Intelligent systems often operate in a blend of cyberspace and physical space. Cyberspace operations—planning, actions, and effects in realms where signals affect intelligent systems—often occur in milliseconds without human intervention. Decisions and actions in cyberspace can affect physical space, particularly in SCADA—supervisory control and data acquisition—systems. For critical military m...

In a world where technology and politics interact, there is increasing discussion of the role of law and government action. This is particularly true in the case of cyberspace, where the internet is changing the ways in which regulation is applied. In the extreme case, technology is claimed to determine freedom and rights. This position has been addressed by Laurence Lessig, in his book “Code a...

During the 1940s, under the pseudonym of Will Stewart, Jack Williamson published a series of fictional stories describing a process for attaching atmospheres to planets in order to make them capable of sustaining life. ‘Terraforming,’ the term he coined for this activity was first picked up by other science fiction writers. Eventually, it captured the imagination of a small but zealous core of ...

On 1 January, 2012, Nigeria commenced the implementation of cashless policy, with the kick-off in Lagos State. By the end of that year it was evident the implementation could not be extended to other states of the federation, as earlier scheduled. This raised a crucial question: was Nigeria prepared in the first place, in terms of availability of needed infrastructures, to commence implementati...

This paper begins with a long-term view of the development of cyberspace. This includes a brief examination of the worldview of a 16th-century mapmaker and over 4000 years of development from the early massive bureaucracies of Babylon and Egypt to the current day. This discussion shows that cyberspace is becoming an everyday experience and we need to design tools to help people navigate electro...

The main objective of the IBM Grand Central Station (GCS) is to gather information of virtually any type of formats (text, data, image, graphics, audio, video) from the cyberspace, to process/index/summarize the information, and to push the right information to the right people. Because of the very large scale of the cyberspace, parallel processing in both crawling/gathering and information pro...

In complex, dynamic and uncertain environments extending from disaster rescue missions, to future battlefields, to monitoring and surveillance tasks, to virtual training environments, to future robotic space missions, intelligent agents will play a key role in information gathering and filtering, as well as in task planning and execution. Although physically distributed on a variety of platform...

The growing presence of Hinduism and its adherents in India’s cyberspace has led to the conceptualization of the categorical identity the ‘Internet-Hindu.’ Using Castell’s theorizing of communication in a network society, this paper articulates a critique on the nature of cyberspace and its use by the Hindu community in the construction of online religious identities. The context of this paper ...

Starting with my acquaintance with W. Ross Ashby, this paper offers an account of one aspect of his work, information theory. It shows his motivation to embrace information theory, how he extended it, where it failed while fertilizing reconstructability analysis, and what it took for a solution to emerge. Based on Ashby‘s recognition of the material limits of computation, the paper continues hi...