Day: March 3, 2023

Chatbots and understanding knowledge graphs

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 110 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Chatbots and understanding knowledge graphs.”

In total the largest knowledge graph ever created on the shoulders of giants happens to be the college academy of knowledge compiled as a part of our higher education traditions. That knowledge graph is inherently built on connections and the learning patterns of academics. It would have to be considered to be a very human based aggregate not a computer based one. It’s possible that could change over time, but I’m not entirely convinced that is going to happen in the short term. The totality of academics is a much more complex knowledge collection than any model. It also contains a lot of conflicting arguments and disagreement. 

Here is a video from IBM Technology that explains, “What is a knowledge graph?”

If you wanted to really go deeper, then you could check out this video from Yanic.

Wang, C., Liu, X., & Song, D. (2020). Language models are open knowledge graphs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.11967. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.11967.pdf 

Here are 3 academic papers that are highly cited within the context of knowledge graphs.

Nickel, M., Murphy, K., Tresp, V., & Gabrilovich, E. (2015). A review of relational machine learning for knowledge graphs. Proceedings of the IEEE, 104(1), 11-33. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/5/7360840/7358050-aam.pdf 

Ji, S., Pan, S., Cambria, E., Marttinen, P., & Philip, S. Y. (2021). A survey on knowledge graphs: Representation, acquisition, and applications. IEEE transactions on neural networks and learning systems, 33(2), 494-514. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.00388.pdf%E2%80%8Barxiv.org 

Wang, Z., Zhang, J., Feng, J., & Chen, Z. (2014, June). Knowledge graph embedding by translating on hyperplanes. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 28, No. 1). https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/download/8870/8729 

Academic papers are really just a series of single meals within the greater academy of academic work. You have to really be committed to bringing together your overall thoughts on the field, the most relevant publications, and ultimately the totality of things happening in your field of academic study. You cannot for the most part hang your hat on any one academic paper being able to explain it all. Together with a multitude of other papers the content has more context. Sometimes people stop eating single serving meals to write introductions, textbooks, or other onramp materials to help people catch up. My fear has been that within the ML and AI spaces the flooding of content has made catching up almost impossible for people wanting to find the on ramp to getting up to speed on everything that is happening. This problem exists in different ways for researchers and scholars that are just trying to keep up with the endless stream of new content along the way. Every day, month, and year new papers are being published at rates that are mind boggling. Now that synthetic written content has gone mainstream thanks to ChatGPT kickstarting that marketplace. My honest guess here is that a lot of researchers will kickstart their writing endeavors with the rocket booster for written content creation that is ChatGPT. They can just edit it down and move along to publish more papers.

That preamble is super important to trying to contextualize why understanding the knowledge graph is so important. An important factor within the larger aggregate knowledge graph we all share itself is changing. It’s really like somebody showed up to the party and invited way more people than could possibly attend. Yeah, I’m about to talk about the effects of content flooding on future knowledge graph management. When the intake protocols for the knowledge graph cannot tell the difference between synthetically created input data and the standard product that has been on the market for thousands of years. For the most part knowledge graph based algorithms have had a hard time dealing with satire and sarcasm content where the author is intentionally spinning a false narrative. You end up with two conflicting next best answers where one should have a very low confidence score. However, this new effort within ChatGPT is whole-sale different. You have content that looks and seems like it should be included in the knowledge graph, but it is not tested or curated in any way shape or form. It’s almost like a point in time has to be considered where things before ChatGPT and things after ChatGPT have different weights within the overall knowledge graph. That is a troubling idea to consider. 

Top 5 Tweets of the week:

What’s next for The Lindahl Letter? 

  • Week 111: Natural language processing 
  • Week 112: Autonomous vehicles
  • Week 113: Structuring an introduction to AI ethics
  • Week 114: How does confidential computing work?
  • Week 115: A literature review of modern polling methodology

If you enjoyed this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend. If you are new to The Lindahl Letter, then please consider subscribing. New editions arrive every Friday. Thank you and enjoy the year ahead.

Lamenting some smartphone repairs

Yesterday before noon the repaired Pixel 7 Pro smartphone from Google arrived. For the last couple of weeks I had moved back to my Pixel 5 which remains a pretty good smartphone. Apparently, they repaired the phone that I sent back to them via a nice cardboard package they sent me for traveling with a postal carrier. The phone I received back has the exact same IMEI as the one that was sent to them for repairs. Based on that I’m pretty sure they actually repaired the unit that was sent in for repairs and did not issue a replacement phone. I took a close look at the actual phone and didn’t really see any evidence that they heated up the glue that holds the screen in place and got inside it to make some type of repairs. They had it from February 21 to February 28 so it is entirely possible that they did take it apart and effect some type of repair to the screen. I’m not entirely sure what happened and to be honest nothing along the way shared any details about what exactly went wrong or what they did to correct the problem. 

Based on my observations something within the screen went very wrong. When you hit the power button the top half of the screen would flash with a dark green sort of tint or the whole phone would flash white and then nothing would happen. The phone itself was probably running and waiting for some type of user input, but the screen was dark and unresponsive. A few people certainly encountered this and I tried to look around for solutions or at least other people to chat with you had experienced the same problem. For the most part, when a smartphone behaves like that people send them back for a replacement. In my case the warranty part of the service cycle would have done that for me and has been fine before. I used it when my screen got cracked. They pretty much sent a new replacement phone and I sent the cracked one back to the warranty center. This time around the warranty and repair was done by Google. 

I loaded the data, contacts, and well everything from my Pixel 5 to the newly repaired Pixel 7 Pro using a standard USB Type-C cable. I pretty much only use official cables from Google chargers that I ordered from the Google store online. The only other charging mechanism that I happen to use is a Google stand for charging. My preferred method of charging is to set the phone on the wireless charging stand. It’s so much easier and used to feel like the future, but now it is more routine than anything else. Completing the data transfer process included moving about 62 gigabytes of data between the phones. It took around 20 minutes and then I had to sign into all the applications which took another hour of time. Getting all the authenticator stuff changed out took maybe another 15 minutes. It was a quick reminder of why I kept my backup phone in the first place. Getting things back in order without some backup would be a lot harder. Based on this exercise about 2 hours of time needs to be reserved to complete the phone transfer process. 

This post might come across as if I’m lamenting some smartphone repairs and that truly is the case. Overall my trust in the Pixel line of products has been diminished. I was a day one device order for the first 5 generations of Pixel smartphone products. I sat out the Pixel 6 as my enthusiasm for it was limited and some of the initial reports conflicted about the build quality. I jumped back in and ordered two of the Pixel 7 Pro phones and the Pixel Bud Pro’s to go with the phones. Maybe delivering hardware is not the thing that Google is most focused on achieving. My Fitbit certainly has not gotten any great updates or support after the acquisition by Google. I actually switched to the Oura ring recently and abandoned using my Fitbit smartwatch. We will see what happens within the organization changes at Google over the next year. I would not be surprised if hardware fades away altogether.