Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics and News12 June, 2014

First we want to talk schedule – There will be no meeting on 13 June, then the next meeting after that will be Tues 24 June then back to the Friday noon schedule on 27 June(sorry but due to Capt Amerika travelling the only other alternative is cancelling).  Meetings on the 12 and the 24th will focus on discussions on topics of interest versus Capt Amerika providing a lecture on recent articles.

1.)    The first discussion topic is on work in ‘conceptual combination’ – specifically we want to place the work recently presented on how it can be used (as could LASS and/or CIH) to address the ‘unexpected query’ - Conceptual combinationresearch investigates the processes involved in creating new meaning from old referents. It is therefore essential that embodied theories of cognition are able to explain this constructive ability and predict the resultant behavior. Article by Lynott – ‘Embodied conceptual combination – Frontiers in psychology nov 2010 vol 1 article 212

                                                               i.      …, by failing to take an embodied or grounded view of the conceptual system, existing theories of conceptual combination cannot account for the role of perceptual, motor, and affective information in conceptual combination.                                                             ii.      In the present paper, we propose the embodied conceptual combination (ECCo) model to address this oversight.                                                            iii.      In ECCo, conceptual combination is the result of the interaction of the linguistic and simulation systems, such that linguistic distributional information guides or facilitates the combination process,but the new concept is fundamentally a situated, simulated entity.

2.)    The second topic is on designing function models – specifically one of our colleagues is attempting to use existing models associated with the ACTR approach to implement a QuEST compliant solution.  That has led to an

interaction with Stanovich which led to some work that we’ve previously discussed by Sloman – so we want to re-look at the summary notes where we discussed Sloman and others on designing artificially conscious systems.3.)    We also of course will entertain any topic associated with the generation of the QuEST whitepaper.

News Stories

http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magicBrain magic – TED talkPsychological effects not power of words and non-verbal communicationTwisting arms – and handsExamples of reading with fingertips of of normal text – second sight – mind control experts can see through someone elses eyes – sense printed letters and color by touch - Drives down road fast – girl freaks out – he couldn’t see through blindfold – never met the girl before – car not gimmicked up – the solutons you might imagine are all wrongIf I don’t want u to look at my right hand I don’t look at itHave people come upTaps the other person – but the original subject feels?Lots of tricks – I have no idea how they work

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/automating-cybersecurity.html?ref=technology&_r=0

Automating CybersecurityBy KENNETH CHANGJUNE 2, 2014

Inside Photo

Credit Chris Gash  Top Stories

If only computers themselves were smart enough to fight off malevolent hackers.

That is the premise of an ambitious two-year contest with a $2 million first prize, posed to the world’s computer programmers by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , better known by its acronym, Darpa. It is the blue-sky, big-think organization within the Defense Department that created a precursor of the Internet in the late 1960s and more recently held a contest that spurred development of self-driving cars.

Michael Walker, the Darpa cybersecurity program manager who is running the contest, imagines a future in which sensors on computer networks could detect intruders, identify the flaws that let them in, and

automatically make the necessary repairs, all without a human computer expert lifting a finger.

Continue reading the main story

No such system exists today. The network security flaw called Heartbleed, for example, persisted for years in Web servers around the world before experts found it in April; hackers who knew about it could have used it to steal passwords and personal information. (Whether anyone did is unknown, but there were attacks after the bug was disclosed.) “Not a single automation tool has stepped forward and said it could find that flaw unassisted,” Mr. Walker said.

With numerous flaws in complex software, large data thefts have become commonplace. The credit card numbers of millions of Target shoppers were stolen last year. Last month, eBay told its users to change their passwords after its servers were breached.

“The problem is the fortification principle,” Mr. Walker said. “The cost for defenders of trying to block every possible weakness is so much greater than the cost of attackers, to be able to find one way in.”

The targets of the future will be even wider as networked computer processors show up in watches, thermostats, cars — the so-called Internet of Things. Then the potential consequences will include not just stolen data and crashed computers but crashed cars in the real world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?ref=technology

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web ImagesBy JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRASMAY 31, 2014

Inside  Top Stories

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

Photo

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, left, who tried to bomb an airplane, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The attempts prompted more image gathering. Credit Reuters; U.S. Marshals Service, via Associated Press

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_get_ready_for_hybrid_thinking?utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_campaign=&utm_source=m.facebook.com&utm_medium=on.ted.com-facebook-share&awesm=on.ted.com_e0E6Qneocortex capable of new type of thinking ab ility to think of new types of behavior

if new behavior serves puspose could be saved for use by rest of the cortical animals – not requiring evolution to change – dinosaurs go extinct 65 m yrs ago – mammals survived – neocortext grew – ridges/folds increases surface – bout size of table napkin – have old brain does basic drive / etc. – modules to recognize and memorize patterns – hierarchy – 50 years ago Kurzweil wrote – how to create a mind his recent bookbetter and better neural information and systems information available – 300M modules – say have ‘A’ recognizer module – they get excited on the cross bar of the A – next level adds other pieces – eventually ringing the ‘A’ detector – eventually the ‘Apple’ or PEAR’ detector – the feedback gives expectation for the next letter – Modules get higher level of abstraction – but based upon them being hierarchies of hierarchies – Brain stimulation – the patient laughs – found a location that stimulates humor – Computers can do HHMM – Jeopardy – getting better at NLU – reading Wikipedia – Watson Eventually will read and understand web pages – similar to the Kabrisky intelligent student aid – Will connect our neocortex to the cloud – in 2030’s need extra neocortex will be able to access it – 300 M modules in human brain will not be enough – will need hybrid solution – Again we will expand our neocortext but without limitation of skull – additional quantity will lead to quantitative leap in technologyhttp://gcn.com/articles/2014/05/21/rand-navy-cloud.aspx?s=gcntech_220514

Navy must deal with rising tide of sensor data

By Dibya Sarkar

May 21, 2014

The U.S. Navy needs to adopt a cloud system to keep pace with the deluge of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data being generated by unmanned aerial vehicles and needed for situational awareness and other mission-critical tasks, said researchers in a new RAND report.

“We’re only now at the point where we’re starting to put up new UAVs with incredible sensors, so the problem is only going to get worse,” said Isaac R. Porche III, a senior researcher with RAND and co-author of the report.

Porche said the Navy had argued for more manpower to deal with the growing volumes of data, but budgetary pressures forced it to seek other options to improve efficiency. RAND, which was hired to do a quantitative assessment, looked at the imagery, video and audio that the Navy was collecting from UAVs, studying how long it took for its analysts to process data from several siloed databases using different desktop applications.

The report, Data Flood: Helping the Navy Address the Rising Tide of Sensor Information, concluded that the Navy may reach a tipping point as early as 2016 when “analysts are no longer able to complete a minimum number of exploitation tasks within given time constraints.” In other words, analysts will be much less effective than they are now in finding value in the exponentially increasing data if the Navy doesn’t change the way it collects, processes, uses, and distributes that data.

The Navy collects the equivalent of what’s stored in the Library of Congress -- about 200 terabytes -- every other day, Porche said.

Even so, the Navy doesn’t even save a lot of the data because it doesn’t have a good way to organize it properly, he added.

RAND recommended that the Navy adopt a distributed cloud approach similar to what the intelligence community and major corporations like Google are doing -- keeping data in different locations and tagging it so it can be searched and accessed easily

According to the report, this cloud architecture “enables development of Web services and widgets that bridge identified gaps” and provides the highest level of interoperability compared with the other options.http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-does-your-brain-respond-to-pain-karen-d-davis#watch

How does your brain respond to pain? - Karen D. Davis 8069 Lesson Views

Let's Begin… Everyone experiences pain -- but why do some people react to the same painful stimulus in different ways? And what exactly is pain, anyway? Karen D. Davis walks you through your brain on pain, illuminating why the “pain experience” differs from person to personPain in fact can cause you to accelerate doing a task – doing a task can distract you from the pain – letting the mind wander can distract you from the pain

What is pain – unpleasant sensory and emotiona experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage – really what you think it is – you can define on a scale – what generates the perception of pain – Pain gets your attention – brain has to respond to the signal – chem systems help regulate and limit painSensitivity and efficacy of circuits make individual differences in pain perception / responseAttention / modulation circuits are the targets of treatments – needs to be personalized

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/unlocking-secrets-if-not-its-own-value.html?ref=technology&_r=0

Unlocking Secrets, if Not Its Own ValueBy QUENTIN HARDYMAY 31, 2014

Alex Karp, chief of Palantir Technologies, has resisted calls for it go public. Despite a growing number of private clients, he says an I.P.O.’s emphasis on stock price would be “corrosive to our culture.” Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Palantir Technologies will not help you share, message, pin, post or chat. It does not exist to make you more social or connected, or even to help advertisers get to you. Its technology is deeply geeky, its work secretive. Nonetheless, it’s one of the most valuable private tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Founded in 2004, in part with $2 million from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm, Palantir makes software that has illuminated terror networks and figured out safe driving routes through a war-torn Baghdad. It has also tracked car thieves, helped in disaster recovery and traced salmonella outbreaks. United States attorneys deployed its technology against the hedge fund SAC Capital, which was also an early investor in the company. (SAC, which changed its name to Point72 Asset Management after it pleaded guilty to insider trading charges, declined to comment on its investment.)

Palantir’s software has been used at JPMorgan Chase to spot cyberfraud and to sell foreclosed homes; at Bridgewater Associates to help figure out investments for its $157 billion under management, and at Hershey to increase chocolate profits. The technology is complex, but the premise is simple: The software consumes huge amounts of data — from local rainfall totals to bank transactions — mashes it together and makes conclusions based on those unlikely combinations. Where is a terrorist attack likely to occur? What is a bad financial bet?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/02/world/asia/pakistan-taliban-split/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

Pakistan Taliban splits over 'un-Islamic' practices

By Sophie Brown and Sophia Saifi, CNNupdated 4:04 AM EDT, Mon June 2, 2014

Azam Tariq, a Mehsud faction spokesperson and Pakistan Taliban leader, says his faction is separating from the militant group.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Mehsud faction of Pakistan Taliban defects, citing ideological differences The break comes after months of internal friction within the militant group Analysts say the split weakens the Taliban, government talks played a role

It remands to be seen how Al Qaeda and splinter groups will respond

(CNN) -- After months of infighting within the Pakistan Taliban, a major faction of the deadly militant group has apparently had enough.

The Mehsud faction has announced it's parting ways with the central leadership of the group, known formally as the Tehreek-i-

Taliban Pakistan (TTP), over ideological differences.The breakaway faction had made attempts to convince the TTP

to give up what it said were "un-Islamic" practices, such as attacks in public places, extortion, and kidnappings, and decided to separate from the banned terrorist outfit after these attempts failed,

a spokesperson for the newly-formed faction, Azam Tariq, said in a statement released to the media last week.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2648556/Forget-practice-makes-perfect-meditation-key-success-study-claims.html

Forget 'practice makes perfect' - meditation is the key to success, study claims

They have shown that people who rise to the top have ‘highly-integrated’ brains finely-tuned for creativity

Advice contradicts widely-held belief that practice eventually makes perfect

Some experts have even put a number on it, saying that 10,000 hours of hard graft make the difference between being good enough and world class

By Fiona Macrae

Published: 10:07 EST, 4 June 2014 | Updated: 12:44 EST, 4 June 2014

Practice doesn’t make perfect – but meditation might.

Researchers say that however hard some people try, they won’t excel at their chosen job, sport or hobby.

This is because the key to perfection lies in the mind.

They key to success? The findings contradict the popular idea that 10,000 hours of hard graft make the difference between being good enough and being world class

They have shown that people who rise to the top have ‘highly-integrated’ brains finely-tuned for creativity.

The good news for those not naturally blessed is that mediation may help.

The advice from Dr Fred Travis, a US neuroscientist and advocate of Transcendental Meditation, contradicts the widely-held belief that practice will, eventually, make perfect.

AND IT HELP BEAT CHOCOLATE CRAVINGS TOO...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/06/09/so-far-big-data-is-small-potatoes/

So Far, Big Data Is Small PotatoesBy John Horgan | June 9, 2014 |   5

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Is Big Data going to revolutionize science and help us make a better world? Not based on what it’s done so far.

Let me back up a moment. I was recently a speaker at How the Light Gets In, a groovy philosophy and music festival in Hay-on-Wye, Britain. The festival lodged me in a fantastical mansion called Great Brampton House, where I hung out with other festival speakers, like physicists George Ellis, Carlo Rovelli, Carlos Frenk and Tara Shears; biologist Rupert Sheldrake; psychiatrist David Nutt; and journalists Colin Tudge and David Malone. (I hope to post Q&As with Ellis and Sheldrake soon.)One afternoon, I participated in a public debate about Big Data with journalists Kenneth Cukier and Angela Saini and sociologist Laurie Taylor. The festival brochure blurbed our session as follows: “In an age when we can collect information in unimaginable quantities, will we replace simplifying theories with complex real patterns? Might Big Data be the end of theory?” These are questions posed by Cukier, data

editor for The Economist, and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of Internet governance at Oxford, in their 2013 bestseller Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.In an essay based on their book, they write: “Big data starts with the fact that there is a lot more information floating around these days than ever before, and it is being put to extraordinary new uses. Big data is distinct from the Internet, although the Web makes it much easier to collect and share data. Big data is about more than just communication: the idea is that we can learn from a large body of information things that we could not comprehend when we used only smaller amounts.”Their most intriguing assertion is that Big Data will allow us to solve problems without necessarily understanding them. Big Data will shift the emphasis of researchers from “causation to correlation,” Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger write. “This represents a move away from always trying to understand the deeper reasons behind how the world works to simply learning about an association among phenomena and using that to get things done.” Former WIRED editor Chris Anderson made similar claims in his 2008 essay “The End of Theory.”If Big Data means digital technologies, I love Big Data. Digital technologies have transformed the way journalists as well as scientists gather, analyze and disseminate information. With my MacBook Air, I can Google Cukier without leaving my room and in an instant find reviews of his book—including a surprisingly positive one by often-cranky Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times .Moreover, Cukier is right that science can achieve a lot merely by uncovering correlations. Epidemiological studies demonstrated more than a half century ago a strong correlation between smoking and cancer. We still don’t understand exactly how smoking causes cancer. The discovery of the correlation nonetheless led to anti-smoking campaigns, which have arguably done more to reduce cancer rates over the past few decades than all our advances in testing and treatment (as I point out in a recent post).http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/06/03/darpa-aims-to-restore-memory-for-traumatic-brain-injury-wounded/

DARPA aims to restore memory for traumatic brain injury woundedBy Bryant JordanPublished June 03, 2014 Military.comFacebook0 Twitter0 Gplus0

DARPAThe Pentagon has ambitious plans to develop a prosthetic for the brain that, if successful, will restore memory functions lost to troops who suffered brain injuries as well as people losing their pasts to Alzheimer’s disease.The Restoring Active Memory — or RAM — is just one project among a broad, multi-agency program underway as part of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative announced by the White House last year.

More than 300,000 service members have sustained traumatic brain injuries since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, which is pumping $50 million into the

research this year, said there currently are no effective therapies to treat the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on memory, notwithstanding the size of the problem.“The specific end goal of RAM is to develop and test an implantable neural device for human clinical use to restore specific types or attributes of memories to individuals with memory deficits,” the agency says. The Pentagon will also be looking at new ways to treat mental health disorders, including depression, and to restore the ability of patients with Parkinson’s disease to control their movements.First up, DARPA has to develop models of how neurons code for declarative memory — that is, knowledge that can be consciously recalled, such as events, times and places. Additionally, researchers will have to find new ways of analyzing and decoding neural signals in order to understand how neural stimulation may facilitate the ability of the brain to process information following brain injury.http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/computer-becomes-first-to-pass-turing-test-in-artificial-intelligence-milestone-but-academics-warn-of-dangerous-future-9508370.html

Turing Test breakthrough as super-computer becomes first to convince us it's human

Eugene Goostman, a computer programme pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy,

successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test

Andrew Griffin

A programme that convinced humans that it was a 13-year-old boy has become the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test. The test — which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime.

Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations.

Read more: What exactly is the Turing test?

Eugene Goostman, a computer programme made by a team based in Russia, succeeded in a test conducted at the Royal Society in London. It convinced 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, said academics at the University of Reading, which organised the test.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/rats-are-capable-of-feeling-regret-scientists-say-9510038.html

Rats are capable of feeling regret, scientists say

Ian Johnston

Rats are capable of feeling regret about their own actions, an emotion that has never previously been found in any other mammals apart from humans.

Researchers set up a test called Restaurant Row in which the rats had to decide how long to wait for food.

“It's like waiting in line at the restaurant,” Professor David Redish, of Minnesota University, told BBC Nature News. "If the line is too long at the Chinese restaurant, then you give up and go to the Indian restaurant across the street."

In some cases, the rats decided to move on from one “restaurant” that offered nice food but was taking too long, only to find the next one offered a less popular dish.

Faced with this scenario, the rats often stopped and looked back at the previous restaurant and were more likely to wait for longer for something nice.

Professor Redish said they had had to be careful to design the study so that they could monitor signs of regret and not just disappointment.

"Regret is the recognition that you made a mistake, that if you had done something else, you would have been better off," he said.

"The hard part was that we had to separate disappointment, which is just when things aren't as good as you hoped. The key was letting the rats choose."

The study, published in “Nature Neuroscience”, questions claims that regret is a uniquely human emotion.

"In humans, a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex is active during regret. We found that in rats recognising that they made a mistake, their orbitofrontal cortex represented the missed opportunity," Professor Redish said.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/527956/imposing-security/

Imposing SecurityComputer programmers won’t stop making dangerous errors on their own. It’s time they adopted an idea that makes the physical world safer.

By Simson Garfinkel on June 5, 2014

Why It MattersFlaws in commonly used software endanger financial information and other sensitive data.

Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people. The flaws cropped up in different places—the software running on Web servers, iPhones, the Windows operating system—but they all had the same root cause: careless mistakes by programmers.

Each of these bugs—the “Heartbleed” bug in a program called OpenSSL, the “goto fail” bug in Apple’s operating systems, and a so-called “zero-day exploit” discovered in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—was created years ago by programmers writing in C, a language known for its power, its expressiveness, and the ease with which it leads programmers to make all manner of errors. Using C to write critical Internet software is like using a spring-loaded razor to open boxes—it’s really cool until you slice your fingers.

Alas, as dangerous as it is, we won’t eliminate C anytime soon—programs written in C and the related language C++ make up a large portion of the software that powers the Internet. New projects are being started in these languages all the time by programmers who think they need C’s speed and think they’re good enough to avoid C’s traps and pitfalls.But even if we can’t get rid of that language, we can force those who use it to do a better job. We would borrow a concept used every day in the physical world.Of the three flaws, Heartbleed was by far the most significant. It is a bug in a program that implements a protocol called Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), which is the fundamental encryption method used to protect the vast majority of the financial, medical, and personal information sent over the Internet. The original SSL protocol made Internet commerce possible back in the 1990s. OpenSSL is an open-source implementation of SSL/TLS that’s been around nearly as long. The program has steadily grown and been extended over the years.Sam’s Club launching credit card with chip-enabled security technology

JUNE 4, 2014 | BY MARIANNE WILSONRelated Content         Welcome to the New Customer Disruption Newsletter

         Kroger debuts Retail Site Intelligence, new enterprise IT architecture

         In the Chips

         Westfield Garden State Plaza brings digital technology to physical world

         NRF calls for adoption of chip-and-PIN credit and debit cards to curb fraud

Bentonville, Ark. -- Sam's Club announced it will launch a new credit card using EMV chip-enabled

technology on June 23, beating Target as the first mass retailer to move to the new technology. The new

card — co-branded with MasterCard Inc. and issued by GE Capital Retail Bank — has an embedded chip

that makes the card more difficult to duplicate, which provides enhanced security from fraudulent activity,

according to Sam’s Club.

Target Corp. announced in the spring that it was speeding up its transition to chip-and-PIN technology, and

plans to be finished with the transition by early next year.