Guardian Angel Technologies:
Providing Right Information to the Right People
Raj Reddy
Carnegie Mellon University
June 2, 2014
rr@cmu.edu
A Grand Challenge For Computer Science
Get The Right Information
 To The Right People
 At The Right Time
 In The Right Language
 In The Right Medium of Text or Multimedia
 With The Right Level Of Detail (Granularity)
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Digital Bill of Rights, Jaime Carbonell 1994
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Universal Human Rights Declaration of
United Nations
1 Right to Equality
3 Right to Life, Liberty & Security
5 Freedom from Torture
7 Right to Equality before Law
9 Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest
11 Innocent until Proven Guilty
13 Right to Free Movement
15 Right to a Nationality
17 Right to Own Property
19 Freedom of Opinion
21 Right to Free Elections
23 Right to Join Trade Unions
25 Adequate Living Standard
27 Right to Cultural Life
29 Free and Full Development
2 Freedom from Discrimination
4 Freedom from Slavery
6 Right to Recognition as Person
8 Right to a Competent Tribunal
10 Right to Fair Public Hearing
12 Right to Privacy and Home
14 Right to Asylum
16 Right to Marriage and Family
18 Freedom of Religion
20 Right of Peaceful Assembly
22 Right to Social Security
24 Right to Rest and Leisure
26 Right to Education
28 Right to a Social Order
30 Freedom from Interference
UN World Summit on The Information Society (WSIS)
Human Rights for a Digital Society
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Unrestricted Access to Information And
Communications
Right to Be Connected at High Speed And Without
Borders
Right to Online Freedom of Expression
Right to Security and Data Protection
Right to Privacy of Personal Communications
Right to Freedom of Association Online
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The Digital Bill of Rights
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Get The Right Information
To The Right People
At The Right Time
In The Right Language
In The Right Medium of Text or Multimedia
With The Right Level Of Detail (Granularity)
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Not Much Progress Towards Digital Bill of Rights
Since 1994
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What do we mean by Right Information?
What do we Mean by Right People?
What do we Mean by Right Time?
Some Progress in Summarization
Some Progress in Translation to Different Languages
Some Progress in Text to Speech technologies
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The Right Information
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Right Information is All Information Impacting Life,
Liberty and Happiness of Every Individual
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Information About Safety, Security and Wellbeing
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Natural Emergencies: Earthquake, Severe Weather, Flood
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Hurricanes, Tsunami, Tornado, Snow Storm, Blizzard, Heat Wave
Man-made Emergencies: Hazmat, Nuclear, Biological
Information About Disruption of Basic Necessities of Life
such as Water, Electricity, Food, Health and
Transportation
Information About Daily Problems
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Traffic Jams, Strikes, School Closings, Stock Markets, etc
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Missing Science of The Right Information
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Right Information is Relevant Information
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Right Information is also notification and alerts
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Most information is not of interest.
Scarcity Of Human Attention implies we need to develop
technologies for personalization of information.
including possible solutions to the problem
Given a Known Problem such as an Earthquake
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Identify each affected individual on the planet
create plans for various contingencies
use push technology for timely communication,
using a database of personal profile of interests,
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including the 5 billion people who don’t read English and
the 1 billion people who can’t read any language.
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To The Right People
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Right People is Anyone and Everyone in the World
Who May Be Impacted by Daily Events
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A human being in the path of a typhoon could be notified of
the possibility and severity or
Man-made disasters such as war and terrorist attacks
Need One or More Dynamic Global Data Bases of All
Persons on the Planet, Providing Information such as
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Devices Owned and Accessible
 Contact Information (Email, Phone Number etc.)
 Location Info for Emergency Notification
 Next of Kin Information
 Only accessible to the Individual and surrogates protecting
privacy and security
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At The Right Time
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Right Time is Just-In-Time, Not Too Soon And Not
Too Late
 Too soon, we forget
 Too late and we are in trouble
 Usually the person does not know that a Tornado
is about to hit
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What is needed is Information Push rather than
Conventional Search
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Time is Money!
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Today Mobile phones broadcast Alerts in affected areas
On Wall Street, Milliseconds is Millions of Dollars
Reaction Time Translates to Lives Saved
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In India, EMRI 108 (911) Saves 80% of Lives by
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Accident Victims by Getting to The Scene in 10 Minutes
In The Right Language
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Right Language is Each Person’s Preferred Mode of
Communication
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In spite of all the progress in Language Translation,
we are not there yet!
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Acceptable Translation from Google in 80+ languages
Still Errorful
Hybrid Systems Combining Knowledge with Data
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Messages in English (and other languages) to be Translated
into Any Language and spoken out using Text To Speech
A Little Knowledge goes a long way! e.g. Deep Blue
Speech to Speech Translation is a Little Worse
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Tolerable Translation
 Compounds Errors of Translation and Speech Recognition
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In The Right Medium
Using Text or Speech or Video
 Right Medium is Technology Solutions that cater to
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Language Divide: 4 billion people don’t read English,
Chinese, or EU languages
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Literacy Divide: 1 Billion People can’t read any language
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A Text Message in English is Not Always Appropriate
Limitations such as inability to read or disabilities such as dyslexic,
blind, deaf etc. require the use of appropriate media
To Reach Every Person on the Planet, the Same
Message may Need to be Sent in ALL the Different
Media to All the Different Devices
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Or preferred mode as indicated by user with RSVP?
Broadcast to Unicast on Mobile devices?
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With The Right Level Of Detail
Right Level of Detail Requires
 Systems that, Given a Text Corpus, can
Summarize the Text as Precisely and Quickly as a
Human Expert
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Do the Same for Speech, Music, Images, Video, Art,
and Movies
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Far From The Goal of Effective Summarization
 Systems that are Context Aware
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Produces Different Summaries for Experts And Novices
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Personal Guardian Angels (PGAs)
to the Rescue
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Getting The Right Information to the Right People requires
that
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A Guardian Angel is an autonomic, nonintrusive, deviceindependent virtual avatar that is always-on, always-working
and always-learning
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Every Person on The Planet is Provided with a Smart Phone with an
Embedded Personal Guardian Angel
and whispers in your ear that a tornado is heading your way
PGAs monitor, analyze and learn from their own experience
and experience of others
A Social Network Of Guardian Angels (Facebook Of Guardian
Angels?) is Able To Learn And Predict What Events Are Likely
To Impact You
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by sharing anonymized knowledge
using publish/subscribe mechanisms of social networking
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Big Elephant in The Room is The Cost
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Free Sensor Intensive Smart Phone to Every
Person on the Planet: Current cost of $200/Unit
 Estimated 2020 Cost per Unit of $50
 Assuming 8B population
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Expected Global Cost $100 to $400 Billion
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0.1% to 0.4% of the Gross World Product
Funding from Government and Other Stakeholders
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One per Family of 4? One per Person?
Smart Phone Manufacturers
Telecom Service Providers
IT Product and Service Companies
Increase in Economic Activity and Productivity
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Expected Payback Time: Less than 1 year
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Getting the Right Information to Every
Person on the Planet Is A Big Idea
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If Every Man, Women and Child on the Planet is
Entitled To Get The Relevant Information of Interest
 How do we filter out all the rest of data glut?
 How do we determine what the right information
might be for every person on the planet?
 Do
we create a data base of everyone on the planet?
 How
can we know what is of interest to each of
them?
 How do we communicate with them?
 Only those with smart phones?
 Just the information available in
English?
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Structure of Personal Guardian Angels
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A Personal Guardian Angel is a Virtual Avatar (like a
shadow) for Each Person on the Planet
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Always-On, Always-Present and Always Working
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Autonomic and Nonintrusive
Always-Learning
Ubiquitous: Device Independent (cloud resident or local)
Monitor, analyze and learn from experience;
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Enduring (life-long)
Learn From Own Experience And Experience Of Others
Share knowledge with a community of Guardian Angels
Automated discovery of data and information sources
PGAs must communicate with humans
The Publish/Subscribe model of social networks
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Who do you ask when you don’t know who to ask?
What if you don’t know who to Friend?
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Functionality of Personal Guardian Angels
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A Personal Guardian Angel
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A Facebook of Guardian Angels will be able know all
disruptive events that may affect your life
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must continuously derive future course of actions from local
sensory observations and context;
earthquakes and hurricanes or fuel or food scarcity
A Guardian Angel can also assist you in solving day to
day problem solving
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find an alternative route in case of accident
warn you about kids being late from school
help you in selecting the right college,
detect and correct fraudulent use of your credit card and 18
even help you to find a compatible partner
Personal Guardian Angels at Work
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Every Guardian Angel, 7 plus or minus two billion, is
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Suitably Anonymized, This Data Can Be Used in
Learning Appropriate Responses For Every Possible
Situation
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always on,
continuously monitoring the wellbeing of the ward and
accumulating huge amount of episodic knowledge
learning preferences by observing user choices,
learning by task similarity and user similarity,
learning by error correction and simply learning thru
clarification dialog ( does that mean yes? Would you care to
define it?).
There will be enough data to swamp even the most
demanding Big Data Advocate.
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Computational Resources
Access to Unlimited Computation, Memory and Bandwidth
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By 2020, Everyone on The Planet Has Access to a Smart
Phone with Global Connectivity
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Every Man, Woman And Child will have Access to 16GB+ of
Space on The Cloud from Facebook, Google And Microsoft
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Enough To Host All Personal Information In Your Own Secure Privacy
Protected Area
Accessible Only To You And Your Guardian Angel
And Ensure Your Digital Bill Of Rights
Everyone on The Planet Has Access to
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A Smart Phone is Expected Cost $20 to $50
Unlimited Computation
Unlimited Memory and
Unlimited Bandwidth
Use Mobile And Cloud Computing For Prediction and
Notification
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The Global Brain of HG Wells?
HG Wells Spoke of the Appearance 0f
“Synthetic Super-minds...” within “The Species
Homo Sapiens”
 He Envisioned that These Super-human
Intelligences Represent “An Ultimate Unification
… Of Knowledge And Memory” of Humanity
 A Social Network Of Guardian Angels May be
the Ultimate Instantiation of The Global Brain of
HG Wells. The Guardian Angels
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 monitor,
analyze and learn from own experience
and experience of others and
 share anonymized knowledge using publishsubscribe mechanisms of social networking
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The Grand Challenge Of 21st Century
In Conclusion
Creation of Guardian Angel Technologies for providing
the right information to every man, woman and child
on the planet in a timely manner can eliminate
surprise and reduce human suffering and misery.
 While the cost appears to be prohibitive, on a per
capita basis it represents less than 0.1% of GWP.
 A Social Network Of Guardian Angels that can
anticipate and share potential disastrous events for
every person on the planet may be able to save 50%
to 80% of all accidental deaths in the world
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and save over a million lives and hundreds of billions of
dollars of property damage every year
It is certainly the most influential research project that
a great country of China could undertake.
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