In my paper reports I focus on materials that are relevant to my goals, rather than a general and exhaustive overview of what the papers discussed. I will concentrate on presenting the pertinent ideas I have gleaned from these sources. I will include asides by myself---i.e. comments on the material---within blockquotes. As one of my initial papers I chose a very important work by one of the luminaries of human-computer interaction Douglas Engelbart---best known for inventing the computer mouse. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is a fairly hefty research report describing an approach to augmenting human intellectual capabilities.

• Engelbart follows the common model of human cognition as a sensory-mental-motor complex. Inputs are provided by the senses, processed via some mental system, and then various motor functions output the results back into the world.
• Problems are approached by humans by creating solutions that are broken down into many processes and subprocesses. These process collections are called process hierarchies.

  These are what I have chosen to call strategies, and each (sub)process is essentially equivalent to a frame.

• Different process capabilities of an individual---i.e. the actions the individual may perform---form that individual's repertoire hierarchy.
• Goals/problems are general things that represent general solutions to such items, e.g. memorandum would represent a sequence of actions involves in writing a memo.

  It seems that the goals, as described by Engelbart, are similar to the concept of prototypes.

• Engelbart provides a figure represent a fun experiment he conducted. In order to figure out how one may augment a human further, one must understand better how we have been augmenting ourselves up to now. So, this experiment has to do with "de-augmenting" an individual. First, the subject wrote "Augmentation is fundamentally a matter of organization" using a typewriter, taking only a few seconds. Then, the subject produced the statement in cursive, doing it much slower. Then the experiment of "de-augmenting a human by attaching a brick to a pen" proceeded. With a brick attached to the pen, writing in cursive, performance time, as well as quality of product was reduced markedly.

  Although the nature of the product itself had no changed much, the efficiency as well as convenience of the activity was greatly reduced first by elimination of augmenting tools, and then actively reducing the capability of remaining tools. This shows that the statement to be written "Augmentation is fundamentally a matter of organization" is truly a key point. The organization of the writing procedure into typing improves overall productivity greatly.

• Augmenting capabilities does not hinge on a particular mental theory, since it is only the selection and efficiency of capabilities that is affected. The exact nature and process of the capabilities is of secondary importance.
• Then, Engelbart refers to Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly "As We May Think". He quotes extensively from it, describing Bush's Memex system (a major inspiration for the World Wide Web). He goes on on to note that the Memex has but an added benefit of speed and convenience over a traditional filing system.

  That is, no new capabilities were truly added. Only that instead of walking through a hall of filing cabinets, recall is fast. Much like a phone call is a mere spatial surrogate of talking in person.

  One of the reasons that Bush's "predictions" (perhaps self-fulfilling since many inventors and developers were inspired by this article) are so apt is that little technological development remains that is not just an externalization of faculties (i.e. capabilities) that were previously performed less efficiently or maybe wholly internally.

Engelbart lays the foundations of my approach to helping humans achieve goals. I want to derive process hierarchies and repertoire hierarchies by annotating strategy narratives using FrameNet, so that the system may select an optimal process hierarchy for each goal (at each point in time, the optimal strategy may most certainly change based on further input). References:

• D. C. Engelbart, "Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework," Stanford Research Institute, Tech. Rep., October 1962.^{(HTML | PDF)}

For the past several weeks I have been working on an Independent Study course at Brandeis University which I have titled Exploring the Exocortex: Machine Learning for Human Behavior, advised by Professor Tim Hickey. Originally conceived as an attempt to use biologically inspired machine learning techniques such as neural nets and genetic algorithms towards modeling and then improving day-to-day human behavior, the course has moved towards a more direct path to solving that problem. I have read several papers and chapters in books, summaries of which I will post soon. In the end, this series of posts (which my be followed using the category exocortex on this blog) will adapted and augmented into a paper, which I will also post here. I believe that research should be done openly and publicly, and so, that's just what I shall do. What is the exocortex? To the best of my knowledge, this is a term coined by researcher Ben Houston--and popularized by science fiction author Charlie Stross--to describe the various systems humans may use in thinking but which are not part of our bio-brain. Already, our Blackberries, iPhones, and other essential electronic devices are proto-exocortices (yup, the plural isn't pretty). Why am I working on the exocortex? As human civilization has grown, we have increased in complexity. Some welcome this, some don't. Some believe that it will lead to some sort of Singularity. The Flynn Effect most likely is a result of humans attempting to adapt to this environment which is growing exponentially more complex. Already the problems of an Attention Economy, pioneered by the same people who pioneered modeling human behavior and augmenting human cognition, are apparent: There are more things one must pay attention to, within the same time constraints and physical limitations. Thus, it seems obvious to me that to cope with this information, and more importantly, attention load humans must create appropriate tools. The exocortex is a collective name for those tools. What do you mean by "Human Behavior"? I am planning to specifically tackle the problems I have greatest difficulty with allocating attention to: those pesky appointments and other thing one might put on a calendar. These things have a relatively high importance, and also allow pretty easy assessment of goal completion. How do you plan to work on that? I am devoting this course to creating a document detailing what I believe is a path of least resistance to a piece of software that can model strategies for goal completion and evaluate the best ones. If time permits, I will implement as much of it as I can. Here's a rough plan for such a system:

• Goals are inputted into the system.
• User provides goal strategy by narrating real-life activities.
• User strategy narrative is annotated using frames from FrameNet.
• Goal-completion satisfaction is rated by user. This is somehow applied to constituent frames.
• Process is repeated, and different frames are assigned different valuations based on perceived contribution to goal completion.
• System provides best set of frames to form optimal strategy for the completion of each goal.

How does this system differ from a PIM, e.g. on a Blackberry? Various calendar systems may provide reminders, perhaps with some intelligence noticing your location etc., that assign to you the task of evaluating your current strategy and seeing if it matches a hypothetical optimal strategy for accomplishing the goal specified in the reminder. This is an attention heavy process. Instead, I would like to move as much of the strategy modeling and evaluation as possible out to the exocortex. Even when strategy evaluation is not yet optimal within the system, merely providing concrete strategy options should reduce the attention needed by the user to evaluate a course of action. Are you really going to do this, and not let it stagnate like you've done with Gargoyle? Well, I'm still working on Gargoyle, slowly but surely! Many new things in my life have taken time I could spend on it (some will be revealed soon). This exocortex project, however, is guaranteed within the semester time frame as a grade depends on it. So, you can be assured of results. I hope you're interested and excited, because I am!