Guardian Angel Technologies: Providing Right Information to the Right People

June 13, 2014
Raj Reddy | Carnegie Mellon University

In the increasingly digital world of the 21st century, every person on the planet should be able to get timely warnings about potential calamities like typhoons and tornados as well as earthquakes and flooding. Twenty years ago, my colleague, Professor Jaime Carbonell, proposed a grand challenge for Computer Science that society should aspire to get the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language in the right medium with the right level of detail. He called it the Digital Bill of Rights. Advances in computing of the last two decades finally make it possible for us to explore technologies for realizing this vision. The concept of getting the right information to every man, woman and child on the planet in a timely manner is a big idea. It assumes that all seven billion of us should be able to get information of direct interest, filtering out all the rest of the data glut. In this talk, we propose the creation of Guardian Angel Technologies for fulfilling the Digital Bill of Rights. A Guardian Angel is an autonomic, nonintrusive, device-independent virtual avatar for every person on the planet that is always-on, always-working and always-learning (and whispers in your ear that a tornado is heading your way). GATs are a social network of guardian angels that monitor, analyze and learn from their own experience and experience of others by sharing anonymized knowledge using publish/subscribe mechanisms of social networking. In this talk, we will review the current state of the art and propose a research agenda to create the guardian angel technology.

Speaker Details

Raj Reddy is the Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University for over 40 years and was the Founding Director of the Robotics Institute at CMU. Dr. Reddy received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 for his contributions to Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterrand of France in 1984 and the Padma Bhushan by the President of India in 2001. He was awarded the Okawa Prize in 2004, the Honda Prize in 2005, and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2006. He served as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001. He has been awarded eleven honorary doctorates (Doctor Honoris Causa) including Universities of Henri-Poincare, New South Wales, Massachusetts, Warwick, and HKUST.