I have tried to scan through the Wiki and other links trying to gain an understanding of the goals of the the research and experimental setup.
I haven\'t got a good handle though on the what the research goals are other than understanding conciousness which is very, very broad.
I also seemed picked up on that some of what\'s being modeled has to do with how our minds and conciousness are affected by fatigue.
Could somebody fill in some more blanks and talk about what the actual experimental goals are and how the potential results could be used to help mankind.
I realize the project is still in Beta but having a good explanation I think is critical to attracting more contributors.
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I have tried to scan through the Wiki and other links trying to gain an understanding of the goals of the the research and experimental setup.
I haven\'t got a good handle though on the what the research goals are other than understanding conciousness which is very, very broad.
I also seemed picked up on that some of what\'s being modeled has to do with how our minds and conciousness are affected by fatigue.
Could somebody fill in some more blanks and talk about what the actual experimental goals are and how the potential results could be used to help mankind.
I realize the project is still in Beta but having a good explanation I think is critical to attracting more contributors.
This is a very good question and in my opinion must be answered continually. I will provide a short answer here, with more to follow later via the wiki and follow-on posts.
The research done at MindModeling@home encompasses many facets of cognitive science with each benefiting the world a bit differently. As each piece is integrated together [in our case via a unifing cognitive architecute -> ACT-R] a more complete understanding of human cognition is obtained. The applications from this are vast: from more advanced intelligent tutors for educations to improving usability in graphical applications to most all dealing with humans where grounded scientific understand of the human cognitive system is currently lacking.
Since you mentioned Fatigue:
A goal of cognitive modeling is to accurately explain human cognition. However most cognitive models currently do capture fatigued human behavior. Understanding how sleep or lack of sleep effects how the processes of the mind function at a very detailed and fundamental level effects the accuracy of most cognitive research over a larger domain of human performance. Why is fatigue research important? Many huge catastrophes have been attributed to human operator fatigue (10-20% of fatal automobile accidents ) Fatigued behavior is very similar to drunk behavior, slow reaction time, decision impairment, etc. This isn\'t an explicit application of the research as planned now, but I could envision a cars were intelligent enough to understand fatigued human behavior to realize when a person is falling a sleep and responding by turning on the radio and suggesting they pull over. In any case, applications will follow, the science has to be done first.
There are other models and lines of research in the queue for MindModeling.org All these lines of research share the goal of enhancing the understanding of human cognition for the entire research community (i.e. published science and cognitive architecture improvements that can be used by all) Each individual jobs in the system have subgoals which will be outlined in the wiki under their respective areas.
The composite results of the MindModeling@Home will help provide a more comprehensive picture of the mechanisms of the mind. For MindModelers, we search to \"Know Thyself\" in a tangible way and expected applicable rewards for mankind based on this understanding.
--Jack
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MindModeling@Home is fun
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