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2The foundations of social coordination: John Searle and Hernando de SotoIn Nikos Psarros & Katinka Schulte-Ostermann (eds.), Facets of Sociality, Ontos. pp. 3--22. 2007.
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6Human Action in the Healthcare Domain: A Critical Analysis of HL7’s Reference Information ModelIn Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 554-573. 2013.
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10Truth-MakersIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 9-50. 2007.
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173Gene Ontology annotations: What they mean and where they come fromBMC Bioinformatics 9 (5): 1-9. 2008.The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of…Read more
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111Meinen und Verstehen in der literarischen GegenstandskonstitutionIn Gerd Wolandt (ed.), Kunst und Kunstforschung: Beiträge zur Ästhetik, Bouvier. pp. 49-61. 1983.Material things have material (spatial) parts. Acts, events, occurrences, have phases, which we can view as their temporal parts. Spatial surfaces and volumes, stretches of time, they all have parts again; they can all be considered "extended". Entities, on the other hand, such as directions, numbers, temperatures, colors, tones, fictional characters, prices, numbers, values, ideologies, goals, are all unextended; they are partless. Let us call such non-extended objects “nodes”, in order to expr…Read more
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Wittgenstein und das ethische GesetzIn Dieter Birnbacher & Armin Burkhardt (eds.), Sprachspiel und Methode: zum Stand der Wittgenstein-Diskussion, De Gruyter. 1985.
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227Where there’s no will, there’s no wayUkcolumn. 2023.An interview by Alex Thomson of UKColumn on Landgrebe and Smith's book: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. The subtitle of the book is Artificial Intelligence Without Fear, and the interview begins with the question of the supposedly imminent takeover of one profession or the other by artificial intelligence. Is there truly reason to be afraid that you will lose your job? The interview itself is titled 'Where this is no will there is no way', drawing on one thesis of the book to the effect …Read more
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797OntologyIn Guillermo Hurtado & Oscar Nudler (eds.), The Furniture of the World: Essays in Ontology and Metaphysics, Editions Rodopi. 2012.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, the ter…Read more
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294Quantum sensing and quantum engineering: a strategy for acceleration via metascienceProceedings of Spie: Quantum Sensing, Imaging, and Precision Metrology 12447. 2023.Research and engineering in the quantum domain involve long chains of activity involving theory development, hypothesis formation, experimentation, device prototyping, device testing, and many more. At each stage multiple paths become possible, and of the paths pursued, the majority will lead nowhere. Our quantum metascience approach provides a strategy which enables all stakeholders to gain an overview of those developments along these tracks, that are relevant to their specific concerns. It pr…Read more
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251A new framework for host-pathogen interaction researchFrontiers in Immunology 13. 2022.COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host…Read more
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468Sam Harris and the Myth of Artificial IntelligenceIn Marc Champagne (ed.), Sam Harris: Critical Responses, Carus Books. pp. 153-61. 2023.Sam Harris is a contemporary illustration of the difficulties standing in the way of coherent interdisciplinary thinking in an age where science and the humanities have drifted so far apart. We are here with Harris’s views on AI, and specifically with his view according to which, with the advance of AI, there will evolve a machine superintelligence with powers that far exceed those of the human mind. This he sees as something that is not merely possible, but rather a matter of inevitability. If,…Read more
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317Why Machines Will Never Rule the World – On AI and FaithIrreverend. Faith and Human Affairs. 2023.Transcript of an Interview on the podcast: Irreverend: Faith and Current Affairs.
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136Drei Briten in Kakanien: Axel Bühler im Gespräch mit dem "Seminar for Austro-German-Philosophy"Information Philosophie 3 22-33. 1987.The three young philosophers Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith have become well-known in the last few years especially in German-speaking analytical philosophy and phenomenology circles. This is on the one hand as a result of their historical and systematic philosophical work; but it is also because of the provocative way in which they represent their philosophy. Because they often appear in threes, they have become known as the "gang of three" or "three musketeers" or even – and this…Read more
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170What is a service?The Eighth Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO’22), August 15-19, 2022, Jönköping University, Sweden. 2022.When governments collect data relating to economic activity they commonly employ a distinction between goods and services. Both goods and services have economic value. Goods (cars, houses, bottles of milk) are, very roughly, independent continuants which can be alienated (sold, gifted, rented, and so forth). Services (hairdressing, gardening, teaching) are, again very roughly, occurrents. They are occurrents which are further often said to be marked by the fact that production and consumption co…Read more
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173Model-induced escapeFacing the Future, Facing the Screen: 10Th Budapest Visual Learning Conference. 2022.We can illustrate the phenomenon of model-induced escape by examining the phenomenon of spam filters. Spam filter A is, we can assume, very effective at blocking spam. Indeed it is so effective that it motivates the authors of spam to invent new types of spam that will beat the filters of spam filter A. An example of this phenomenon in the realm of philosophy is illustrated in the work of Nyíri on Wittgenstein's political beliefs. Nyíri writes a paper demonstrating convincingly that there are s…Read more
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380The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) Core OntologyFOMI 2022: 12th International Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry, September 12-15, 2022, Tarbes, France. 2022.The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) was formed to create a suite of interoperable ontologies. Ontologies that would serve as a foundation for data and information interoperability in all areas of manufacturing. To ensure that each ontology is developed in a structured and mutually coherent manner, the IOF has committed to the tiered architecture of ontology building based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as top level. One of the critical elements of a successful tiered architecture build i…Read more
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305A comprehensive update on CIDO: the community-based coronavirus infectious disease ontologyJournal of Biomedical Semantics 13 (1): 25. 2022.The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integ…Read more
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709Why AI will never rule the world (interview)Digital Trends. 2022.Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity — for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans. According to the theory, advances in AI — specifically of the machine learning type that’s able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly — will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In t…Read more
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319Unsterblichkeit 2.0In Ludger Jansen & Rebekka A. Klein (eds.), Seele digital? Mind uploading, virtuelles Bewusstsein und christliche Auferstehungshoffnung, Verlag Friedrich Pustet. pp. 69-83. 2022.Das in diesem Aufsatz vorgebrachte Argumentationsmuster hat folgende Schritte: 1. Der menschliche Geist ist vom Körper nicht trennbar, sie bilden ein Kontinuum. 2. Unser Bewusstsein und alle darauf aufbauenden geistigen Phänomene sind die Emanation eines materiellen Prozesses, den ein komplexes System verursacht. 3. Komplexe Systeme lassen sich mathematisch nicht modellieren und nicht kausal verstehen. 4. Computer sind Turing-Maschinen. Sie können nur mathematische Modelle berechnen. Es wird nie…Read more
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2921The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the …Read more
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Austrian philosophy and Austrian economicsIn J. Lee Auspitz, Wojciech W. Gasparski, Marek K. Mlicki & Klemens Szaniawski (eds.), Praxiologies and the Philosophy of Economics, Transaction Publishers. pp. 245--272. 1992.
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659Philosophical foundations of intelligence collection and analysis: a defense of ontological realismIntelligence and National Security 38. 2022.There is a common misconception across the lntelligence Community (IC) to the effect that information trapped within multiple heterogeneous data silos can be semantically integrated by the sorts of meaning-blind statistical methods employed in much of artificial intelligence (Al) and natural language processlng (NLP). This leads to the misconception that incoming data can be analysed coherently by relying exclusively on the use of statistical algorithms and thus without any shared framework for …Read more
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197Ontocommons in the standardization environmentOntoCommons. 2022.Ontologies and standards are strongly interrelated and can often be seen as two sides of the same coin. Indeed, standards reflect consensus on the semantics of terms, though different standards might employ different ways to explain the same or very similar concepts semantically. Given the crucial role played by both aspects in OntoCommons, we have interviewed Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo and one of the External Advisory Board (EAB) members…Read more
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116The OBO Foundry: Coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integrationNature Biotechnology 25 (11): 1251-1255. 2007.The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Ex…Read more
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692The Space Domain OntologiesIn Alexander P. Cox, C. K. Nebelecky, R. Rudnicki, W. A. Tagliaferri, J. L. Crassidis & B. Smith (eds.), National Symposium on Sensor & Data Fusion Committee, . 2021.Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of li…Read more
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360An Introduction to Hard and Soft Data Fusion via Conceptual Spaces Modeling for Space Event CharacterizationIn Jeremy Chapman, David Kasmier, John L. Crassidis, James L. Llinas, Barry Smith & Alex P. Cox (eds.), National Symposium on Sensor & Data Fusion (NSSDF), Military Sensing Symposia (MSS). 2021.This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic …Read more
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670Gestalt Theory and Its Reception: An Annotated BibliographyIn Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 227-478. 1988.The list which follows is intended as a comprehensive bibliographical survey of the wider Gestalt tradition from Graz and Berlin to Padua, Frankfurt and New York. It presents diagrammatically the main influence and teacher-pupil relationships also groupings into schools. It includes the classical texts of the Gestalt psychological tradition, together with the more important translations and reprints thereof. Special attention is paid to works on the following topics: - the concept of Prägnanz o…Read more
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1204The birth of ontologyJournal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (1): 57-66. 2022.This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.
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327Implementing Dempster-Shafer Theory for property similarity in Conceptual Spaces modelingSensor Systems and Information Systems IV, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SCITECH Forum 2022. 2022.Previous work has shown that the Complex Conceptual Spaces − Single Observation Mathematical framework is a useful tool for event characterization. This mathematical framework is developed on the basis of Conceptual Spaces and uses integer linear programming to find the needed similarity values. The work of this paper is focused primarily on space event characterization. In particular, the focus is on the ranking of threats for malicious space events such as a kinetic kill. To make the Conceptua…Read more
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295Ontology of plays for autonomous teaming and collaborationProceedings of the 14Th Seminar on Ontology Research in Brazil (Ontobras 2021), Ceur 3050, 9-22. 2021.We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to…Read more
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
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University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
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APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |