Re: Welcome and Introductions

A few words about me.  I studied physics and astrophysics at university, and then got into computer networks, operating systems and AI. I have been a part of the W3C staff for many years now, and am attached to the European host in France, but work from home in the UK.

In my role as the lead for the W3C Web of data activity, I am interested in related technology trends and what is needed to make W3C a more effective and welcoming venue for developing community standards. Much of the early work on the Semantic Web focused on deductive reasoning, but with real-world data often being incomplete, uncertain and inconsistent, we need to open our minds to other kinds of reasoning, including inductive, abductive, analogical, social and emotional reasoning.

In addition, I am interested in how to take advantage of progress in cognitive science and sociology. Here, I am impressed by the theoretical and practical result with cognitive architectures like ACT-R, which point to opportunities for extending RDF with features that model human memory.  There is a great deal of hype around deep learning, but the weaknesses of current approaches is increasingly apparent, and this is pointing to the potential for major breakthroughs as we figure out the right questions to ask.  Likewise for natural language, where a cognitive approach is needed that focuses on understanding. Here, I see an opportunity for using language and simulated environments to teach common sense skills and emotional intelligence. That would have a huge impact on practical applications of AI.  There is of course plenty of technical work to do to realise the potential, but that is much more interesting to me that the philosophy of AI in the abstract.

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things