Copyright and Promotion: Oxymoron or Opportunity?

Copyright in the cultural sphere can act as a barrier to the dissemination of high-quality information. On the other hand it protects works of art that might not be made available otherwise. This dichotomy makes the area of copyright difficult, especially when it applies to the digital arena of the web where copying is so easy and natural. Here we present a snapshot of the issues for online copyright, with particular emphasis on the relevance to cultural institutions. We concentrate on Europe and the US; as an example we include a special section dedicated to the situation in Italy.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figure

Memory versus logic: two models of organizing information and their influences on web retrieval strategies

We can find the first anticipation of the World Wide Web hypertextual structure in Bush paper of 1945, where he described a "selection" and storage machine called the Memex, capable of keeping the useful information of a user and connecting it to other relevant material present in the machine or added by other users. We will argue that Vannevar Bush, who conceived this type of machine, did it because its involvement with analogical devices. During the 1930s, in fact, he invented and built the Differential Analyzer, a powerful analogue machine, used to calculate various relevant mathematical functions. The model of the Memex is not the digital one, because it relies on another form of data representation that emulates more the procedures of memory than the attitude of the logic used by the intellect. Memory seems to select and arrange information according to association strategies, i.e., using analogies and connections that are very often arbitrary, sometimes even chaotic and completely subjective. The organization of information and the knowledge creation process suggested by logic and symbolic formal representation of data is deeply different from the former one, though the logic approach is at the core of the birth of computer science (i.e., the Turing Machine and the Von Neumann Machine). We will discuss the issues raised by these two "visions" of information management and the influences of the philosophical tradition of the theory of knowledge on the hypertextual organization of content. We will also analyze all the consequences of these different attitudes with respect to information retrieval techniques in a hypertextual environment, as the web. Our position is that it necessary to take into accounts the nature and the dynamic social topology of the network when we choose information retrieval methods for the network; otherwise, we risk creating a misleading service for the end user of web search tools (i.e., search engines)

Google AI and Turing's Social Definition of Intelligence

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Language and communication in Turing’s machine intelligence

In this paper I will discuss Turing’s ideas about mechanical intelligence and suitable methods for simulating intelligent behavior in machines with special regard to his position after World War II. My main thesis is that Turing considered communication and interaction between human beings and machines a crucial asset for ensuring intelligent performances on the part of machines. Accordingly, Turing was also interested in Cybernetics research on information technologies and interactive communication. He attributed a remarkable value to language as a communication tool rather than simply a representational means, in contrast with the established thinking in classical logic researches, which were strictly intertwined with the debate on the foundations of mathematics. Alan Turing and John von Neumann were both fascinated by the Cybernetics relational approach to the study of adaptive and intelligent behavior, and were not inclined to focus exclusively on a computational approach in the search for machine intelligence. In this paper I will mainly focus on Alan Turing’s position. However, I will also examine some of the approaches proposed by von Neumann, emphasizing points of agreement between the two scientists on many research ideas and projects

La memoria e la rete

The aim of this paper is the discussion of a genealogy of the concept of digital memory in order to understand connexions and differences with the human memory, with which it shares the name. The digital definition of memory implies some reactive transformations also on the idea of human memory itself. The definition of digital memory within the history of ideas of computing between Turing and Licklider allows us to individuate the genealogic structure that produced the definition of digital memory as a representation of human memory. However they can’t be more different. We know that digital memory reliably stores any information (except in case of malfunctioning), but can retrieve it only if there is a precise enquiry that asks to sort out the expected stored data. Human memory instead is selective in itself, imprecise and unstable as many psychological studies can demonstrate, but at the same time it supports almost all the creative human activities, exactly for the serendipity of its continuously new associations between different elements. The use of the same word for the two elements has deep consequences also on the representation of the functioning of human memory, because some of the digital characteristics have a retroactive impact on the perception of memory in human beings. The final observations of the paper discusses the big expectations about Data science with reference to the possibility of substituting scientific modelling with data correlations. The trust in data power is one of the dangerous outputs of the mistaken identification between human and digital memory. This paper proposes a critical genealogy that can explain the reason of this mystification

Storia dell'interazione tra tecnologia e sapere umanistico

Questo capitolo ha lo scopo di rintrazcciare il ruolo dei saperi umanistici nella struttura epistemologica e nella storia della digitalizzazione. Compieremo un percorso a ritroso che conduce dai nuovi media all'idea del calcolatore come strumento di comunicazione, mostrando come questa questa visione abbia prodotto dei cambiamenti profondi nella concezione stessa della tecnologia e nella sua organizzazione pratic