Monthly Archive for February, 2005

Finished reading an article on Spatial Cognition by A. Frank. The idea he had was to ask an agent1 to constructing a map replicating reality. Agent2 had to use that map to navigate the physical space. From the measurement of correctness and effectiveness of the agent2 interaction in the environment he could define the goodness of the realised map by agent1.

He constructed, therefore a three stage model of the situation as follows: Level 1: Reality, what is for real in the environment; Level 2: Beliefs, what the agent 1 and 2 think of the perceived reality; Level 3: Map, what the agent 1 has perceived and decided to be represented of the reality with the aim of guiding agent 2.

The author describe the two-tiered reality and beliefs model in which facts describing the simulated environment and the simulated agent’s beliefs of this environment are separated.

I wonder if it is possible to substitute one of the agent with a human using the system, namely with agent2. We can invent then a treasure-hunt task in the city environment where one or more “human” has to follows a series of steps to find an object. The map is defined and shared between agent1 and the participant/s. Agent1 has also the ability to see how his humans partner/s are using the map to retrieve the messages and find the treasure. Then his goal would be to evaluate the communication/interaction between the peers.

I advocate here for a different epistemological strategy of supporting learning: instead of talking of mirroring or guiding systems where the interaction is regulated through computational means, I propose a “coupling system”, where there in no model of correct interaction underneath but the system just stick of the users interactions, offering hooks to relevant information when needed. The system/agent and the humans forms a multi-agent distributed system.

The pictures are taken from: A. U. Frank. Spatial Cognition II (International Workshop on Maps and Diagrammatical Representations of the Environment, Hamburg, August 1999), volume 1849 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter Spatial Communication with Maps: Defining the Correctness of Maps Using a Multi-Agent Simulation, pages 80–99. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000. [url]

STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: “this is my preferite pizzeria!”, to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to navigate the city. You can ask the system, for instance: “where is a pizzeria near by?”, and the system will search for other people’s messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

craftsrv1.epfl.ch/research/stamps/

Finally I managed to spend some time reflecting on the recent discussion about folk taxonomy or folksonomy. Obviously there are lots of disadvantages in leaving a huge freedom to people to pick up their own keyword to describe the content. On the other hand there are people that advocate for a spontaneous rise of a shared meaning. I would adhere to a “middle-earth philosophy”, where context sets the boundaries and the natural alveum to constraint the unleashed meaning of words. In my idea, we cannot expect these discontinuous connections among different network resources to bring towards a huge shared meaning. Vice-versa, we can expect something better from the location based content. The difference I can see between the two resides in the context that is pretty much defined by the geographical space in the latter case.

There I expect to be a certain degree of redundancy that can correct difference in meaning, or at least, can make them more self evident, as a first step towards a consensus.

I am interested in hearing your opinion on this.