Thinking: Directions of Commonsense Reasoning Research

I don't think that the applications developed here at the media lab have fully taken the advantage of the commonsense reasoning capability of computers right now.

There are, in my point of view, two major styles of applications base on OMCS. One is more practical, down-to-earth, kind of work, and the other is, mostly by Hugo, a more creative style. The former is more similar to traditional computer science research projects that it is convinsingly practicable. The later, oppositely, shows the possiblities of solving new problems that are people generally don't believe to be solvable (But it only shows some "possible" ways toward the solution, instead of something readily useful)

I think there are no applications taking fully advantage of the power of OMCS, in the sense that that are they inspired from two schools of thoughts: the computing devices, and computational linguistics. I don't see any of them coming up deeply from sociological or psychological thinking, despite that commonsense is really about us humans, abour our lives.

So I'm deciding to gain more nutrition from ideas in the sociological/psychological domains, and stand from those point of views to see the whole commonsense computing thing. It's not gonna work for me to focus solely on natural language processing or other pure computer science stuffs, cuz those are simply tools, and do no good to coming up with ideas that have true impacts.

I think filmmaking is a good domain for me, actually. But it's not enough. To me it's only a part of the projects that should be going on. People have thought too much about devices for social interactions, and I don't think it's gonna bring much difference if I stick to those social devices as well. So right now it's probably good for me to check out other domains that is truely interesting, standing from a human's point of view.

The commonsense-based film-editing agent could certainly be something meaningless to users as well. What I'm doing right now is to find what people really want when they tell stories - maybe a computer program, maybe not - but it's gonna be cool even if I find that they don't. It's just a process of looking into humans, and looking into what supply that computers can give at the same time. Commonsenes reasoning is for building applications. And applications come from users' needs. Wouldn't it be wierd if we keep focusing on the question "what application can I build for commonsense reasoning technology?" instead of looking into humans?