising the design and construction of any artifice [solution] which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognised need. To work with this definition means one must consider virtual as embedded in the real, as illustrated in Figure 1. Rogers embeds the virtual world in the real. The Brain User is the human operator with, perhaps, knowledge needs. Rogers's model is correct in the analysis it enables – we experience the virtual only through physical interaction with the PC. However, it leaves something to be desired when it comes to synthesis in the virtual world, as building the virtual artifice rests on lengthy navigation back and forth through avatars, the PC embedded in the physical world which interacts with our Brain User in their physical world. Is there a simpler model that removes some of this complexity for easier synthesis? The metaphor I am suggesting for virtual engineering is illustrated in Figure 2. Here, we have held a mirror up to the real world to illustrate the symmetry that exists between the virtual world and the real world. It induces a paraphrasing of Rogers, from which we may define virtual engineering as A mirror on the problem: virtual engineering enabled through recognition of the virtualized identified need: the avatar as virtualized brain user. the practice of organizing the design and construction of any virtual artifice which transforms the virtual world around it and our virtual selves to meet some virtual recognized need. Notably, this definition suggests that our real-world engineering skills can and should be transferable to the virtual: there is no reason that organization in the virtual should differ substantially from that in the physical (unless we can get the avatars to do it!). It may also be, of course, that there are new organizational skills to learn from the virtual, to do with enhancing communications for instance, whence our real-world skills are augmented. What isn't clear from our simple restatement of Rogers is the nature of the process by which the real recognized need becomes its virtualized counterpart: more simply, how can we deduce the virtual need from the real one? Examples of the complexity of the relationship will be clear to anyone whose avatar has sat on the virtual beach of any second life world: if you haven't, I recommend the OU's new virtual MPhil on Second Life – hosted on the deep|think islands. The deep|think islands provide a virtual campus for research students where avatars sit on virtual deckchairs under virtual parasols sipping virtual cocktails and watching spectacular virtual sunsets. Virtual birds fly overhead singing virtual birdsong. Later, the avatars will dance the night away in a virtual disco, or go boating: most relaxing, your avatar drifting away into the sunset. Whilst relaxing there, one gets to thinking: for, although the virtual deckchair supports the avatar, it does not support the student whose avatar it is. On the other hand, the virtual birdsong does not calm the avatar, it calms the avatar's owner; just as the virtual sunsets burn themselves not into the avatar's retinas but into real memories. Each virtual artifice has both virtual and real effects, with each virtual effect having a physical emotional counterpart: indeed, it is the emotional response of the real that is reflected by the mirror! Outside of military simulations, 1982's best virtual reality was provided by Microsoft's Flight Simulator, and so it is not too difficult to understand why, for Rogers, the physicality of the real world was of critical importance to engineering. We now know that real-world engineering and virtual-world engineering are related; that the relation is based on a useful symmetry between them that allows skills from one to be used to good effect on the other; but that the translation of real recognized need to the virtual need is complex. As knowledge engineers, we should take a view on this complexity and try to describe it so that real and virtual engineers can come together, to think both outside and inside the box. The deep|think sunsets can be experienced by visiting http://slurl.com/secondlife/Deep%20Think%20East/228/29/34/. (Free registration is required to visit Second Life.) HTTP://www.welcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX058631.htm In their new ten-year plan, the Wellcome Trust will focus on supporting the best researchers to address five challenges. While each of the challenges is truly worthwhile and valuable, one might be of particular interest to the readers of Expert Systems, and especially to those researchers whose contribution defines it. It reads: Exploring how the billions of nerves in the brain allow us to think, learn and remember, so that we can find new approaches to treating mental illness and neurological disorders such as stroke, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. What is particularly welcome is the Wellcome Trust's recognition that researchers need freedom and security to pursue long term the questions that will provide answers to these challenges. Writing in their Strategic Plan, 2010–20, the Wellcome Trust writes: We will support research to improve understanding of how the brain functions and to find improved approaches for treating brain and mental health disorders. This will require the characterisation of how nerve cells function and interact in complex networks to enable specific cognitive and behavioural functions. It will also demand a fully integrated approach that links basic and clinical biomedical research, with key inputs from social sciences, humanities and the arts. More details at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/news/2010/news/wtx058631.htm. Dr Juan I. Arribas, an Associate Editor for Expert Systems, is on his way to visit the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology, part of Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI, http://www.thebarrow.org/index.htm), in Phoenix, Arizona. The BNI is the largest neurological centre in the southwestern USA. Juan will travel at the behest of the Spanish government which has awarded him a fellowship to study computational models of blood flow measurements during seizure events and their use for neuroprotective therapies. The expected results of Dr Arribas have the potential to affect the quality of life of epilepsy patients everywhere. So, please join with me in wishing Juan a truly productive stay! Juan will, of course, continue his Associate Editor duties while he is away. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, repeated this old Russian proverb many times in his long career as a politician. When asked by Mikhail Gorbachev ‘Why?’, he simply said, ‘I like it!’ Perhaps what he liked was the phrase's easy juxtaposition of the faith-based ‘’ (‘Trust’) with the scientist's creed ‘’ (verify). In legalese ‘Trust, but verify’ becomes the assonant, but otherwise unpoetic, ‘due diligence’. Expert Systems is currently trialling iThenticate. iThenticate is a web-based service which indicates overlaps between academic papers. It provides a way of verifying what we trust to be the case: that an author's writing is his/her own. As an example of the iThenticate service in use, I ran this short editorial through the iThenticate system. The system picked up that Rogers's definition also appears in other papers and, in particular, one from 1995 by Professor Tom Maibaum who cites Rogers and gives the same definition in a paper on the teaching of software engineering. Satisfyingly, that's precisely where I first came across Rogers's quote. We have five excellent papers for you in this issue, in a number of areas of our field. To whet your appetite for more – The first, ‘Identification and resolution of conflicts during ontological integration using rules’ by Biletskiy, Ranganathan and Vorochek, shows how larger ontologies can be built from smaller heterogeneous ones, even in the presence of certain semantic conflicts. The work is grounded in OWL, the Ontology Web Language, and also demonstrates how the newer SWRL, the Semantic Web Rule Language, can be used for executable ontology representations. In ‘Discovering hidden knowledge in data classification via multivariate analysis’, Chen, Ip, Li and Wang propose a new three-step classification algorithm based on multivariate analysis for the grading of school transcripts. Claiming high classification accuracy and intuitive data interpretation, this work is supportive of new ways of working in today's educational environment. Iskurt and Becerikli present their system for automatic calculation of the quantities of vascular plaque from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images. Validation of the new technique is provided by an algorithm for labelling IVUS images and comparison against expert-produced contours and the contours extracted by their system. The paper is entitled ‘Extraction of media and plaque boundaries in intravascular ultrasound images by level sets and min/max flow’. In ‘Method of classifier selection using the genetic approach’, Jackowski and Wozniak present a compound classifier system machine learning algorithm for sets of area classifiers, whose parameters were chosen through the application of an evolutionary algorithm. The results of experiments confirm that the proposed method outperforms each elementary classifier as well as a simple voting committee. Vague information is the bane of modern life. In our last paper, ‘Knowledge acquisition in vague objective information systems based on rough sets’, Feng, Wang and Li describe new theories, techniques and tools which permit the analysis of vague data sets based on the combination of rough and vague sets theories.