On the huevent'14 workshop at ACM Multimedia 2014

This is me looks small standing near a slide from my presentation at the huevent'14 workshop.  This was kind of a keynote talk so I could talk for an hour (which is better than a typical conference talk of 20 minutes).  My talk is similar to some recent talks and can be found on slideshare. 

One new thing is that  I have cited a recent post by Chris Curan entitled: "12 hurdles hampering the Internet of Things".    There is also a position paper co-authored with Fabiana Fournier that is available through the ACM digital library. 

An interesting keynote given by Ramesh Jain on storytelling.  Ramesh views a story as a flow of events. This is an interesting concept. I guess that the relationship among events is a function of the genre.  For documentary  story events are coming in a sequence of chronological order, in a detective story, the crime is an event, and later events are relating backwards to previous events in the way to solve the mystery.   Other stories have other patterns.  This is an interesting topic to investigate further, and I'll continue to do so in the framework of the work on creative skills which is part of the agenda of my institute.      More about this - later 

Big data analytics will never replace creative thought

The claim expressed in the title of this posting is the title of  a piece in "Data Quality News" by Richard Jones.   It claims that the "data craze" - the conception that data mining alone is sufficient to get decisions in all areas, is a misconception in some areas.  Jones provides two examples:  marketing - where statistical reasoning gives a great value, but it deals with the small details, however  human creative thinking deals with the big picture, and data mining alone cannot get it,  and healthcare - again, data mining can be of great value, but interactions with the patient and personal examination by a physician is vital.    
I guess that the research into AI should also deal with how to create artificially creative thinking.  As I've written before Noam Chomsky has criticized the AI community by making statistical reasoning its mainstream and deserted the strive for  "solid model of the universe" .  I guess that after some disillusionment from the "data craze" the industry will settle on getting data mining its right place, as a supporting technology.

More on this - later.