Re: HumanMarkup Introductions

BACKGROUND

Bachelor's Degree University of Illinois Champaign--Astrophysics 1985, Supported myself in college programming simulations for math professors. Dropped out of a Masters in Math Education after getting tired of learning about Thomas Dewey than rays and bundles. Spent four years as an itinerant artist, doing Science Fiction conventions with friends -- I watched Larry Niven chasing a girl wearing only seashells, had lunch with Piers Anthony, and shared a hot tub with Mercedes Lackey.

In 1990, I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Became involved with game programming (Director, game development, artificial intelligence systems and so forth) and multimedia development. Wrote my first magazine article in 1993, my first computer book in 1995, and am up to 150+ articles and 12 books. I've worked with most major dev environments since their first releases, and watched an entire industry get wiped out overnight (typesetting). In 1996 I encountered XML, and have rode that wave ever since. I joined a consulting firm Net Objectives, two weeks ago, Monday.

GENERAL INTERESTS

Programming, Art, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Physics, Astronomy, Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, Macro-economics, Complexity/Systems Theory, Mermaids.

INTERESTS RELATING TO HUMANMARKUP TC

I'm fascinated with the interaction between humans and computers. So far this interaction has been delineated by programmers and designers, the first of which tend to look at application development as being a process of getting the humans to work with the logical rules of the computer, the second of which tend to look at application development as being a process of getting the computers to work with the common-sensical world of people. These approaches tend to end up creating programs that often do neither well.

I think that HumanML is a significant part of the solution; if you can effectively provide a way for computers to model human behaviors, characteristics and interactions, then these same computers will be able to develop interfaces that more accurately reflect the needs of the user, rather than that of the designer or programmer. Additionally, as more and more of our communications take place over the province of the computer, having a humanML system makes it possible to create synchratic world views that are appropriate to the participants rather than to the developers of the communication software.

I also think that there are inherent dangers involved in creating models of humans, as modeled worlds by their very nature limit the range of choices that can be accomodated. I'd like to help make sure that HumanML is flexible enough to handle a healthy subset of modelling the real world.

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