NAKFI Projects
These projects apply narrative-based mechanisms of contextual integration to the problem of modeling interactions among multiple systems. Two were supported by seed grants from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI), in its series of advanced interdisciplinary projects in which art, medicine and engineering intersect. The current project realizes that research as a new representational system.
Building a Narrative Modeling Tool
Capturing Implicit Contextual Influence
This project builds a narrative modeling platform that can capture forms of information related to context: limited perspective, influence, causal agency, implicit information. These qualities are depicted as semantic networks that evolve. One goal is to capture a new tier of information that usually can’t be included in models, such as social, emotional and learning information. Another is to model connections between diverse disciplines, such as the psychological, neurological and microbiological information entailed in understanding how stress impacts on the immune system. A third is to newly map how information is structured at the level of systems: how new ideas emerge, evolve and interact.
The modeling platform is being built in Unity to leverage 3D so that new information architectures are able to be built and explored.
This is a joint initiative between Sirius-Beta and the Virginia Modeling Analytics and Simulation Center, Old Dominion University. It is based on the design foundations developed during the NAKFI project Design in Information Flow (described below).
Updates on this project can be found on my blog, here.
Collaborators:
- Beth Cardier, Sirius-Beta Corp.
- Ted Goranson, Sirius-Beta Corp.
- Saikou Diallo, John Shull and Alex Nielsen, Virginia Modeling Analytics and Simulation Center, Old Dominion University
- Niccolo Casas, RISD Rhode Island School of Design; The Bartlett College, University College London
- Patric Lundberg, Richard Ciavarra and Larry Sanford, Eastern Virginia Medical School
Design in Information Flow
Using aesthetic principles to overcome computational barriers in the analysis of complex systems.
This project models streams of biomedical information as evolving form. We discover new methods of contextual integration using artistic mechanisms to match and constrain the available information: analogical structure, optimal tension resolution and the aesthetics of design. These operations are supported by the philosophy and new formalisms for situation theory, based at Stanford.
The goal is to overcome the barriers in computational logic that would usually prevent different kinds of data from interacting.
This work was supported by a $50K seed grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. It occupied new territory somewhere between art, biomedicine and informatics. A long-term target was to develop a new visualization tool for small biomedical teams, enabling them to see shifts and anomalies in data, and pinpoint the most valuable way to allocate resources in future experiments.
Read about the project and its approach on my blog: The Intelligence in Beautiful Form, with a companion essay on interdisciplinary technique, Extreme Interdisciplinarity. I discuss interdisciplinary techniques learned during this project in an interview with EVMS for its continuing education program.
Collaborators:
- Beth Cardier, Sirius-Beta Corp, PI
- Niccolo Casas, RISD Rhode Island School of Design; University College London
- Ted Goranson, Sirius-Beta Corp
- Alessio Erioli, Università di Bologna
- Patric Lundberg, Richard Ciavarra and Larry Sanford, Eastern Virginia Medical School
Towards the ‘InnerNet’
An integrated sensor analysis of biome/microbiome systems, employing novel interactivity through acoustics and design for personalized health monitoring.
This project was supported by a $100K seed grant.
The InnerNet project considered the whole biophysical system of the body with the goal of understanding how bodily systems ‘talk’ to one another by tapping into communications between the body and the microbiome. The team explored the development of wearable external and internal sensor arrays for this purpose.
My essay The Language of Microbes grew out of this project’s themes.
Collaborators:
- Paul Weiss, University of California, Los Angeles, PI
- Ruth West, University of North Texas
- Andrea Polli, University of New Mexico
- Beth Cardier, Sirius-Beta Corp
- Niccolo Casas, RISD Rhode Island School of Design; University College London
- Allison Kudla, Institute for Systems Biology