Web 2.0 Start-Ups = Social Science Experiments
Recently I had the great pleasure to hear the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, give the keynote at the Tetherless World Conference organized by Rensellaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY (see RWW's live blogging of the event). He is such an entertaining and thought-provoking speaker that it is hard to isolate one nugget, but after a few weeks I am still thinking about one comment he made about start-up entrepreneurs conducting social science experiments.
This was in the context of Rensellaer launching the Tetherless World Research Constellation, described by them as follows:
"The World Wide Web changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate. But without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving and potential Web, we may miss or delay opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities.
To model the Web, to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and to ensure it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention."
Rensselaer's Tetherless World Constellation addresses this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and its future use.
Faculty in the constellation explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develop new technologies and languages to expand the capabilities of the Web.
We use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information-centric views. We aim to make the next generation Web natural to use while responsive to a growing variety of policy and social needs."
The point is that we study Computer Science but the Web is a lot more than the application of Computer Science. It is the social dimension that makes it interesting and nobody has been systematically studying that. For scientists this is marvelous unexplored territory. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, being a scientist, looks at all the wild, apparently chaotic Web 2.0 innovation in the same way a scientist looks at experiments. In that context, entrepreneurs run experiments by launching something onto the Web. If it "catches fire", the investors clamor to get on board and people make a lot of money. If it fails in the market, people lose money. But to a scientist, both results are equally useful, providing additional data points from which theories can be deduced.
It is personally exciting for me to have Rensellaer take such a leadership position in this emerging science as they are close to where I live in what has historically been the "sleepy government town of Albany". All the tech action was either south to New York City or east to Boston. There have been attempts for some time to create a Tech Valley high tech zone in the area. But this new drive by Rensellaer will make a difference.
Rensellaer have brought in some real academic leaders to drive this initiative, including Jim Hendler and Deborah McGuiness:
Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society.
He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded the US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.
He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.
Deborah McGuinness is of the creators of the Web language that is ushering in the next generation of the World Wide Web -- the OWL Web Ontology Language -- Deborah McGuinness is widely known in her field.
McGuinness comes to Rensselaer from Stanford University where she last led the Knowledge Systems Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
McGuinness has published more than 100 papers on knowledge-based systems, ontology environments, configuration, search technology and intelligent applications and holds five patents. Prior to joining Stanford, McGuiness worked for Bell Laboratories (later AT&T) were she co-developed a predecessor language to today's ontology Web language.
She is CEO and president of her own consulting firm and is on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of startup companies. She is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Rensellaer is clearly staking a position in the elite technology world usually reserved for Stanford and MIT. This will create some new technology. I caught an early glimpse of some of the web technology coming out of the Rensellaer labs and it looked very exciting. I intend to go back to there and report on that in a future post.
Combine this with a good quality of life and lower cost of living (compared to say New York City or Silicon Valley) and you get a fertile environment for start-ups.
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Ah! RPI, my alma mater! Information Technology was a brand new major that RPI offered when I was there. My class was the second year to offer it as a major. I remember at the time, RPI was one of the few schools in the country that was offering it as a major. I entered RPI in 1999 and graduated in 2003. It's good to hear that RPI is still at the leading edge.
That web has to be "responsive to a growing variety of policy and social needs" - seems to be the right concern as currently the web seems to be growing in size like a nuclear balloon without adequate control points . In the coming years these policy and social concerns will become stronger as we come out of the web2.0 euphoria
Perhaps a new technology will come along in the next few decades that will completely replace the WEB.
The Web is good for now - but just think of the tech evolutions that will come along by the end of this decade.
society compared to those living then.
RPI is a power house of computer science, and most would be surprised at how many top names have a sheepskin from the institution. Anyone considering a tech or eng degree who wants a great education in a pastoral, historical campus and area should certainly consider.
That Web 1 or Web 2 is a social experiment is not a new idea, as is the notion that the mechanisms used to capitalize them are a study in mental dysfunction.
Doc McGuinness is a BIG thinker, as anyone who has read the OWL W3C docs can attest to. Maybe she is too smart by half; after reading the spec, your head will hurt. These overly complex data specifications like RDF, XML-Schema, and OWL are some of the principal roadblocks to getting the Semantic Web fully woven into 'daily use'.
But this is the way it's s'posed to be - smarter people leading with incomprehensible and seemingly unimplementable concepts. The mortals have to evolve.
Thanks, Doctor McGuinness, for leading the way.
Yes I agree that Dr. McGuinness is one of the top researchers in knowledge-based system domain. I have read two of her published papers in the past. I had used an open source API which was developed at her Knowledge System Lab at Stanford called Java Theorem Prover (JTP) for a project that I got involved in a few years back.
"It is the social dimension that makes it interesting and nobody has been systematically studying that." That's just not true; both academic and private sector researchers have been studying the social impact of the web for years. The Association of Internet Researchers (http://aoir.org/) is just one example of a coordinated group that brings together researchers from myriads fields to investigate these issues.
But it would be great to have more programs like the one at RPI that strive to bridge the gap between the academy and industry, especially in the context of start-ups. There needs to be more communication between these two worlds, because each has a ton to offer the other. But generally, these worlds don't come together very often.
For example, we pay so much attention to the start-ups that become giant successes that it's easy to forgot how much we can learn from those start-ups that fail. Wouldn't it be interesting to systematically study those "experiments"? I bet we could learn a lot from in-depth analysis of failed start-ups.
The object of the experiments is to find out how quickly everyone in the world can learn an insignificant piece of knowledge.
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