Well it’s been a while but the blog’s back on course! Thing is, I thought I’d retired but it looks as though I haven’t – for now at least!
So, new posts and articles on the way. Maybe the book serialisation could even begin again at some point?
Watch this space …
After a long break, here’s announcing a new project … What’s it all about? Well …
Essentially, this is a novel, an academic comedy to be precise, being written in real time. My previous attempt at fiction was fairly well received so, retired now, I thought I’d try a different genre.
But rather than faff around with finding publishers this time, I thought I’d just knock it out in instalments as an online series. There are two big advantages to this: (1) I can get feedback from readers and tweak it as I go, and (2) I can ask for small donations from anyone who’s enjoying reading it. And I’ve a particular plan for (2) …
Continue reading“ERIC”
How a Bad Think-Thing Destroyed the World
A short story by Vic Grout
Download as a PDF: https://vicgrout.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/eric-1.pdf
On the planet ‘Arth’ (which, if it helps, you can think of as being like Earth but without the ‘E’), things were going pretty smoothly. Arth society was organised roughly into three groups of people: doers, thinkers, and leaders. There was no great difference in status or esteem among the three groups but there were a good many more doers than thinkers and a lot more of both than leaders.
So, yes, most people were doers: they did things. They found raw materials and turned them into what people needed; they made clothes, built shelter, grew food; they moved it all to where it had to go; they repaired and cleaned. They cared and treated mind and body; kept people safe; raised families; looked after the young, the old and the ill; they taught new generations. There were also doers that entertained; made nice things to look at, told stories, played music or sport. All of these doers together made Arth a comfortable and happy place to live.
Continue readingSpecial Issue Information: Advanced Machine Learning and Data Mining: A New Frontier in Artificial Intelligence Research (Big Data and Cognitive Computing Journal)
Call for Papers
Without data, there is no machine learning (ML), so there is no doubt that big data and ML are inextricably linked. However, much research to date has tended to treat them as separate areas of development. As we are confronted with today’s difficult problems and the wealth of held data continues to grow, it is vital that new, innovative ways of examining, testing, and using big data to produce useful information are both researched/developed and integrated. Whether this be for the social good (health diagnostics, for example) or corporate gain (competitive advantage), given the exponentially increase in both the volume of data and the velocity by which it is generated, the need for the expansion of direct cooperation of mining big data with ML is long overdue. For this Special Issue, as the individual fields of advanced machine learning and advanced data mining are well established, the focus will be specifically on their intersection: the point―or points―at which one aids, needs, or enhances the other.
This new frontier is almost boundless, but will eventually become the norm. Automatically learning and improving from experience without being explicitly programmed gives great opportunities. The quality of the data being used, its speed of acquisition, and the effectiveness of processing are all of vital importance―if Microsoft’s AI chatbot Tay taught us anything at all, it is certainly this.
Turing's Radiator 