Transmission 005

The image shows half the cerebral hemisphere of a macaque monkey. Made with technique called Diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI). Author(s): Van Wedeen, Patric Hagmann, et al Institution: Massachusetts General Hospital, Vanderbilt University, EPFL, et al Year: 2008 URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21175/

00_Problematic
We are supposing that both human and system possess knowledge and intelligence.
We are supposing that the actual systems of exchange between them are not able to use the full potential of both of these ends due to communication gaps.
We are placing our project in this context; we will try to make an interface between Human and System not specifying for the time being where exactly it will be used.
We will try to design a strategy of communication so that the uses remain multiple.

01_Proposition context
We proceed in an interpretation of what we call “potential of user, potential of system” through the dipole Knowledge / Intelligence. Explaining:
Human knowledge: The substance, data, information, expertise that a person can bring.
Human intelligence: The subjective, complex methods, skills and strategies that each person applies when facing a problem, the hierarchies, abstractions, organisations, decisions, combination of the materials at hand to propose solutions, the creative, cognitive processes.
We are assuming that current systems are not able to learn from those and we think it’s worth trying at least to render these legible, readable in terms of code, whether it can be treated by newer generations of systems or integrated in the current ones.
System knowledge: The system is capable of recognising patterns, language patterns, word patterns, semantic fields when those appear in a syntax that connects to its arborescence of code. Therefore, it is able to store the input information.
System intelligence: The system’s computational and calculating capacities. The system can recombine the data connections real-time to produce the new form of the interface based on the changes by the user. (if not clear, proceed to 02_proposition description).

02_Proposition description
The user-system exchange takes place in the form of an interaction game. Action-reaction
In the beginning the user has to choose from a number (3,4) basic forms / bodies of organisation the one that is most suited to his mind frame and expertise. (for “form” details, proceed to 03_form description).
Using multiple forms to choose from is a method extracted from computer games.
Each character to choose from has a certain number of specificities, properties.
The initial form proposed has two functions:
a) to introduce the user to the rules/ language/ connection types, generally the environment in which he will have to adjust the way he is emitting information
b) to present the typologies, families of questions – knowledge expected from him.
Then the user starts entering his input by filling up empty spaces within the form.
The user chooses where to start from.
The user chooses the size of the space he needs for his input.
The user chooses the connections between his input and other pre-existing elements within the form.
The user can create more empty space where there isn’t enough.
The user can zoom in a particular territory and discover its sub layers, its details.
Basically, within the duration of the interaction the user discovers gradually that he has the ability to radically change the form in order to create a construct that is rational to him and expressing best the relations between his inputs.
While at the beginning the system proposes a form to stick to, in time the control of the organisation of data is taken by the user- expert while the system follows closely.
The system monitors the changes he is making and changes accordingly the matrix where the input is stored.
Therefore, it reacts real-time to the changes induced by the user by re-organising the form
There are two outputs from this process:
a) The data, inputs of the user, interconnected in the way that he has judged as necessary.
b) The monitoring, documentation of the process revealing how the human mind decomposes and recomposes – also adding- elements in order to solve a problem.

03_Form description
The form will be at the same time the representation of the knowledge and the memory of its construction. The shape will be the hybridization between patterns of language, sharable, understandable by all; the way each field of knowledge is structured, the system knowing forehand the few hundred words being the backbone of this knowledge; and at last the way the expert is constructing and enunciating the knowledge he has, with his own logic and experience. Those three concentric circles, going from the most common to the least, could be used as parameters to shape the form.

We’ve been thinking and studying the past week about three possible way of shaping the form. The first one was by the way the human body is made, by successive folds of skins, by their intertwining. This form allow easily Boolean operations, a part of the knowledge could be adjacent to another and not the same. It would also allow, by processes of folding/unfolding, to define the level of complexity required and to understand easily the way it is structured. It could be tri-dimensional, the folds superposing themselves.

The second one was an analogy with the way a textile is made, with the process of woven. We were considering that each fibre could be like a small DNA helix, containing one instruction (IF IS THEN), a thread being an association of instructions. Nodes, irregularities in the woven, densities of threads used to structure the knowledge. The system being able to recognize pattern of language in fibre and recombining them more easily, owing to the fact that those threads have no physicality, they are just lines.

The last one we were thinking using was the infinite fold, the way it was used by the Baroque. The image of the fold is coming from Leibniz and the monad. The monad is the smallest unity containing one possibility (“Caesar is crossing the Rubicon” and in another one “Caesar is not crossing the Rubicon”); both action being possible at the same time. The outside of the monad is completely smooth, when the inside is made of this infinite fold. This way of structuring the knowledge will allow “digging” as far as necessary if needed, the surface being theoretically infinite. It would also permit a lot data to be concentrated in a small place and unfolded if necessary. The protocol to enter the knowledge in the system could be at the same time quite elaborated and simple.

We find actually the first way of structuring the knowledge as the most promising, because of its simplicity of making, use and reading. But we are still searching and talking about them, some of the characteristics of the last two possibly being integratable in the first one.