Data Mining

Artificial Intelligence comes in many guises, it is not only for robots and self-aware computers. One of the things it is used for is to search for patterns in huge reams of data. This is called Data Mining. In fact data is now considered very valuable and people who know how to mine data to find patterns and help clients improve their businesses are well sought after.

This is not just as simple as looking for a line of best fit among a few hundred data points. The data been dealt with in data mining can be on the order of billions of data points with many attributes living on a high dimensional plane. There are many known techniques for extracting useful knowledge from such a vast amount of information but many new techniques are still been researched today.

In short Data Mining is all about finding unsuspected relationships and sumarizing data in new ways to give insights to the owner (of the data) and allow them to understand it better. One problem is that the data is not always collected primarily for data mining (although it is more and more so these days) so there are sometimes some issues in transforming the data for use. Another is that it is key that a human can interpret the output so that it can be put to use.

In future posts I will detail a few major usages and users of Data Mining.

Thanks for reading.

Ghost In The Shell: a gaze into the future

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is an anime series based on a manga written by Masamune Shirow. The anime is set in Japan in the near future, the year 2030, and deals with issues of cyber-terrorism and the future of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Technology. The series deals with philosophical issues both about the nature of AI and timeless problems such as that of existence and as such may require multiple watches to really appreciate.

The main storyline involves investigation into a case of corporate terrorism perpetrated by a genius hacker which leads down a path uncovering wide-scale corruption in the government and technology companies. There are many individual episodes as well which stand alone and can be watched separately.

There are many themes such as cyborgs, technological enhancements of the human body and whether robots can really gain artificial intelligence that I will talk about in later blog postings. The name of the anime comes from the concept of been able to lift someone's spirit (ghost) from their body (shell) and place it in a full cyborg body (another (robotic) shell) of which the main character (the Major) is an example of. This is a really interesting concept and I wonder if it or something like it may become reality one day. I'll leave this for another post.

You should check it out for yourself though. It really is an interesting program and provokes a lot of thought.