View source for SSSW Day 4

{{pubdate|2|August|2005}}
This day no theoretical talks, but instead two invited speakers - and much social programme, with a lunch at a swimming pool and a dinner in [http://images.google.com/images?q=segovia Segovia]. Segovia is a beautiful town, with a huge, real, still standing roman aqueduct. Stunning. And there I ate the best pork ever! The aqueduct survived the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake huge earthquake of Lisbon of 1755], although houses around it crumbled and broke. This is, because it is built without any mortar - just stone over stone. So the stones could swing and move slightly, and the construction survived. <br />
Made me think of loosely coupled systems. I probably had too much computer science the last few days.

The talks were very different today: first was [http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mjw/ Mike Woolridge] of the [http://www.liv.ac.uk/ University of Liverpool]. He talked about Multiagent Systems in the past, the present and the future. He identified five trends in computing: Ubiquity, Interconnection, Intelligence, Delegation and Human-orientation. <br />
His view on intelligence was very interesting: it is about the complexity of tasks that we are able to automate and delegate to computers. He quoted John Alan Robertson - the guy who invented resolution calculus, a professor of philosophy - as exclaiming "This is Artificial Intelligence!", when he saw a presentation of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran FORTRAN compiler] at a conference. I guess the point was, don't mind about becoming as intelligent as humans, just mind at getting closer. <br />
''"The fact that humans were in control of cars - our grandchildren will be quite uncomfortable with this idea."''

The second talk was returning to the Semantic Web in a very pragmatic way: how to make money with it? Richard Benjamins of [http://www.isoco.com/en/index.html iSOCO]] just flew in from Amsterdam where he was at the [[SEKT]] meeting, and he brought promising news about the developing market for Semantic Web technologies. Mike Woolridge was criticizing Richard's optimistic projections and noted that he also, about ten years ago, spent a lot of energy and money into the growing Multiagent market - and lost most of it. It was an interesting discussion - Richard being the believer, Mike the sceptic, and a lot of young people betting a few years worth of life on the ideas presented by the first one...

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