Amsterdaam, 27th of April 2009: Thomas Quillinan is one of the colleagues at the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group at the Vrije University Amsterdam. He is involved in the EU project on crisis
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Thomas Quilinan
Security research
person
Thomas Quillinan is a Security Researcher at the D-CIS Research Lab in Delft, in the Netherlands. He received a Ph.D., in the area of Security for Distributed Systems, and a M.Sc. in Computer Science
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Quillinan, when asked abut his association with witnessing, makes the distinction between looking and seeing. Seeing refers to having concentrated attention where looking refers to a more general
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Realizing the impact computers and systems have, the question that arises is whether, and if so in what ways, computers are intelligent.
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Instead of having the computer adapt to the person, the person is supposed to adapt to the computer. People have different ways of communicating with a computer, but the computer has only one way of
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The adaptation of human beings to computers can be understood as a result from the ‘master and slave’ model, which defined the design of computers and systems since the early days.
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Asked to comment on the rhythms, frames, loops and organisation of time in machines and between people in communities, Quillinan emphasizes that
scale is the most important difference between those
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When asked about the interaction of rhythms between humans and systems Quillinan emphasizes that humans operate on a completely different rhythm to computers.
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One of the major advantages computers give us is the lack of having to be in one place. And especially with the access to the Internet, one can be pretty much anywhere in the world and still interact
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Because of their scale and speed, computers and systems have changed important concepts of space, of speed, of connection, of impact. Computers have changed people’s perception of the world and the
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In relations the witnessing and the recognizing of the other is very important. Computers facilitate a lot of relations, argues Quillinan, but it depends on what you’re using your computer for.
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Quillinan agrees that one can describe computers and systems as formatting tools of human presence. The interaction, the formatting, it tends to be depended on the application, he argues.
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Quillinan is working on a use case of crisis-management for a European funded project. They are modelling crisis as it happens. For example, if an area of the Netherlands is flooded, certain things
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Witnessing is one of the issues in crisis management. In a crisis different people witness the same thing in very different ways, and one person will say, ‘there is a major flood in my street’,
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One of the biggest problems in most crisis has been lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of what’s happened in the past. Poor decision making that’s happening today, has happened before.
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Asked about witnessed presence in systems, middleware or applications, Quillinan finds that the difference between applications and infrastructures is dramatic. Even though he claims that computers
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experience:
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Full transcript including film fragments you find at: http://www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
Hereunder the transcript in text.
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