Cognitive Architecture

The assignment: Sum up the entire first half of my Cognitive Architecture seminar into five principles, in one page or less, using language that could be understood by any semi-intelligent human being.

What I did: Turned the assignment on its head and created a vivid presentation showcasing each of the principles I identified (with a total amount of text occupying about one page).

The result?

'Her': On Truly Artifically Intelligent Assistants

The future promises the perfection of artificially intelligent personal assistants. 'Her', the recent movie starring Joaquin Pheonix and ScarJo as his "OS" delivers a compelling vision of a future in which intelligent personal assistants can be interacted as easily as with the person right next to you. Without spoiling much of the plot, I will say the lead character falls in love with his OS, which is contained within a small phone-like gadget and an earpiece, and they have to struggle to work out what a human-computer relationship means. It's a surprisingly powerful story that truly left me with questions such as "What is life?" and "What makes humans human?" and left my friends with questions such as "Is this even possible?" In this future, the humans interact with an "OS" (operating system) that, while initially as intelligent as a human, has access to a much wider array of knowledge and learns much faster than we simp...

DIY: How to Build an Artist's Easel (For $20 or Less)

So you want a good, solid easel but don't want to spend $100-200. I recently found myself in this situation; a recent graduate between jobs, I was running low on cash but high on motivation to get my hands dirty and paint. I set out to buy supplies for painting, but I realized only when I was at the store that I was lacking a crucial element: an easel. I was shocked to see prices in the $100-200 range for anything remotely resembling a decent wooden easel, so, perhaps as a result of my computer science do-it-yourself mindset, I set out to build one from raw materials. Turns out it can be done for under $20! And if I did it, you can to. Here's what you'll need:

Decentralized Internet Considered Harmful

Today I was reading a really great story on TechCrunch about how the future of the internet could be serverless . I was immediately hooked in by the idea, myself being a big fan of P2P technologies that eliminate server usage. I've often pondered how this type of network could be built in the past, mostly coming up blank, but was excited that a company called MaidSafe might have figured it out. MaidSafe is a fully decentralized platform on which application developers can build decentralized applications. The network is made up by individual users who contribute storage, computing power and bandwidth to form a world-wide autonomous system. Their solution is essentially to replace server storage with a P2P-like network, where chunks of data are stored over the computing devices of many individuals. They go on to make promises about the inherent security of such a network, how it would provide an alternative revenue stream for developers, yada yada yada. Though an attractive ide...

Ruben Martinez Jr.

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