Abstraction of levels of abstraction

The notion of level of abstraction (LoA) is one of the foundations of the Floridi's Philosophy of Information. It also serves for many practical purposes as in information ethics. But the notion of abstraction is not new; it has been given many different meanings in various fields, especially in scientific disciplines and, in particular, in computer science. Our purpose here is to examine the use of abstraction in Floridi's works in conjunction with some of the meanings of abstraction in computer science. The article is divided into five sections. After a general introduction to the Floridi's method of abstraction (MoA) in Section 1, Section 2 revisits Floridi's definition of abstraction and Section 3 gives the different senses of abstraction in computer science. The Section 4 compares them with the Floridi's LoAs and proposes to generalise the Floridi's approach to abstraction using an abstraction of the LoAs, while Section 5 concludes on what we think to be some new arguments in favour of MoA and LoA.     

ALAN TURING'S VISIT TO DAYTON

Recently declassified documents from the “Crane Collection” at the National Archives (USA) reveal much of the purpose of Alan Turing's visit to the United States during the Winter of 1942–1943. The “Bombe Correspondence” file contains Turing's “Visit To National Cash Register Corporation of Dayton, Ohio” and additional material which places this report and his earlier “Treatise on the Enigma” in the context of his role as consultant to the U. S. Navy Cryptanalytic Section (Op-20-G) on the design of the Navy Bombe and other related matters. The documents in this collection reveal a productive and decisive relationship between Turing and Op-20-G dating from the visit of the Sinkov mission to Bletchley Park in February 1941.     

From Symbol to ‘Symbol’, to Abstract Symbol: Response to Copeland and Shagrir on Turing-Machine Realism Versus Turing-Machine Purism

In their recent paper “Do Accelerating Turing Machines Compute the Uncomputable?” Copeland and Shagrir (Minds Mach 21:221–239, 2011) draw a distinction between a purist conception of Turing machines, according to which these machines are purely abstract, and Turing machine realism according to which Turing machines are spatio-temporal and causal “notional" machines. In the present response to that paper we concede the realistic aspects of Turing’s own presentation of his machines, pointed out by Copeland and Shagrir, but argue that Turing's treatment of symbols in the course of that presentation opens the door for later purist conceptions. Also, we argue that a purist conception of Turing machines (as well as other computational models) plays an important role not only in the analysis of the computational properties of Turing machines, but also in the philosophical debates over the nature of their realization.     

RECOVERING THE WIRING OF ENIGMA'S UMKEHRWALZE A

Umkehrwalze A was the original reflector used in the version of the Enigma machine employed by the German armed services. Its wiring was originally deduced by the Polish cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski in December 1932 or January 1933, but details of the wiring have not previously been published. Sufficient information to recover the wiring analytically is provided in a wartime document by Alan Turing, and other sources have been found to confirm the solution. This paper presents the wiring, along with alternative methods of recovering it from Turing's data.     

Other bodies,other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem

Any attempt to explain the mind by building machines with minds must confront the other-minds problem: How can we tell whether any body other than our own has a mind when the only way to know is by being the other body? In practice we all use some form of Turing Test: If it can do everything a body with a mind can do such that we can't tell them apart, we have no basis for doubting it has a mind. But what is “everything” a body with a mind can do? Turing's original “pen-pal” version of the Turing Test (the TT) only tested linguistic capacity, but Searle has shown that a mindless symbol-manipulator could pass the TT undetected. The Total Turing Test (TTT) calls instead for all of our linguistic and robotic capacities; immune to Searle's argument, it suggests how to ground a symbol manipulating system in the capacity to pick out the objects its symbols refer to. No Turing Test, however, can guarantee that a body has a mind. Worse, nothing in the explanation of its successful performance requires a model to have a mind at all. Minds are hence very different from the unobservables of physics (e.g., superstrings); and Turing Testing, though essential for machine-modeling the mind, can really only yield an explanation of the body.     

Effective Memory' and Turing's model of mind

In the first section of his celebrated 1936 paper A. Turing says of the machines he defines that at each stage of their operation they can ‘effectively remember’ some of the symbols they have scanned before. In this paper I explicate the motivation and content of this remark of Turing's, and argue that it reveals what could be labeled as a connectionist conception of the human mind.     

Why zombies cannot write significant source code: The Knowledge Game and the art of computer programming

This article analyses the knowledge needed to understand a computer program within the philosophy of information. L. Floridi's method of levels of abstraction is applied to the relation between an ideal programmer and a modern computer seen together as an informational organism. The results obtained by the mental experiment known as the Knowledge Game are applied to this relation, so to explain what a programmer should know in order to program a modern computer. In particular, this analysis clearly shows why non-conscious agents have no hopes to write significant programs. Two main objections are then presented and attacked by corresponding counterobjections.     

Extending the Usability of Heuristics for Design and Evaluation: Lead,Follow, and Get Out of the Way

User-centered design practitioners have often relied on discount usability engineering methods using heuristics. Top 10 lists of design and evaluation heuristics have proliferated during the 1990s, leading to a plethora of heterogeneous heuristic guidelines for a multitude of user interfaces. A simple, unified set of heuristics that might be applicable across different technologies, understood between disciplines, and equivalent to metrics used to measure ease of use can be beneficial.

Lead, follow, and get out of the way (LF&G) theorizes that the optimal human-computer interaction (HCI) experience is analogous to a facilitative learning relation-Like a good teacher, mentor, or coach, the usable user interface leads the user to successful completion of tasks and goals; follows the user's progress and provides appropriate feedback and information when needed; and gets out of the way of the user to allow efficient and effective completion of tasks as the user attains mastery of the system, its concepts, and operations. A set of 18 heuristics grouped under the 3 general principles of the title are provided for use across the tasks of design guidance, development refinement, and end-user evaluation of computer systems.

This article provides background into the development of LF&G, case studies on its use in real-world product design and development, and directions for further research needed to develop this approach into an empirically based method for defining, describing, designing, and predicting the ease of use of interactive human-computer systems.     

It Takes a Library to Support Distance Learners

ABSTRACT

The Rochester Institute of Technology Wallace Library's philosophy is to create and provide resources and services that will support all users. Consequently, distance learners and distance faculty have a plethora of online resources available to them, some of which are “pushed out,” saving time and effort for the library user. The evolvement of Wallace's online resources is continuous, focused on the student or professor's research need from a geographic distance.     

Floridi's informational structural realist basis for info-computational modelling of cognizing agents

Informational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.     

VON-FOERSTER'S CONJECTURE—TRIVIAL MACHINES AND ALIENATION IN SYSTEMS

In this paper, we demonstrate how the proper modelling of general systems allows us to address the question of how the actions of many independent but inter-connected agents contribute to a global behaviour. In particular, we apply the techniques of information theory to probabilistic automata to formalize and prove what has come to be known as the ?Von-Foerster conjecture”.

In the first part of this paper we describe Von-Foerster's conjecture in its historical context. In the second part we restate it using formal definitions and we prove it.     

Information flow between cockpit and aircrew

Abstract

Recent avionics developments and the associated processing power now available in civil and military aircraft have produced cockpit systems that can rapidly saturate the crew with information. Future cockpits will have the potential to provide many more times the information available today. Man's processing capability, however, remains essentially constant and minute in comparison. Only by understanding man's capabilities and limitations will it be possible to design avionics systems that match human requirements and result in an effective man-machine combination.     

BUILDING A “RICH PICTURE” AND ASSESSING A “QUALITY MANAGEMENT” PROGRAM AT THORNTON PRINTING COMPANY

This working paper illustrates the use of a variety of systems ideas to explore the problem situation presented by Thornton Printing Company, and to examine its “Quality Management” Program—the major instrument chosen by the Company to address its problems. The method employed to set the proposed solution against the “mess” it was designed to alleviate could be refined to have a very general application, The paper also contains many points of more specific interest. Checkland's guidelines for building a “rich picture” are supplemented by ideas drawn from the organization theory literature and by use of the “cognitive mapping” technique. The legitimacy of such a combination of concepts is therefore raised (but not examined.). The “Quality Management” Program adopted by the Company, and the method of implementation, is revealed to be a much attenuated version of the philosophy set forth in the literature on Quality Management and “Excellence” from which it was drawn. Finally, the assumptions underlying the Company's version of “Quality Management” are neatly exposed and questioned using the strategic assumption surfacing approach.

The work reported could have been dressed up lo make it appear a fairly profound intervention (in some respects it was profound). It was deckled to publish it in a less than polished form because this captures much more of the flavor of the project experience—continually thinking on the run to keep up with the rapidly changing problem situation presented by the company.

The actual project report must remain confidential until January 1990. but will then be available for consultation.     

EXTRAORDINARY CODEBREAKERS,OUTSTANDING FAMILY: A REVIEW

The effectiveness of Alan Turing's original bombe design is discussed in this article along with organizational methods of implementing it via a microcomputer. To illustrate the material presented, a three part German Werhmacht message is solved.     

‘Real’ information is not flat – and why it matters

We consider Luciano Floridi's proposal for a structural realism based on an Informational Structural Realism which, as he describes in his book (p. 339): ‘As a form of realism … is committed to the existence of a mind-independent reality addressed by, and constraining knowledge’. In doing this, we inform and reform aspects of the argument within a mathematical and, specifically, computability theoretic context.     

ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY: THREE EXPERIMENTS ON THE QUALITY OF INFORMATION

Abstract

An expert system in ethical organizational administration is a new and appropriate venture for workers in artificial intelligence. The positive relationship between knowledge and belief along with the inextricable connection of fact to value set the general systems design for this modeling process. The premises of general systems theory dictate the modeling of an holistic ethical system. The pattern of the holistic ethical system of Orthodox Christianity is used to design the flow diagram of the decision-making and judgment-making processes in ethical thought. There are seven symbolic propositions that detail these ethical processes. With the public language of the United States being secular, four Orthodox Christian ethical principles were transformed from their biblical and theological language into four university ethical policies using secular language. The writer's future design of computer software will confirm or deny the wisdom of this approach to modeling an ethical system.     

Robust stability evaluation of sampled-data control systems with a sector nonlinearity in a gain-phase plane

This paper describes a graphical evaluation of the robust stability in a frequency domain based on the results from our previous paper in which the extension of Popov's criterion to discrete-time systems was expressed in an explicit form. The control system described herein is a sampled-data control system with one time-invariant nonlinear element (sector nonlinearity) in the forward path. For the purpose of application to a computer-aided control system design (CACSD), we will present an evaluation method of the robust stability in connection with the size of sector nonlinearity and the gain margin on a gain-phase diagram (i.e. a modified Nichols chart). We will show two results as numerical examples: one where Aizerman's conjecture was approved, and one where it was not. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

The (Uncertain) Future of Libraries in a Google World

Abstract

Libraries are in competition with other entities that provide information access to students, scholars and the general public. This constitutes a radical change in the information environment. The library profession's failure to take seriously the change that has taken place in the information environment, and to respond with fundamental changes of its own, may well spell disaster for the library as we know it.     

Multimedia information using mobile computers: accessing the digital campus and the digital library

Abstract

It is clear that the role of the information resource is changing. Major publishers have been slow to adapt to the emergence of a global digital medium, but there are now signs that a great deal of information will be delivered on-line, (although at present only about 25 databases account for 80% of usage in UK and optical publishing is still in its early stages). However, digital publishing on the Internet — with services for libraries such as just-in-time purchasing and delivery, for example — will be a driving force in creating the ‘global digital medium’. One issue that will become increasingly relevant is how the individual user accesses rich multimedia data in the most appropriate way. The ‘digital university campus’ and the ‘digital library’ are coming to be important concepts, with the aim that users of information services will receive information on-line supported by a ‘ubiquistructure’ of information technology. For the ‘digital campus’ this means that not only scholarly but also teaching activities are based on interactive access to information, and where not only the digital library but also the digital bookshop and the digital classroom are becoming possible with the development of 140Mb/s SuperJANET links. However, it is recognised that libraries will not be truly digital for the foreseeable future, and that libraries will maintain traditional and digital media side by side. In this paper, reporting on work at the University of Bristol's Educational Technology Service multimedia resources unit MRU, and the University of the West of England's Centre for Personal Information Management (in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories and the University of Bristol's Centre for Communications Research), we look the ‘digital library’ and ‘digital campus’ from the perspective of the individual user and her information needs. We are particularly interested in the use of small, mobile computers as access points to the global digital medium. We suggest that, in an environment of change — where the traditional campus and the traditional library exist alongside the digital campus and digital library — the most appropriate form of access technology is based on ‘personal technology’ which allows a linking between digital information and traditional paper-based information.