Moving to the Computational Knowledge Economy

Today

Aim: unlock knowledge assets

Theme: available ≠ democratised

Talks: information perspective, unlocking technology

Computation comes of age

High-powered computation for everyone changes...

...who can process information and compute answers
...what publishing information constitutes
...where value lies in the supply-chain of knowledge
...what we need to learn for this new era
...even what think of as (human) expertise

Example: linguistic access

Example: apps for communicating

From demonstrations.wolfram.com
Contributed by Seth J. Chandler.

Example: widget-building for authoring

http://www.conradwolfram.com/

Answers not search

Many answers mix knowledge and computation

Technical ingredients of democratisation

Interface (immediate, authoring, "reading")

Language (computers') [Complex, precise specification cf. math]
Mouse-driven [Small number of possible tasks]
Language (human) ["Drive by"]

Automation

Retrieval

Methods layer

Inteface

Presentation

Computational power

Sufficient algorithmic infrastructure

Symbolics, not just numbers

Computable knowledge

How did we get into this...?

Built Mathematica (June 1988)

Launch of Wolfram|Alpha (May 2009)

New knowledge ecosystem

Who provides knowledge assets?

Who are the new users?

Who curates?

Injects expertise?

Extent of editorialisation?

Form and monetisation of results?

How will author-"reader" interaction work?

Knowledge assets: governments

Democratizing knowledge means open and usable

Usable increasingly means computable

Biggest user of government data: governments. More efficient internally.

Cameron: get citizens to use goverment data to hold government to account

Knowledge assets: publicly funded R&D

$300 billion R&D funded by governments. 
What's the output?

Low communication bandwidth: scientific papers

Summarize without full information or data

Can't directly check conclusions

Documents v. applications (future: CDF)

Results for immediate reuse, further working

Knowledge assets: corporate information

"Drive-by" answers hard to get from ERP systems

Moving research assets to development and others...

Knowledge assets: human experts

Leverage human technical expertise, one level down

Instead of direct, through computer intelligence

Paradox: change our education for this New Era

Maths at centre of debate.

“Is it cheating to use Wolfram|Alpha for maths homework?”

Are we defining, teaching the right subject?

Summary: 

Era of The Computational Knowledge Economy