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Computers help social animals to see beyond their tribes

Computers help social animals to see beyond their tribes

By Noam Cohen, New york Times | Updated: 5 June 2012 02:22 IST

Highlights

IBM researchers in this laboratory nestled next to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been forced lately to confront a limit on computing power: The human brain just isn't processing data any faster.

IBM researchers in this laboratory nestled next to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been forced lately to confront a limit on computing power: The human brain just isn't processing data any faster.

It's a shame, too, because the brain has never had more material to make sense of: More friendships, that come with more frequent updates, more bosses to report to, more news, more entertainment choices. And who knows when the next million-page WikiLeaks release may come along?

Overwhelmed by all the noise, some have simply chosen to block it out - to opt out, say, of social networks and microblog platforms like Twitter. Alternatively, others have been close to these social networks, counting on them to sort through all the information coming at us.

But to be informed in the distributed world we live in, opting out isn't really an option. For better or worse, we are watching a C-Span version of our lives trying to fast-forward to the good parts.

That is the task being squarely addressed last week at IBM's Centre for Social Software - a roughly 30-member lab that addresses "the modern-day challenges of collaborating across distributed, global enterprises." The lab tries to use increasingly sophisticated computers to act as information advisers.

"I do think of computers as augmenting people, not replacing them," said Irene Grief, the Director of the research centre. "We need help with the limits of the brain, but there are some things that our brains can do that computers can't do."

The researchers essentially create programs that find patterns (and outliers) in the "fire hose" of information. Once patterns are revealed, it becomes easier to decide who or what is worth our undivided attention.

A literal example of fast-forwarding through the clutter of government is a public website created by IBM researchers, Many Bills. Relying on sites that collect and format federal legislation, the IBM project uses textual analysis to summarize and display Congressional bills as they move through the legislative process. This often reveals material that would seem to be unrelated to the business at hand (and probably was inserted as part of the bargaining process), like a provision on guns in a financial regulatory bill.

The added material isn't necessarily a secret - someone had to insert it, and often the deal making is quite public - but a computer trained to see patterns and to highlight in bright colors can often spot it instantaneously.

The creators of the program stress that all of its features are intended to allow people to dig deeper - The entire text is there to be read. In an academic paper on the project, its creators, Yannick Assogba, Irene Ros and Joan DiMicco, described other "open government" visualization techniques that seem to allow "only a few number of interpretations." By contrast, they wrote: "Our belief is that for citizens to become meaningfully engaged with government data, they need to be able to draw their own conclusions about it."

Then there is the problem of searching for expertise, not necessarily Web page results. One tool for IBM employees, SaNDVis, does this by showing a web of relationships around a search term to reveal who within IBM has expertise on a topic. It uses writings, meetings attended, personal profile information and previous work experience to map these connections with lines showing who is closest to whom.

Like many of the center's other projects, SaNDVis takes advantage of 400,000 IBM employees who write reports, contribute to internal wikis, share bookmarks and blogs, or communicate via internal versions of Twitter or Facebook.

The implication is that in such a huge global company, there will not be a single center of expertise. And true to form, when Adam Perer, the creator of SaNDVis, typed in "visualization" - the expertise of many of his colleagues at the Cambridge lab - he saw familiar faces, including his own, but also people from around the world whom he didn't necessarily know.

Ido Guy, a Manager at the IBM office in Haifa, Israel, where the data for SaNDVis is compiled, described the mission. "This is about unlocking - or unleashing - the value of information," he said. "You cannot tie together the connections as well as a computer program can do it -- that these two people are commenting on the same blog that they have a lot of similarities and maybe should know each other."

And as for Mr. Perer's way of displaying search results through people, Mr. Guy said: "When the Web and intranet become more social, people become more central. It is more than a document search."

With its huge employee base, IBM also performs the kind of data mining on its own employees that Google or Facebook still can't dream of applying to the public - with access to the entire range of internal social networking tools linked to an employee ID number.

Projects like SaNDVis, which builds off a collection of information called Social Networking and Discovery, work as well as they do because employees' professional lives are all on the record and are fodder for analysis.

In many ways, the IBM lab can seem like the anti-Google. Its research frequently stays in house, and its goals are very different. Google projects can seem like confections put before the public to keep them participating in the all-seeing Google data-collection project: that participation helps Google learn more about you and give better search results. The ads can be directed to you more effectively, as well.

IBM doesn't serve ads, and thus collects information for its sake and for the sake of the businesses it is working with.

"People who come here know that the end goal is to help our company help our clients," Dr. Greif said. "We think we have also educated the company that some playful, consumer-oriented ideas" can end up "helping this corporation."

The goal is to tame the wondrous flow of information that has become part of normal life, while remaining engaged in the broader world, as you would expect from a multinational corporation. (The WikiLeaks material is an exception; Dr. Greif said she had been told that her researchers shouldn't mine that particular trove of data.)

For simple business reasons, IBM is trying to break out of the standard way people use social networks to navigate the flood information. Typically, people interact with generally like-minded friends and thus create an "echo chamber" where prejudices are reinforced.

Such a posture also helps flatten the culture - reduces the culture to memes, if you will; we float from one "trending topic" to another. Pass along the same YouTube clip everyone else is passing along. Treat serious news as gossip, and vice versa.

Of course, life is not the same as working at a conglomerate. Many people are perfectly happy seeing the same faces, learning the news from the same sources, seeing the most popular movie that week.

Thinking beyond those safe parameters can make your head hurt.

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