

In 5 Years, We Could All Have 'Digital Twins' That Make Decisions for Us - uzodave
http://nr.news-republic.com/Web/ArticleWeb.aspx?regionid=3&articleid=29132267&m=d

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walterbell
These ideas only work if the "agent" or "digital twin" is driven by open-
format data controlled by the user. The analytics algorithms making
recommendations can be OSS or proprietary, but the data store needs to be
open-source and legally owned by the user, e.g. federated from their home
(e.g. ownCloud) or personal cloud (VPS).

This enables competition among apps that use the personal identity data,
without the limitations of API tokens or an ecosystem business tax. It also
allows users to consolidate their own data, which can never be done by a
single corporation, no matter how large, since competing corporations will
present barriers to data interop.

The barriers are interoperable knowledge representation and social ontologies,
rather than machine learning algos. Similar to the challenges faced by
interoperable semantic webs, e.g. [http://dime-project.github.io](http://dime-
project.github.io)

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dalke
I know of them as "intelligent software agents", as in
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent)
. They were part of marketing hype in the dot-com era. At least, our company
had a product with the slogan "the first intelligent agent for
bioinformatics", or something like that.

W00t! Traces of it are still on line. See
[http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/microbial-genomics-
arra...](http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/microbial-genomics-array-techs-
highlight-genome-conference) , from 1998.

Like most articles concerning futurists, this one doesn't cover the decades of
previous attempts which would suggest that the task is much more difficult
than the optimistic 5 year prediction.

