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Situational awareness and information pollution--we all face these problems daily. How do you know what you need to know to work, play and live better, yet at the same time not experience a cognitive overload of either too much or untrustworthy knowledge?
Specifically, whether you're a professional in business, government, the non-profit sector or self-employed, having timely, relevant, true knowledge helps you work better and translates into better short-term and long-term operations.
On a larger scale, think 9/11 or the Second Iraq War: having (or lacking) the right knowledge influences outcomes.
At the same time, we all face exponential amounts of knowledge (ranging from sources as diverse as Google Scholar, Morningstar Quotes, Wikipedia, Twitter.com or even virtual communities in Second Life) that are created, remixed or cataloged daily. How can we find the right knowledge that translates into better individual, group or organizational performance? Can information technologies help individuals and groups know more, know truth, know faster?
Perhaps knowledge can even seek us out, instead of us trying to find it.
I've spent 10+ years working with IT in both public and private organizations, including a role as IT Chief of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This summer, I'm a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, with a rare opportunity to exchange ideas with several premier researchers on these subjects. While I'm here, I'll also travel around and give presentations at different universities in the U.K.
My blog entries will highlight some of the most important findings regarding situational awareness and information pollution, and translate cutting-edge research into meaningful IT practices and ramifications for professionals today.
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Comments (4)
The idea of knowledge that can 'seek us out' sounds intriguing. Right now I'm overwhelmed with too much information and not enough time to read it all, let alone sort through it to figure out what's valuable and what's not! I think the eventual solution will have to include some way of filtering or letting the information itself figure out what's relevant for my immediate attention (without the side-effect of spam).
Posted by Gregory Jones | July 7, 2007 3:00 PM
I would love to see a Bayesian inference plugin for my Google search results! Perhaps just for medical advice discovered on the web...
Posted by Mark Conde | July 9, 2007 8:32 AM
Great comments Gregory and Mark -- what you both are discussing is the fact that there is almost too much information for any one individual to wade through, let alone be able to filter what is relevant to them and necessary for their work. There are some interesting models emerging, such as:
1. The ability for communities to vote and rank articles (such as digg.com)
2. The ability for communities to tract reputation of contributors (such as ebay.com)
3. The ability for communities to rank the quality of an object (such as amazon.com)
4. The ability for communities to allow contributions and edits from anyone (such as wikipedia.org)
Each of these, alone, are not enough -- but they point the ability where information systems, which include some technology in addition to human intelligence, can help sort through and prioritize relevant information either within or across organizations. I'd also suggest you take a look at a sermo.com and endeca.com as interesting companies with novel approaches to information sorting, filtering, and prioritizing.
Long-term, there may be a day when information can "find us" akin to how ants, with a little bit of intelligence as well as external motivations (find food, protect the colony from outsiders, make friends with like neighbors) can collectively build impressive structures. Right now files on our desktop are relatively static and dumb, but what if they were given the similar motivations and intelligence of ants, and allowed a space (across the desktops of multiple, authenticated users with different likes and dislike) in which they could built connections and "find" users interested in their content? More on these ideas at http://ssrn.com/author=745562
Thanks for your comments!
-d.
Posted by David Bray | July 9, 2007 3:21 PM
Hi!
My name is Tomas!
Posted by Loghikeels | July 16, 2007 6:27 PM