It is depressing to read the emphasis given to statistics in a report of an AI conference. I once heard a famous Professor of Statistics at a leading British University claim, "AI is just a branch of Statistics". While such a statement reveals his ignorance of the scope of AI and its methods (eg: logic, emergence, agent systems, software engineering, etc), what is depressing is the arrogance this reveals: a problem is considered solved once it has been reduced to numbers and these subjected to statistical analysis.
Not all problems are reducible to a quantitative representation, and even if they were, a clever statistical analysis of the numbers does not engineer you an intelligent system able to act in the world and to explain its actions to others.
Right now I'm the tech lead and co-founder of a new startup in the Web Services space - 3scale networks. We're based in Barcelona, Spain and currently in stealth mode - looking to do great things for Web Services / Web 3.0 infrastructure :).
In my past life, I spent 10 years running international research efforts in areas such as backbone network traffic management, distributed systems, AI and agent technology areas. I still have interests there and we hope to spring some surprises with 3scale - stay tuned for that :)
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It is depressing to read the emphasis given to statistics in a report of an AI conference. I once heard a famous Professor of Statistics at a leading British University claim, "AI is just a branch of Statistics". While such a statement reveals his ignorance of the scope of AI and its methods (eg: logic, emergence, agent systems, software engineering, etc), what is depressing is the arrogance this reveals: a problem is considered solved once it has been reduced to numbers and these subjected to statistical analysis.
Not all problems are reducible to a quantitative representation, and even if they were, a clever statistical analysis of the numbers does not engineer you an intelligent system able to act in the world and to explain its actions to others.
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