“TRUTHINESS” MAY have a lot more truth to it than many people think. The term, coined by a US comedian, reflects a growing dependence on web-based social networking, according to researchers at a conference in NUI Galway.
It is four years since US political humorist Stephen Colbert started talking about “truthiness” and “wikiality”, as in a dependence on Wikipedia for fact-checking. The terms used in his programme, The Colbert Report, were voted top television buzzwords in 2006.
Now “wikiality” is an accepted truth and one that generates versions of reality at ever accelerated speeds, says Prof Ulrik Brandes, computer and information science expert at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
He was one of two keynote speakers at the 21st national conference on artificial intelligence and cognitive science in NUIG. Prof Brandes specialises in examining and interpreting graphs of activity by people on computers. These graphs can be applied to activity on web-based social networks like Facebook, Twitter and on Wikipedia.
Prof Brandes said fellow specialists in this field found such sites to be very useful research tools. Such sites depended on user-generated content and yielded information far more easily accessible than heretofore.
“It’s a far quicker way of collecting data than spending two years analysing a large number of sample interviews with subjects,” he told The Irish Times.
Such analysis can contribute to a different type of research – relating to illegal or criminal activities, Pádraig Cunningham of UCD’s school of computer science and informatics, explained.
“If you are trying to detect instances of money-laundering, you won’t find it in one single instance on the web,” he said. “The key is to look at a collection of amounts of data, as in large numbers of small transactions.”
An analysis of more than 500,000 Dáil questions to determine the extent of clientelism in Irish politics was also presented to the conference by Sarah Jane Delany of DIT’s digital media centre, Richard Sinnott of UCD’s Geary Institute and Niall O’Reilly of DIT’s school of computing.
The team used automated text categorisation techniques. Results showed national issues dominated questions tabled from the 1990s to 2008 – a trend also occurring in the 1930s. The team found just two periods, from 1926 to 1932 in the early years of the State, and from 1981 to 1987, when local topics dominated Dáil questions.
The team said its findings were “tentative”, but there was little evidence to support the view that the role of TDs was “determined by mainly clientelist/parochial imperatives”.
NUIG information technology lecturer Josephine Griffiths, one of the conference organisers, said that although artificial intelligence might sound “abstract and futuristic”, it was very much part of reality for many internet users.
“When you search with Google, get a book recommendation on Amazon, play against the computer in an Xbox game or use speech recognition on a modern mobile phone, you are using artificial intelligence,”she noted.
Prof Scott Kelso, an Irish-born neuroscientist, was also a keynote speaker at the conference. He has challenged the view that co-ordinated behaviour, such as picking up an object, is controlled by a central programme instructing limbs to work in unison, arguing that that behaviour is self-organised.
