Reverse Engineering the Human Mind as a Way to Better Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Last summer, I gave a guest lecture in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing at the Department of Computer Science of Simon Fraser University. I said I’d publish the presentation on YouTube, so here it finally is:

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Courage, Heroes and Culture

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Well over a decade ago, age (experience) yielded a dividend of wisdom: the resolve to develop courage. I created the montage above, comprised of pictures of my heroes, Winston Churchill, Jacques Brel and Pierre Elliot Trudeau, which I hung prominently in my office. They were emblems of cognitive zest and courage. They were brilliant, perspicuous, hard working men who facing trials did not flinch. I devoured biographies of Winston Churchill. I re-read Trudeau’s auto-biography and some other books about him. I also read books about Brel and got the DVD collection of his videos. I even started “The zest of Brel” project, exchanging emails with Arnie Johnston who holds the right to translate Brel into English (and I drafted ACT in Three Acts). I re-acquired a beautifully bound copy of the play Cyrano de Bergerac. I memorized La tirade du Non Merci :

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Seven Tips and Some Great Apps for Mastering Knowledge: Technology-enhanced learning

Some students and professors are heading “back to school”. With Covid, learning with technology has become more important than ever. So today, Smile published an original article of mine: Technology-Enhanced Learning: 6 Ways to Master New Info. Here, I summarize and extend that article.

https://twitter.com/HookProductvT/status/1299418000622333953

The tips are:

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An integrative design-oriented research approach to autonomous agents

updated 2021-03-22: I’ve finally added the video for this talk, above.

Here are some notes about a guest lecture I will give in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing (Dpt of Computer Science) at SFU on 2020-07-16. (Twitter handle)

I aim to inspire students about the importance, enjoyability and challenges of trying to understand entire minds of autonomous agents, using an integrative design-oriented approach. I will present several interesting problems and functions that call for such an understanding, and focus mainly on mental perturbance.
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Homage to Aaron Sloman, Winner of the 2020 APA K. Jon Barwise Prize

Last month, Professor Aaron Sloman was awarded the 2020 K. Jon Barwise Prize which recognizes “significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member. The prize will serve to credit those within our profession for their life long efforts in this field.”

Aaron Sloman university Birmingham
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Augmenting Your Use of LaunchBar and Alfred (Launcher Apps) with Hook’s Contextual Retrieval

The LaunchBar and Alfred launcher apps are super helpful. Amongst other things, they allow you to search for information with minimal typing. Hook is also an information retrieval app. However, Hook is designed for contextual information retrieval, i.e., to instantly retrieve information that is connected to the document or object you are working with in the current app of your choice, whether the item is on the web or on your Mac. Hence Hook’s slogan, “find without searching”.

On the Hook website, I’ve recently produced a blogged about how launchers can be used with Hook, and produced a screencast on the topic:

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