ALBERTO PEPE

Lazy webs

My friend Karen Van Godtsenhoven asked me some questions about the semantic web (and how it is related to laziness), for the latest issue of The Word Magazine. To read the article, go to the online issue (January-February 2009). The article is on pages 44-47. Alternatively you can download a PDF of the article. You can also find The Word in print, in Belgium and in good bookstores worldwide.

Review: "Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective"

This week, I had the pleasure to read a manuscript titled “Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective”, recently authored by my friends and colleagues Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors present agent-based simulations of two collective decision making systems that can be used for societal-scale governance.

Rodriguez and Watkins reiterate that from a statistical viewpoint, optimal decision making is best approximated by ensuring the appropriate conditions realized by the Condorcet jury theorem. The theorem provides a theoretical basis for democracy; it states that a group of decision makers will achieve the optimal decision provided that the group is large enough (i.e. the size of the population tends toward infinity) and that the probability of each decision maker choosing the best of two options is larger than 0.5. Thus, the two conditions for a successful outcome of Condorcet’s jury theorem are population size and individual knowledge to make a decision. Rodriguez and Watkins suggest a means to achieve these conditions by: (i) approximating the largest possible population via a dynamically distributed democratic system that propagates voting
“power” to active voters in a trust-based social network; and (ii) delegating different decisions to specific groups of decision makers via the implementation of an incentive decision market model, on the basis that different decision makers possess different types of knowledge that are most useful to make different decisions. Simulation data presented in the paper show both a smaller average error and a higher proportion of correct decisions made when dynamically distributed democracy and incentive market are used, as opposed to direct democracy and incentive-free market, respectively.

The overarching thesis of the paper is that present day governments do not make appropriate use of the technological advances of the Information Age to develop modern governance and decision making systems: “many of today’s government structures are remnants of the technological constraints of the eighteenth century”. A critique is necessary: was this level of democracy the original intent of the
thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment? One might consider the social, cultural, economic, racial and gender-based barriers that existed in the eighteenth century to argue that it wasn’t solely the technological (as well as the logistical) impediment that prevented the implementation of more direct types of democracy in governance systems; rather, many Enlightenment thinkers may well have preferred governance to remain an activity of the (albeit broadened) elite classes, technological limitations notwithstanding.

Yet, perhaps the question of the Enlightenment thinkers’ original intent is beside the point. If it is our intent to achieve more optimal decisions through a decision making system involving universal suffrage, the fact is that the technologies currently relied upon by our governments to achieve this goal are unnecessarily burdened by the limitations of the past, both perceptual, and technological.

For this reason, Rodriguez’s and Watkins’ paper is important and necessary, both to advance research in e-governance and to increase awareness in the general public. The embrace and implementation of the technology offered by web-based social networks, recommendation algorithms, and collective decision making systems, should be a
crucial priority for the development of future governance systems, and as technological advances continue apace, these issues will only become more important.

Note. An excerpt of this post appears on the Collective Decision Making Systems Blog. Many thanks to Chris Starr for reading the paper and providing his comments from a socio-political perspective.

A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to Build Cultural Ontologies

Authors: Ramesh Srinivasan, Alberto Pepe, Marko A. Rodriguez

Title: A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to Build Cultural Ontologies

Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Volume 60, Number 2, Pages 1-13. 2009.

Abstract: This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce cognate ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of fluid ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, US). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semiautomated solution best optimizes among issues of interoperability and scalability, deemphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.

* Preprint also available on eScholarship, here.

A Grateful Dead Analysis

Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Vadas Gintautas, Alberto Pepe

Title: A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior

Venue: First Monday, volume 14, number 1, 2009.

Abstract: The Grateful Dead were an American band that was born out of the San Francisco, California psychedelic movement of the 1960s. The band played music together from 1965 to 1995 and is well known for concert performances containing extended improvisations and long and unique set lists. This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead’s concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 last.fm Grateful Dead listening events from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they are listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their fans 10 years after the band’s dissolution.

* Preprint also available on arXiv, here.