Getting started

Welcome to You Know Nothing, Socrates! The theme of this blog is knowledge, or more specifically – because that sure could use some narrowing down – the intersection of knowledge (in the philosophical sense) and computing. Knowledge, of course, is a notoriously elusive concept once you start trying to pin it down, which is why I’ve decided to name the blog after the famous Socratic paradox, apocryphal though it may be. And before you ask: yes, the title is also a Game of Thrones reference. Get over it.

To make matters worse, we haven’t been content to just assert that we as human beings have the ability to know various things and to derive new knowledge from evidence. Instead, ever since the invention of the modern digital computer, we’ve been very keen on the idea of replicating, or at least imitating, that ability in machines. This pursuit has given rise to fields of computer science research such as knowledge representation and knowledge discovery; this is the area where I’ve been working throughout my career as a researcher, and also the main subject area that I’ll be writing about.

A bit of context: I’m currently working as a Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in Dublin, Ireland. The project I’m working on, titled KDD-CHASER, deals with remote collaboration for the extraction of useful knowledge from personal data, such as one might collect using a wearable wellness device designed to generate meaningful metrics on the wearer’s physical activity and sleep. These products are quite popular and, presumably, useful, but for most users their utility is limited to whatever analyses the product has been programmed to give them. The research I’m doing aims for the creation of an online platform that could be used by users of personal data capturing devices to discover additional knowledge in their data with the help of expert collaborators.

As long as the KDD-CHASER project is running, which is until the end of January 2020, I will be using this blog as a communication channel (among others) to share information about its progress and results with the public. However, I’m also planning to post more general musings on topics that are related to, but not immediately connected with, the work I’m doing in the project. These, I hope, will be enough to keep the blog alive after the project is done and I move on to other things. Not that I’m expecting those other things to be radically different from the things I’m involved in at the moment, but hey, you never know.

There certainly isn’t a shortage of subject matter to draw on: besides the under-the-hood mechanics of computers capable of possessing and producing knowledge, there’s the philosophical dimension of them that I’m also deeply interested in – another reason for my choice of blog title. From here it’s not much of a conceptual leap to the even more bewildering philosophical questions surrounding the notion of artificial intelligence, so I might take the occasional stab at those as well. I fully expect to come to the conclusion that I really know absolutely nothing, but whether I’ll be any the wiser for it remains to be seen.