The
biotech revolution has resulted in an explosion of genetic and proteomic data.
Much of this data is quantitative: DNA
chips and other microarray technologies allow biologists to collect huge data
sets recording gene and protein expression, dwarfing in size the traditional
genetic sequence data sets. But
important parts of the data are qualitative as well – information regarding
gene and protein function, regarding experimental conditions, and so forth. And much of the
value of the data can only be realized by integrating this sort of data with
diverse additional data about biological systems, such as metabolic pathway
information, information on overall cellular function, knowledge about chemical
reactions, and so forth.
Extracting
patterns from all this data is a difficult art and science, and innovative
computer scientists and biologists are currently exploring a variety of
different methods. Ultimately,
though, what is needed are highly powerful data analysis techniques that provide
integrative intelligence --
recognition of the patterns in each particular data set using the full variety
of background information available in textual and quantitative databases.
It’s not a matter of replacing human intelligence, but a matter of
augmenting human intelligence with software that goes beyond simple mathematical
algorithms and provides its own nonhuman, fanatically detail-oriented cognitive
perspective on the data.
These observations lead up to the long-term vision at the heart of Cognitive Bioscience -- a vision that integrates two grand and ambitious disciplines of science: AI and post-genomic biology.
The synergy between AI and molecular biology is a deep one, with significant implications both conceptually and pragmatically:
AI provides the computational firepower needed to analyze the vast amounts of data that microarrays and other post-genomic data gathering techniques produce
The world of molecular biology provides a domain rich enough to feed an AI system with an endless variety of information that is not tied to human sense organs or human common-sense understanding.
Our product releases are intended to form a pragmatic pathway to the realization of this long-term vision.
The Cognitive Bioscience vision is closely related to the long-term vision of creating "real AI" that was at the core of the now defunct firm Webmind Inc. The difference is that within Cognitive Bioscience we are focused on moving toward true digital intelligence in the context of molecular biology.
A journalistic treatment of aspects of the Cognitive Bioscience vision may be found in the article The New Genetics, written by Cognitive Bioscience founder Ben Goertzel in early 2001 and published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung.
The Webmind Inc. vision lives on not only in a biology-focused form within Cognitive Bioscience, but in a purer form in the Real AI Institute, a fledgling nonprofit research organization.