PalaceHotel Blog

My Safari Bookshelf currently has two books on Collective Intelligence. They are not theoretical books, but practical programming guides. One is titled “Collective Intelligence in Action”, the other “Programming for Collective Intelligence”. Sofar I had nurtured an almost philosophical interest for CI, but these books promise much more: I can get in front of my computer and start taking advantage of it. It is becoming a resource, maybe even a new kind of utility.

Personal Intelligence is another beast. It is this most precious – and unevenly distributed, capacity of knowing oneself and others in order to make sensible decisions in life. More so even than CI, PI has deep echoes in the philosophical tradition (everyone remembers Socrates’ motto). O’Reilly does have a few books that relate to PI, but they are not programming titles.

Thus, there seems to be no way for me to leverage Personal Intelligence insights and concepts using a computer. The idea might sound idiotic, but think about it: people (you?) generate tons of highly personal information on computers these days. Imagine what Freud could do if he could lay a hand on the accumulated data you are generating on all your electronic devices. Having you lay down on a sofa would probably feel redundant.

Organizations have exercised introspection for a long time, though. In the corporate world, this is known as Business Intelligence. Techniques in these disciplines have been inspired, or directly applied, from the fields of A.I. and bioinformatics. It is a vibrant field where techniques stemming from the 70s and 80s and that have been deemed useless ever since, have finally found their target domain; what’s more, they very effectively benefit the bottom line. It is basically this technology that is being rebranded and explained in simple words in my Safari books on Collective Intelligence.

Individuals could probably benefit from these techniques, too. Through mining their own data, you and I could find out about the cycles in our lives, uncover unforeseen influences from people and events. By knowing ourselves better we could certainly gain more control over our health, personal objectives and behavioral patterns.

The Personal Cloud is a popular concept these days. Like everything “cloud” it has a rather fuzzy meaning, or at least one that is very changing, depending on the context.

• it might be an online datastore, where people are able to store arbitrary data: images, documents, videos…
• it may refer to the idea of some private instance of a social network (ala buddypress), collaboration tools (zimbra), etc… where the software runs in the cloud but on a privately owned server
• finally, the most widely accepted definition is probably that of the aggregated personal data that a user has gathered online with all the different “free” services she uses: facebook, gmail, flickr…

The fundamental difference between all these definitions is probably the degree of isolation with other people’s data. The so-called social web is somehow blurring the notion of a digital identity, as people tend to define themselves more and more through the different social networks they are being part of. I.e. you are not anymore this mister so-and-so with a given profession and, possibly, a certain number of political/philosophical/artistic views; you are instead a member of a certain number of communities, and you are in constant interaction with their members on multiple subjects.

It is those interactions that, considered en masse, are creating the value of the social web. They are the driving force behind the enthusiasm for cloud computing, and for a good reason: intelligence gathered from the interactions of millions and millions of users is an incredibly powerful marketing tool.

In my opinion, the Personal Cloud is this elusive notion that, in addition to your being part of a certain number of online communities, you are your own personal individual, too; one particular person with their own tastes, feelings and aspirations that need not necessarily belong to a marketable and outbound community.

I am convinced that there is a need for everyone of us to reflect on the complex interactions we entertain with cyberspace. It is as we are learning to breathe and we need to understand how to inhale.

The Personal Cloud is yet to be invented.

I am a software engineer. My interest for IEML is philosophical and maybe even a bit esoteric, but I’m also interested in its power from a purely engineering standpoint. Here’s my take on it.

To begin with, IEML is a language in its own sake; one of its own kind, too, however, since it has a universal scope. It stems from a long philosophical ambition to conceive of a language that is the language of the mind. Foremost, it is also a script through which we can not only describe ideas, things or concepts, but, as we are doing so, it gives us the power to understand and to discover more about the reality we are trying to model. This process, in which we are constantly re-evaluating our own assumptions about our personal ideas, is what makes IEML a bridging technology for humans to collaborate accross disciplinary boundaries and language barriers, almost without us ever noticing it.

As a software engineering tool, IEML is the technology for IT experts to create systems that are not only technically interoperable, but whose functionality will be expressed in the most generic way and which will allow for a whole new level of reusability. It has the potential to create a breakthrough in design pattern engineering aswell as in SOA software design. Imagine a world where Web Service descriptors not only expose method signatures but also the true meaning and scope of these methods in a way that is understandable by machines. IEML is the empowering technology for software engineers to exponentially grow our ability as a species to think collectively and, ultimately, to better understand the world we are living in.