Philosophy of Computer Science: An Introductory Course

There are many branches of philosophy called “the philosophy of X,” where X = disciplines ranging from history to physics. The philosophy of artificial intelligence has a long history, and there are many courses and texts with that title. Surprisingly, the philosophy of computer science is not nearly as well-developed. This article proposes topics that might constitute the philosophy of computer science and describes a course covering those topics, along with suggested readings and assignments

Extracting Visual information From Text: using Captions to Label Human Faces in Newspaper Photographs

There are many situations where linguistic and pictorial data are jointly presented to communicate information. A computer model for synthesising information from the two sources requires an initial interpretation of both the text and the picture followed by consolidation of information. The problem of performing general-purpose vision(without apriori knowledge) would make this a nearly impossible task. However, in some situations, the text describes salient aspects of the picture. In such situations, it is possible to extract visual information from the text, resulting in a relational graph describing the structure of the accompanying picture. This graph can then be used by a computer vision system to guide the interpretation of the picture. This paper discusses an application whereby information obtained from parsing a caption of a newspaper photograph is used to identify human faces in the photograph. Heuristics are described for extracting information from the caption which contributes to the hypothesised structure of the picture. The top-down processing of the image using this information is discussed

Meinongian Semantics and Artificial Intelligence

This essay describes computational semantic networks for a philosophical audience and surveys several approaches to semantic-network semantics. In particular, propositional semantic networks (exemplified by SNePS) are discussed; it is argued that only a fully intensional, Meinongian semantics is appropriate for them; and several Meinongian systems are presented