User:Uriah George

Hello

My name is Uriah George. I am a young self-taught developer aspiring to go to school to become a systems engineer.

Upbringing

I was born at home in Tonasket Washington during a freezing blizzard on the 16th of February, 1989. I grew up in the small towns of North Central Washington, east of the Cascade Mountains near the border with Canada, where I spent a majority of my adolescence hiking, swimming, reading and developing concepts for the future.

Going Abroad

In 2008 I pursued my interest in charitable work in Uganda with the Kitovu Mobile AIDS Organization through an internship program provided by the Foundation for Sustainable Development. Due to my aptitude in computer technology it was decided that I should work on modernizing the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) database management systems at Kitovu Mobile. At the time their M&E consisted largely of hard copy paper data collection forms, with only some of the data ever being entered into Excel spreadsheet files which were e-mailed back and forth during intermittent times of internet connectivity, or passed around on USB drives. Kitovu Mobile provides care to many remote villages in the hard to reach areas surrounding Masaka. I heard estimates they cared for between four to six thousand patients, of the actual number no one could be sure. Initially I conducted a needs assessment and identified a number of gaps and inefficiencies, many of which are common in developing countries. After much deliberation I concluded that any partial upgrade to their current systems would be insufficient to fill the gaps required by the staff and administration. Without the proper time and resources, and regrettably due to my inadequate experience with database management, it was nearly impossible to make any significant changes. Looking back, the lessons learned during that six months were priceless, and were to have considerable consequences in my next pursuit.

Quest for the Holy Grail

Between the year 2009 and the beginning of 2012 I devoured hundreds of books ranging from technical to intellectual subjects including; digital computing, information theory, information technology, artificial intelligence and learning algorithms, crowd-sourcing, cloud computing, collective intelligence, military intelligence and intelligence operations, social media, peer-to-peer networking and many, many more. During this time a concept was forming in my mind whose objective is to revolutionize our database management and information processing systems. My time in Uganda gave me a good perspective for this problem, helping me immensely. What I had in mind in 2009 turned out to be far different from what came out of it, yet the fundamental needs never changed.

The Relics Project

In 2012 my concept solidified and I founded the Relics Foundation, a non-profit employing an organizational structure very similar to that of Wikipedia.

The pretext for the Relics Project is the current disparity of knowledge that exists. However the dilemma we face is not characterized by a scarcity of information, on the contrary, there is an overwhelming abundance. What is needed is a greater capacity to derive knowledge from information, and that is my objective.

Platform for Distributed Intelligence

• Relics is a concept for an open-source online community. It will be accessible free of charge and open to users who are willing to contribute time or computer resources to the project. The Relics platform can be used to research and study information for any purpose.
• Relics is a space where all activities are collaborative in nature. Its decentralized architecture facilitates a high degree of transparency, peer review, and quality assurance, all of which will ultimately prove the resilience of the Relics concept.
• Relics is based on the concept that a diverse collection of independent individuals are likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than any one individual or panel of experts. There are four conditions that allow groups to make intelligent decisions: Diversity of private knowledge, independence of thought, decentralization (i.e. specialization), and a mechanism to aggregate their knowledge into a collective decision.
• The Relics platform is the keystone software application that connects and harmonizes all operations of the intelligence process, which utilizes both human intelligence and biologically inspired learning algorithms to perform intelligence tasks.
• Relics users are connected via a peer-to-peer network hosted by all the users, forming a community which encompasses the shared resources available to the intelligence process. This distributed network is intended to meet the high demands of processing, memory, scalability and fault tolerance.
• All Relics users must also be providers who contribute to the community resource pool. This may include memory, processing, bandwidth or human resources.
• Relics users can seek hosting for computational resources far beyond the capacity of any personal computer. The user develops a project and submits it to the Relics Community for review. Resources are allocated to a specific user’s project by means of a participatory voting system. In other words, the independent choices of users collectively decide how the community resources are used.
• Relics automates the more manual and repetitive tasks of the intelligence process so that the user community may focus their attention on the evaluation of information that may be subject to a number of interpretations. Algorithms generate statistical output, so Relics does not state a definitive answer, but instead makes inferences in probabilistic terms.
• The Relics concept is unprecedented as it is the first system of its kind, and stands in a class alone. It is not finished concept, but a vision that will be shaped by future participants.

How can you use Relics?

Collaborative user participation makes Relics a vital tool for all sectors of research: personal, academic, and market. Relics can be used to gather input in order to make basic life decisions such as choosing a career path or a new locale. Students can use Relics to test a hypothesis or to aggregate academic data. Business can use Relics to revolutionize the design and marketing of new products.

By developing a symbiotic relationship with the Relics Community, a business will be able to isolate and eliminate products that may not perform well in the real market by using a process that is accurate, inexpensive, and much quicker than conventional consumer research.

Relics Development Plan

Relics is made feasible through community-driven development which leverages all available resources and employs a spiral development cycle by designing, building, testing and evaluating the system in realistically achievable stages. The Relics concept is not achievable in the traditional manner where an unprecedented project of such magnitude would require significant capital investment. The argument here is that the Relics open-source system should not be valued in terms of monetary profits, but instead by the potential benefits of information. This should serve to invite and not alienate investors by proving that this is something worth the venture.

The Relics software platform will not be built entirely from scratch. There will be significant landmarks to achieve in terms of successful design and innovation as well as overcoming the challenges of coordinating the decentralized development efforts. It can be thought of as a system-of-systems and takes a systems engineering approach in order to refine the preliminary concept and design a proof of concept. That said, many of the core ideas and critical technologies already exist, now all that remains is to design a suitable platform, and form a community to undertake building the sub-systems and effectively integrating the many components.

Core development groups, in their respective areas of expertise, will manage human and material resources, acting as the central planners and coordinators of the distributed development process. It is essential that individual participants appreciate the roles of both the employee and the volunteer. It is important to realize that this strategy is the only feasible direction to take.

Pivotal questions remain in terms of the conditions-of-use and potential vulnerabilities of the system that could be explicitly misused or corrupted. Such questions will be addressed during the project’s preliminary design phases.

External Links

Relics Project Facebook page