How smart machines are transforming us all ― and what we should do about it.

The smart-machines revolution is re-shaping our lives and our societies. Here, Nigel Shadbolt, one of Britain’s leading authorities on artificial intelligence, and Roger Hampson dispel terror, confusion, and misconception. They argue that it is human stupidity, not artificial intelligence, that should concern us.

Lucid, well-informed, and deeply human, The Digital Ape offers a unique approach to some of the biggest questions about our future.

The central themes of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2004) were ontological engineering and the Semantic Web. These provide the key foundational and delivery mechanisms for building open, Web-based knowledge services. However, consistent with the tradition of EKAW conferences, EKAW 2004 was concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling and managing knowledge, and its role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems. Indeed a key aspect of the Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (KAWs) held in the US, Europe and Asia over the past 20 years has been the emphasis on 'holistic' knowledge engineering, addressing problem solving, usability, socio-technological factors and knowledge modelling, rather than simply analyzing and designing symbol-level inferential mechanisms. The papers included in this volume are thus drawn from a variety of research areas both at the cutting edge of research in ontologies and the Semantic Web and in the more traditionally grounded areas of knowledge engineering. A Semantic Web service can be seen as the addition of semantic technologies to Web services to produce Web-accessible services that can be described using appropriate ontologies, reasoned about and combined automatically. Since Web services can be seen as Web-accessible computational objects, much of the work in this area is also concerned with problem-solving methods (PSMs).

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, EKAW '96, held in Nottingham, UK, in May 1996.
The 23 revised full papers included address the most relevant theoretical and applicational aspects of knowledge acquisition with a certain emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge for the modelling or automation of complex problem-solving behaviour. The volume is organized in sections on theoretical and general issues, eliciting knowledge from textual or other sources, data-mining, group elicitation, and planning.

Social machines are a type of network connected by interactive digital devices made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the read/write World Wide Web, connecting people at scale to document situations, cooperate on tasks, exchange information, or even simply to play. Existing social processes may be scaled up, and new social processes enabled, to solve problems, augment reality, create new sources of value, and disrupt existing practice. This book considers what talents one would need to understand or build a social machine, describes the state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM - The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a wide space, by asking 'when will it be valuable to use these methods on a sociotechnical system?' The systems for which the use of these methods adds value are social machines in which there is rich person-to-person communication, and where a large proportion of the machine's behaviour is constituted by human interaction.

We are entering a new state of global hypersurveillance. As we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they? Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, The Spy in the Coffee Machine explores what-if anything-we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age, and provides readers with a much needed wake-up call to the benefits and dangers of this new technology.

A Framework for Web Science sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. A Framework for Web Science surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed. A Framework for Web Science is aimed primarily at researchers and developers in the area of Web-based knowledge management and information retrieval. It will also be an invaluable reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level, academics and industrial practitioners.