Seb's Open Research
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Wednesday, April 30, 2003
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My thesis defence
 My Ph.D. thesis defence is scheduled for Friday, May 2, at 2 PM, in room 5340 of Pavillon André-Aisenstadt (see picture) at Université de Montréal. The title of my thesis is "A Socio-Technological Approach to Facilitating Knowledge Sharing Across Disciplines", and my talk (in French) will chiefly be about the interdisciplinary knowledge sharing problem and how such tools as weblogs, wikis, and ontologies may help alleviate it. Everyone is welcome to attend!
I'm glad to report that Professor Tommaso Toffoli of Boston University has accepted to act as external examiner for this thesis. He himself will be giving a talk (in English, I think) at 3:30 PM on Thursday, May 1, either at room 5340 or 3195, entitled "A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge engineering for normal people". Here's the first paragraph of his abstract (which you can find in its entirety near the end of this page):
We have started crafting and disseminating the elements of a new cultural package (tools, skills, and traditions) which will help ordinary human individuals---ie, not only nerds and geeks---cultivate and enjoy an extended personal information space---a "knowledge home", as it were. The computer will materially help manage this extended space by providing storage capacity, software tools, and processing power. But these resources will have to be matched, on the human individual's side, by substantial new competencies---a "computational literacy", as it were---whose acquisition, like that of ordinary literacy, will be encouraged and made possible by the Knowledge Home culture.
This sounds really interesting (and a little Spike Hall-ish, might I add).
In case you're near Montreal and are interested in attending my defence or Prof. Toffoli's talk, here are pictures detailing how to get there by car and by subway.
 12:45:51 AM
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Don't get sued
Dan Bricklin has been contemplating the entrails of the Creative Commons licenses, and advises us to be careful about the responsibility that is entailed by their use.
The Creative Commons licenses say, in effect, "After checking, I guarantee no one will sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions". What many casual webloggers really want to say is "I guarantee I won't sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions".
12:25:46 AM
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Tuesday, April 29, 2003
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Making the past more accessible
David Carter-Tod evokes a very significant problem that exists in academia but also in large organizations of any kind that have been around for a while. He starts with a quote by Mark Bernstein:
I'm sick of papers and monographs whose authors are too busy (or too lazy) to build on what has gone before, to respond to what we already know, and instead spend their time coining new terms and hauling in new theoretical systems from outside
Right. Lots of stuff out there that we don't know that we know.
I think two reasons why we are prone to ignore past developments are that (1) we are often hardly socially connected at all with the people who were responsible for them; and (2) a proper reward structure for synthesizing lessons learned and keeping old fires alive does not exist, which has the effect of locking knowledge up in forms that are not sufficiently accessible to outsiders once its originators have moved on.
I really wish there were a good way to dig up the relevant stuff in the piles of material that were written five, ten, twenty years ago. Forget keyword search -- words shift too quickly. Right now pretty much the only way is to have an old-timer around with a good ear, a good memory, and time on his hands. (Good luck.) And if you don't, sadly, reinventing the wheel might actually be more efficient than digging through the haystack to find it.
A related older post of mine: Don't throw away the past.
11:46:23 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:38 PM.
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