KMi Seminars
Problem solving and mathematical knowledge
This event took place on Friday 10 December 2010 at 11:30

 
Joe Corneli

I will give a brief retrospective on the past year at KMi and talk a little bit about what brought me here in the first place! I will then spend the rest of the time discussing my plan for the next two years. Succinctly, the plan is to build a problem-solving layer over the encyclopedia layer that comprises the central feature of the current PlanetMath.org. Research will proceed by examining the activities of people in this space (e.g. connecting, discussing, working, recording, sharing, learning, etc.) and analysis of these pursuant to creating useful recommendations for learners. I am particularly interested in looking at the ways problem-solving connects with encodings of knowledge in the encyclopedia layer. Comments and criticisms are welcome; and, to this end, please come with an opinion about the following motivating quote: "Outsiders see mathematics as a cold, formal, logical, mechanical, monolithic process of sheer intellection; we argue that insofar as it is successful, mathematics is a social, informal, intuitive, organic, human process, a community project." -- Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, by DeMillo, Lipton, and Perlis.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities