Web Science and Data Analytics Course

Resources from the Singapore Summer School 2014 hosted by NUS. ws-summerschool.comp.nus.edu.sg

Hierarchical Prediction Machines and Big Data Analytics

An emerging consensus in cognitive science views the biological brain as a hierarchically-organized predictive processing system. This is a system in which higher-order regions are continuously attempting to predict the activity of lower-order regions at a variety of (increasingly abstract) spatial and temporal scales. The brain is thus revealed as a hierarchical prediction machine that is constantly engaged in the effort to predict the flow of information originating from the sensory surfaces. Such a view seems to afford a great deal of explanatory leverage when it comes to a broad swathe of seemingly disparate psychological phenomena (e.g., learning, memory, perception, action, emotion, planning, reason, imagination, and conscious experience). In the most positive case, the predictive processing story seems to provide our first glimpse at what a unified (computationally-tractable and neurobiological plausible) account of human psychology might look like. This obviously marks out one reason why such models should be the focus of current empirical and theoretical attention. Another reason, however, is rooted in the potential of such models to advance the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence and machine learning. Interestingly, the vision of the brain as a hierarchical prediction machine is one that establishes contact with work that goes under the heading of 'deep learning'. Deep learning systems thus often attempt to make use of predictive processing schemes and (increasingly abstract) generative models as a means of supporting the analysis of large data sets. But are such computational systems sufficient (by themselves) to provide a route to general human-level analytic capabilities? I will argue that they are not and that closer attention to a broader range of forces and factors (many of which are not confined to the neural realm) may be required to understand what it is that gives human cognition its distinctive (and largely unique) flavour. The vision that emerges is one of 'homomimetic deep learning systems', systems that situate a hierarchically-organized predictive processing core within a larger nexus of developmental, behavioural, symbolic, technological and social influences. Relative to that vision, I suggest that we should see the Web as a form of 'cognitive ecology', one that is as much involved with the transformation of machine intelligence as it is with the progressive reshaping of our own cognitive capabilities.

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 1

Lecture 1: The Pioneers and History of Hypertext (pre-WWW) Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: Bush: As We may Think; Engelbart: NLS and A Framework for Augmenting Human Intelligence; Nelson: Xanalogical Structure; Conklin: A Survey of Hypertext; Halasz 1987: Reflections on NoteCards: Seven Issues for the Next Generation of Hypermedia Systems; Berners-Lee 1994 The World-Wide Web.

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 2

Lecture 1: Contributions of Pre WWW Research: Open Hypermedia Systems Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: Industrial Strength Hypermedia: Requirements for a Large Engineering Enterprise (Malcolm et al. 1991); Towards An Integrated Information Environment With Open Hypermedia Systems (Davis et al. 1992); Unifying Strategies for Web Augmentation (Bouvin 1999); Hyper-G (Adapted from Lowe and Hall); OHP:A Draft Proposal for a Standard Open Hypermedia Protocol (Davis et al. 1996); XML Linking (DeRose 99)

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 3

Lecture 3: Contributions of Pre WWW Research: Spatial Hypertext and Temporal Hypertext Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: Spatial [SPATIAL] VIKI: spatial hypertext supporting emergent structure (Marshall, 94); Towards Geo-Spatial Hypermedia: Concepts and Prototype Implementation, (Gronbaek et al. 2002); Cyber Geography and Better Search Engines; [TEMPORAL] Anticipating SMIL 2.0: The Developing Cooperative Infrastructure for Multimedia on the Web (Rutledge 1999); Its About Time: Link Streams as Continuous Metadata (Page et al., 2001); Everything You Wanted to Know About MPEG-7:Part 1 (Nack & Lindsay 1999)

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 4

Lecture 4: Ontological Hypertext and the Semantic Web Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: Conceptual linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia (Carr et al. 2001); CS AKTiveSpace: Building a Semantic Web Application (Glaser et al., 2004); The Semantic Web Revisited (Shadbolt, Hall and Berners-Lee, 2006); Mind the Semantic Gap (Millard et al., 2005).

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 5

Lecture 5: Web 2.0 and Social Hypertext Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software . Tim O'Reilly (2005); Web 2.0: Hypertext by Any Other Name? (Millard & Ross, 2006)

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand 3 "History" Lecture 6

Lecture 6: Where are all the links taking us: Web Science Contains Powerpoint Lecture slides and Hypertext Research Papers: The Literati (The Cyberspace and critical theory website) (Eastgate website); Pervasive Hypertext at Southampton and at Aarhus; Adaptive Hypertext - The Next Big Thing: (De Bra & Chepegin, 2004); Web Science: Creating a Science of the Web (Berners-Lee, Hall, Hendler, Shadbolt & Weitzner, 2006).

What is the Web? The Web Architecture

The Introductory Lecture is a discussion about "What is the Web". It involves lots of calling out TLAs and writing them on the blackboard, dividing things into servers, clients, protocols, formats, and the punchline is that the one unique and novel thing about the web is the hypertext link. This follows naturally into the Web architecture - the answer to the question "what is the web".

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "XML" Lecture 1

Lecture 1: Basic XML & HTML5 Lecture slides and exercises for reading and writing basic XML (without DTDs).

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "XML" Lecture 2

Lecture 1: DTDs and XML Structure Verification Lecture slides and exercises for validating XML with DTDs.

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "XML" Lecture 3

Lecture 3: DOM and XPath Lecture slides and exercises for using DOM and XPath to access material within an XML database or document.

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "XML" Lecture 5

Lecture 5: XLink and XPointer Lecture slides and exercises for using XLink and XPointer to link to and control material within an XML database or document.

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "XML" Lecture 6

Lecture 6: RDF and Metadata Lecture slides and exercises for using RDF to describe Web resources

COMP3016 Web Technology - Strand "Web Science" Lecture 2

Lecture 2: Personal Privacy and State Interference Lecture slides and video by Danny Weitzner.