Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks.

The idea emerged from the writings of Douglas Hofstadter (1979), Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Pierre Lévy (1994), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003) and other theorists. Collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic intelligence by Norman Lee Johnson. The concept is relevant in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction, frequently in the form of telepathically-linked species and cyborgs.

History

A precursor of the concept is found in entomologist William Morton Wheeler's observation that seemingly independent individuals can cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism (1911). Wheeler saw this collaborative process at work in ants that acted like the cells of a single beast he called a "superorganism".

In 1912 Émile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical thought. He argued, in "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" that society constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over space and time. Other antecedents are Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of "noosphere" and H.G. Wells's concept of "world brain" (see also the term "global brain"). Peter Russell, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Barbara Marx Hubbard (originator of the term "conscious evolution" ) are inspired by the visions of a noosphere — a transcendent, rapidly evolving collective intelligence — an informational cortex of the planet. The notion has more recently been examined by the philosopher Pierre Lévy.

Dimensions

Howard Bloom has discussed mass behavior - collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies. He stresses the biological adaptations that have turned most of this earth's living beings into components of what he calls "a learning machine". In 1986 Bloom combined the concepts of apoptosis, parallel distributed processing, group selection, and the superorganism to produce a theory of how collective intelligence works. Later he showed how the collective intelligences of competing bacterial colonies and human societies can be explained in terms of computer-generated "complex adaptive systems" and the "genetic algorithms", concepts pioneered by John Holland.

Bloom traced the evolution of collective intelligence to our bacterial ancestors 1 billion years ago and demonstrated how a multi-species intelligence has worked since the beginning of life. Ant societies exhibit more intelligence, in terms of technology, than any other animal except for humans and co-operate in keeping livestock, for example aphids for "milking". Leaf cutters care for fungi and carry leaves to feed the fungi.

David Skrbina cites the concept of a ‘group mind’ as being derived from Plato’s concept of panpsychism (that mind or consciousness is omnipresent and exists in all matter). He develops the concept of a ‘group mind’ as articulated by Thomas Hobbes in "Leviathan" and Fechner’s arguments for a collective consciousness of mankind. He cites Durkheim as the most notable advocate of a ‘collective consciousness” and Teilhard de Chardin as a thinker who has developed the philosophical implications of the group mind.

Tom Atlee focuses primarily on humans and on work to upgrade what Howard Bloom calls “the group IQ". Atlee feels that collective intelligence can be encouraged "to overcome 'groupthink' and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process—while achieving enhanced intellectual performance.” George Pór defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as "the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration." Atlee and Pór state that "collective intelligence also involves achieving a single focus of attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of action". Their approach is rooted in Scientific Community Metaphor.

Atlee and Pór suggest that the field of collective intelligence should primarily be seen as a human enterprise in which mind-sets, a willingness to share and an openness to the value of distributed intelligence for the common good are paramount, though group theory and artificial intelligence have something to offer. Individuals who respect collective intelligence are confident of their own abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any individual parts. Maximizing collective intelligence relies on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member. Groupthink often hampers collective intelligence by limiting input to a select few individuals or filtering potential Golden Suggestions without fully developing them to implementation.

Robert David Steele Vivas in ''The New Craft of Intelligence'' portrayed all citizens as "intelligence minutemen," drawing only on legal and ethical sources of information, able to create a "public intelligence" that keeps public officials and corporate managers honest, turning the concept of "national intelligence" (previously concerned about spies and secrecy) on its head.

According to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, collective intelligence is mass collaboration. In order for this concept to happen, four principles need to exist;

; Openness: Sharing ideas and intellectual property: though these resources provide the edge over competitors more benefits accrue from allowing others to share ideas and gain significant improvement and scrutiny through collaboration.

; Peering: Horizontal organization as with the ‘opening up’ of the Linux program where users are free to modify and develop it provided that they make it available for others. Peering succeeds because it encourages self-organization – a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

; Sharing: Companies have started to share some ideas while maintaining some degree of control over others, like potential and critical patent rights. Limiting all intellectual property shuts out opportunities, while sharing some expands markets and brings out products faster.

; Acting Globally: The advancement in communication technology has prompted the rise of global companies at low overhead costs. The internet is widespread, therefore a globally integrated company has no geographical boundaries and may access new markets, ideas and technology.

Examples

Political parties mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates and finance and run election campaigns. Knowledge focusing through various voting methods allows perspectives to converge through the assumption that uninformed voting is to some degree random and can be filtered from the decision process leaving only a residue of informed consensus. Critics point out that often bad ideas, misunderstandings, and misconceptions are widely held, and that structuring of the decision process must favor experts who are presumably less prone to random or misinformed voting in a given context.

Military units, trade unions, and corporations satisfy some definitions of CI — the most rigorous definition would require a capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance from "law" or "customers" to constrain actions. Online advertising companies are using collective intelligence to bypass traditional marketing and creative agencies.

In Learner generated context a group of users marshal resources to create an ecology that meets their needs often (but not only) in relation to the co-configuration, co-creation and co-design of a particular learning space that allows learners to create their own context. Learner generated contexts represent an ''ad hoc'' community that facilitates coordination of collective action in a network of trust. An example of Learner generated context is found on the Internet when collaborative users pool knowledge in a "shared intelligence space". As the Internet has developed so has the concept of CI as a shared public forum. The global accessibility and availability of the Internet has allowed more people than ever to contribute and access ideas. (Flew 2008)

Improvisational actors also experience a type of collective intelligence which they term 'Group Mind'. A further example of collective intelligence is found in idea competitions.

Mathematical techniques

One measure sometimes applied, especially by more artificial intelligence focused theorists, is a "collective intelligence quotient" (or "cooperation quotient")—which presumably can be measured like the "individual" intelligence quotient (IQ)—thus making it possible to determine the marginal extra intelligence added by each new individual participating in the collective, thus using metrics to avoid the hazards of group think and stupidity.

In 2001, Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba from the AGH University in Poland proposed a formal model for the phenomenon of collective intelligence. It is assumed to be an unconscious, random, parallel, and distributed computational process, run in mathematical logic by the social structure.

In this model, beings and information are modeled as abstract information molecules carrying expressions of mathematical logic. They are quasi-randomly displacing due to their interaction with their environments with their intended displacements. Their interaction in abstract computational space creates multi-thread inference process which we perceive as collective intelligence. Thus, a non-Turing model of computation is used. This theory allows simple formal definition of collective intelligence as the property of social structure and seems to be working well for a wide spectrum of beings, from bacterial colonies up to human social structures. Collective intelligence considered as a specific computational process is providing a straightforward explanation of several social phenomena. For this model of collective intelligence, the formal definition of IQS (IQ Social) was proposed and was defined as "the probability function over the time and domain of N-element inferences which are reflecting inference activity of the social structure." While IQS seems to be computationally hard, modeling of social structure in terms of a computational process as described above gives a chance for approximation. Prospective applications are optimization of companies through the maximization of their IQS, and the analysis of drug resistance against collective intelligence of bacterial colonies.

Digital media

New media are often associated with the promotion and enhancement of collective intelligence. The ability of new media to easily store and retrieve information, predominantly through databases and the Internet, allows for it to be shared without difficulty. Thus, through interaction with new media, knowledge easily passes between sources resulting in a form of collective intelligence. The use of interactive new media, particularly the internet, promotes online interaction and this distribution of knowledge between users.

Francis Heylighen, Valerie Turchin, and Gottfried Mayer-Kress are among those who view collective intelligence through the lens of computer science and cybernetics. Collective intelligence can be defined as a form of networking enabled by the internet. The developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, aimed to promote sharing and publishing of information globally. Later his employer opened up the technology for free use. In the early ‘90s, the Internet’s potential was still untapped, until the mid 1990s when ‘critical mass’, as termed by the head of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, demanded more accessibility and utility. The driving force of this form of collective intelligence is the digitization of information and communication. Henry Jenkins, a key theorist of new media and media convergence draws on the theory that collective intelligence can be attributed to media convergence and participatory culture . Collective intelligence is not merely a quantitative contribution of information from all cultures, it is also qualitative.

Levy and de Kerckhove consider CI from a mass communications perspective, focusing on the ability of networked ICT’s to enhance the community knowledge pool. They suggest that these communications tools enable humans to interact and to share and collaborate with both ease and speed (Flew 2008). With the development of the Internet and its widespread use, the opportunity to contribute to community-based knowledge forums, such as Wikipedia, is greater than ever before. These computer networks give participating users the opportunity to store and to retrieve knowledge through the collective access to these databases and allow them to “harness the hive” (Raymond 1998; Herz 2005 in Flew 2008). Researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence research and explore collective intelligence of groups of people and computers.

In this context collective intelligence is often confused with shared knowledge. The former is knowledge that is generally available to all members of a community while the latter is information known by all members of a community. Collective intelligence as represented by Web 2.0 has less user engagement than collaborative intelligence. An art project using Web 2.0 platforms is "Shared Galaxy", an experiment developed by an anonymous artist to create a collective identity that shows up as one person on several platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and Second Life. The password is written in the profiles and the accounts named "Shared Galaxy" are open to be used by anyone. In this way many take part in being one.

It has been argued that media, particularly central media, cannot promote intelligence, due to the inherent inability of Central media to adequately deal with complex issues such as the Environmental Crisis. See The IRG Solution - hierarchical incompetence and how to overcome it1984, argued, that Central media and government type hierarchical organizations. The book argued that collective intelligence could only emerge from vast informal networks of human interaction, something which Media do not promote.

Growth of the Internet and mobile telecom has also produced "swarming" or "rendezvous" events that enable meetings or even dates on demand. The full impact has yet to be felt but the anti-globalization movement, for example, relies heavily on e-mail, cell phones, pagers, SMS and other means of organizing. Atlee discusses the connections between these events and the political views that drive them. The Indymedia organization does this in a more journalistic way. Such resources could combine into a form of collective intelligence accountable only to the current participants yet with some strong moral or linguistic guidance from generations of contributors - or even take on a more obviously democratic form to advance shared goals.

Social bookmarking

In social bookmarking (also called collaborative tagging), users assign tags to resources shared with other users, which gives rise to a type of information organisation that emerges from this crowdsourcing process. The resulting information structure can be seen as reflecting the collective knowledge (or collective intelligence) of a community of users and is commonly called a "Folksonomy".

Recent research using data from the social bookmarking website Del.icio.us, has shown that collaborative tagging systems exhibit a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics. Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources has been shown to converge over time to a stable power law distributions. Once such stable distributions form, examining the correlations between different tags can be used to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtained a form of community or shared vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be seen as a form of collective intelligence, emerging from the decentralised actions of a community of users.

Video games

Games such as ''The Sims'' Series, and ''Second Life'' are designed to be non-linear and to depend on collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations. he refers to Pierre Levy’s concept of Collective Intelligence and argues this is active in videogames as clans or guilds in MMORPG constantly work to achieve goals. Henry Jenkins proposes that the participatory cultures emerging between games producers, media companies, and the end-users mark a fundamental shift in the nature of media production and consumption. Jenkins argues that this new participatory culture arises at the intersection of three broad new media trends. Firstly, the development of new media tools/technologies enabling the creation of content. Secondly, the rise of subcultures promoting such creations, and lastly, the growth of value adding media conglomerates, which foster image, idea and narrative flow. Cultural theorist and online community developer, John Banks considered the contribution of online fan communities in the creation of the Trainz product. He argued that its commercial success was fundamentally dependant upon “the formation and growth of an active and vibrant online fan community that would both actively promote the product and create content- extensions and additions to the game software”.

The increase in user created content and interactivity gives rise to issues of control over the game itself and ownership of the player-created content. This gives rise to fundamental legal issues, highlighted by Lessig and Bray and Konsynski, such as Intellectual Property and property ownership rights.

Gosney extends this issue of Collective Intelligence in videogames one step further in his discussion of Alternate Reality Gaming. This genre, he describes as an “across-media game that deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences” as events that happen outside the game reality “reach out” into the player’s lives in order to bring them together. Solving the game requires “the collective and collaborative efforts of multiple players”; thus the issue of collective and collaborative team play is essential to ARG. Gosney argues that the Alternate Reality genre of gaming dictates an unprecedented level of collaboration and “collective intelligence” in order to solve the mystery of the game.

Stock market predictions

Because of the Internet's ability to rapidly convey large amounts of information throughout the world, the use of collective intelligence to predict stock prices and stock price direction has become increasingly viable. Websites aggregate stock market information that is as current as possible so professional or amateur stock analysts can publish their viewpoints, enabling amateur investors to submit their financial opinions and create an aggregate opinion.The opinion of all investor can be weighed equally so that a pivotal premise of the effective application of collective intelligence can beapplied: the masses, including a broad spectrum of stock market expertise, can be utilized to more accurately predict the behavior of financial markets.

Collective intelligence underpins the efficient-market hypothesis of Eugene Fama - although the term collective intelligence is not used explicitly in his paper. Fama cites research conducted by Michael Jensen in which 89 out of 115 selected funds underperformed relative to the index during the period from 1955 to 1964. But after removing the loading charge (up-front fee) only 72 underperformed while after removing brokerage costs only 58 underperformed. On the basis of such evidence index funds became popular investment vehicles using the collective intelligence of the market, rather than the judgement of professional fund managers, as an investment strategy.

Views

Tom Atlee reflects that, although humans have an innate ability to gather and analyze data, they are affected by culture, education and social institutions. A single person tends to make decisions motivated by self-preservation. In addition, humans lack a way to make choices that balance innovation and reality. Therefore, without collective intelligence, humans may drive themselves into extinction based on their selfish needs.

Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder quotes Bowles and Gintis (1976) that in order to truly define collective intelligence, it is crucial to separate ‘intelligence’ from IQism. They go on to argue that intelligence is an achievement and can only be developed if allowed to. For example, earlier on, groups from the lower levels of society are severely restricted from aggregating and pooling their intelligence. This is because the elites fear that the collective intelligence would convince the people to rebel. If there is no such capacity and relations, there would be no infrastructure on which collective intelligence is built . This reflects how powerful collective intelligence can be if left to develop.

Research performed by Tapscott and Williams has provided a few examples of the benefits of collective intelligence to business:

; Talent Utilization: At the rate technology is changing, no firm can fully keep up in the innovations needed to compete. Instead, smart firms are drawing on the power of mass collaboration to involve participation of the people they could not employ. ; Demand Creation: Firms can create a new market for complementary goods by engaging in open source community. ; Costs Reduction: Mass collaboration can help to reduce costs dramatically. Firms can release a specific software or product to be evaluated or debugged by online communities. The results will be more personal, robust and error-free products created in a short amount of time and costs.

Skeptics, especially those critical of artificial intelligence and more inclined to believe that risk of bodily harm and bodily action are the basis of all unity between people, are more likely to emphasize the capacity of a group to take action and withstand harm as one fluid mass mobilization, shrugging off harms the way a body shrugs off the loss of a few cells. This strain of thought is most obvious in the anti-globalization movement and characterized by the works of John Zerzan, Carol Moore, and Starhawk, who typically shun academics. These theorists are more likely to refer to ecological and collective wisdom and to the role of consensus process in making ontological distinctions than to any form of "intelligence" as such, which they often argue does not exist, or is mere "cleverness".

Harsh critics of artificial intelligence on ethical grounds are likely to promote collective wisdom-building methods, such as the new tribalists and the Gaians. Whether these can be said to be collective intelligence systems is an open question. Some, e.g. Bill Joy, simply wish to avoid any form of autonomous artificial intelligence and seem willing to work on rigorous collective intelligence in order to remove any possible niche for AI.

See also

Bees algorithm

Cellular automaton

Civic intelligence

Collaborative filtering

Collaborative human interpreter

Collaborative innovation network

Collaborative intelligence

Collaborative software and Wikis

Collective action

Collective consciousness

Collective decision-making

Collective effervescence

Connectivity

Crowd psychology

Crowdsourcing

Customer engagement

Cybernetics

Distributed cognition

Enterprise bookmarking

Global brain

Global Consciousness Project

Group behaviour

Group mind (science fiction)

Facilitation and Facilitator

Human-based computation

Hundredth monkey effect

Information Routing Group

Keeping up with the Joneses

Knowledge ecosystem

Meme

Noosphere

Open-space meeting

Open source intelligence

Public Intelligence

Prediction Markets

Preference elicitation

Recommendation system

Smart mob

Social commerce

Social information processing

Stigmergy

Superorganism

Systems intelligence

Swarm Intelligence

''The Wisdom of Crowds''

Think tank

Notes

References

CIA. (2008). ''The World Factbook''. (accessed 3 September 2008)

Leiner, Barry, Cerf, Vinton, Clark, David, Kahn, Robert, Kleinrock, Leonard, Lynch, Daniel, Postel, Jon, Roberts, Larry and Wolff, Stephen. 2003. ''A Brief History of the Internet''. Version 3.32 (accessed 3 September 2008)

Further reading

Kaiser, C., Kröckel, J., Bodendorf, F. (2010). Swarm Intelligence for Analyzing Opinions in Online Communities. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1-9.

External links

MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence

Cultivating Society's Civic Intelligence Doug Schuler. Journal of Society, Information and Communication, vol 4 No. 2.

Jennifer H. Watkins (2007). Prediction Markets as an Aggregation Mechanism for Collective Intelligence Los Alamos National Laboratory article on Collective Intelligence

Hideyasu Sasaki (2010). International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence (IJOCI), vol 1 No. 1.

Olivier Zara, ''Managing Collective Intelligence, Toward a New Corporate Governance'', Axiopole editions, 2004

Category:Superorganisms Category:Futurology Category:Artificial intelligence Category:Multi-robot systems

ar:ذكاء جمعي cs:Kolektivní inteligence de:Kollektive Intelligenz es:Inteligencia colectiva eo:Kolektiva inteligento fr:Intelligence collective ko:집단 지성 hy:Կոլեկտիվ բանականություն it:Intelligenza collettiva he:אינטליגנציה קולקטיבית ja:集団的知性 pt:Inteligência coletiva ru:Коллективный интеллект fi:Kollektiivinen älykkyys zh:集體智慧

{{infobox war on terror detainee | name

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed | image | image_size | caption | birth_date July 24, 1978 | birth_place Ethiopia | date_of_arrest | place_of_arrest | arresting_authority | date_of_release | place_of_release | death_date | death_place | citizenship | detained_at The dark prison, Guantanamo (-2009) | id_number 1458 | group | alias Benjamin Mohammed,Benyam (Ahmed) Mohammed,Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi | charge All charges dropped | penalty | status Released | csrt_summary | csrt_transcript | occupation | spouse | parents | children }}

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed () () (also described as Benjamin Mohammed, Benyam (Ahmed) Mohammed and Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi) (born 24 July 1978) is an Ethiopian national, who was detained in Guantanamo Bay prison between 2004 and 2009. He was captured and transported under the US extraordinary rendition program. Mohamed's military representative reported that he had admitted while he was detained that he had trained in the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camp Al Farouq, but has since claimed that the evidence against him was obtained using torture. After charges against him were dropped, he was eventually released and arrived in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2009. In February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that he had been subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities".

Background

Mohamed has claimed to have been tortured in US custody, and tortured while in nominally Moroccan custody. He was alleged to have played a role in what American counter-terrorism analysts characterized as a "dirty bomb plot" with Jose Padilla, despite the fact that it became clear, almost from the moment that Mohamed was seized, that the plot never existed. In June 2002, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, admitted that "there was not an actual plan" to set off a radioactive device in America, that Padilla had not begun trying to acquire materials, and that intelligence officials had stated that his research had not gone beyond surfing the internet.

Detention before being charged

Born in Ethiopia, Mohamed came to United Kingdom in 1994, where he lived for seven years, sought political asylum and was given leave to remain while his case was resolved.

In June 2001, Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan. The reasons for the trip are in dispute. British and U.S. authorities contend, and the US Military-appointed Personal Representative's Initial Interview notes state, that Mohamed admitted to receiving paramilitary training in the al Farouq training camp. Mohamed's supporters contend that he had gone to conquer his drug problems and to see Muslim countries "with his own eyes". It should be noted that Mohamed contradicted this with his own statement in March 2005. On 10 April 2002, Mohamed was arrested at Pakistan's Karachi airport by Pakistani authorities as a suspected terrorist, while attempting to fly to the UK using a false passport. Mohamed contends that he was a subject of the United States extraordinary rendition policy, and entered a "ghost prison system" run by US intelligence agents.

Before his transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Mohamed states that he was incarcerated in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, and that while in Morocco, interrogators tortured him by using scalpels or razor blades to repeatedly cut his penis and chest.

Mohamed was taken from Bagram airbase to Guantánamo Bay on 19 September 2004. He says that since then he has been "routinely humiliated and abused and constantly lied to". In February 2005 he was placed in Camp V, the harsh "super-maximum" style facility where, reports suggest, "uncooperative" detainees are held. He was told that he would be required to testify against other detainees.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said that Mohamed participated in recent hunger strikes to protest against the harsh conditions and lack of access to any judicial review. The hunger strike started in July 2005, and resumed in August 2005 because the detainees believed the US authorities failed to honour promises to meet their demands. From a written statement by Mohamed dated 11 August 2005:

:''"The administration promised that if we gave them 10 days, they would bring the prison into compliance with the Geneva conventions. They said this had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld himself in Washington DC. As a result of these promises, we agreed to end the strike on July 28.''

:''"It is now August 11. They have betrayed our trust (again). Hisham from Tunisia was savagely beaten in his interrogation and they publicly desecrated the Qur'an (again). Saad from Kuwait was ERF'd [visited by the Extreme Reaction Force] for refusing to go (again) to interrogation because the female interrogator had sexually humiliated him (again) for 5 hours _ Therefore, the strike must begin again."''

On 7 August 2007, he was one of five Guantánamo detainees that British Foreign Secretary David Miliband requested be freed, citing the fact they had all applied for or had been granted refugee status, or similar leave, to remain in Britain prior to their capture by US forces.

Charged with conspiracy

On 7 November 2005, Mohamed was charged with conspiracy. The complaint alleges that Mohamed was trained in Kabul to build dirty bombs (weapons combining conventional explosives with radioactive material intended to be dispersed over a large area). According to the complaint, he ''was planning terror attacks against high-rise apartment buildings in the United States and was arrested at an airport in Pakistan, attempting to go to London while using a forged passport.

At the start of his military commission Mohamed chose to represent himself. He decried the military commissions and stated he was not the person charged because the Prosecution had spelled his name incorrectly. He held up a sign "con mission" and stated: "This is not a commission, it's a con mission, It's a mission to con the world."

In mid-2006 the United States Supreme Court over-ruled President Bush. The judges ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the President lacked the constitutional authority to create military commissions and Mohamed's military commission was halted.

In late 2008, new charges were filed against Binyam Mohamed after the United States Congress authorized new military commissions under the Military Commissions Act in 2006.

On 21 October 2008 Susan J. Crawford, the official in charge of the Office of Military Commissions, announced that charges were dropped against Mohamed and four other captives, Jabran al Qahtani, Ghassan al Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi, and Noor Uthman Muhammed.

Carol J. Williams, writing in the ''Los Angeles Times'', reported that all five men had been connected to Abu Zubaydah — one of the three captives the CIA has acknowledged was interrogated using the controversial technique known as waterboarding. Williams quoted the men's attorneys, who anticipated the five men would be re-charged within thirty days. They told Williams that ''"... prosecutors called the move procedural",'' and attributed it to the resignation of fellow Prosecutor Darrel Vandeveld, who resigned on ethical grounds. Williams reported that Clive Stafford Smith speculated that the Prosecution's dropping of the charges, and plans to subsequently re-file charges later, was intended to counter and disarm the testimony Vandeveld was anticipated to offer that the Prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence.

Accusations of abusive incarceration and UK complicity

In December 2005 the declassification of his lawyer's notes permitted further claims of abusive interrogation to be made public. Mohamed's further claims included that he was transported to a black site known as "the dark prison", where captives were permanently chained to the wall, kept in constant darkness, and constantly bombarded with "The Real Slim Shady " by Eminem for 20 days

On 21 June 2008 the ''New York Times'' reported that the UK Government had sent a letter to Clive Stafford Smith, confirming that it had information about Binyam Mohamed's allegations of abuse.

On Monday 28 July 2008 his lawyers filed a petition in an UK court that the Foreign Office should be compelled to turn over the evidence of Binyam Mohamed's abuse. They also filed a petition with the Irish government for the records of his illegal transport over Ireland. On 21 August 2008, the High Court of the United Kingdom found in his favour, ruling that the Foreign Office should disclose this material. The judges said of the information that it was "not only necessary but essential for his defence".

Although the documents were disclosed to Mohamed's legal counsel as ordered, they were not released to the general public, and a later examination by the High Court found in favour of the Foreign Secretary not to force their publication. The reasons given were that — even if it was unreasonable for it to affect international relations — if the Foreign Secretary thought it was going to harm the special intelligence relationship with the United States, it would not be in the public interest.

In February 2009, ''CBC News'' reported that Mohamed had described being warned to cooperate by two women, who represented themselves as Canadians. Each woman met represented herself as a third-party intervener, who warned him that she thought he should co-operate, and answer the American's questions fully, or he was likely to be tortured. According to the CBC report, Canada had an obligation to object if it were determined that the Americans had falsely represented US security officials as Canadians, as a ploy to trick Mohamed into confessing.

Extraordinary rendition, CIA custody, Torture allegations

Binyam's attorneys reported that he had been subjected to "extraordinary rendition", transferred to Morocco, where he was tortured, and that he had also been held in a network of secret CIA interrogation centres, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in 2004.

Civil suit

On August 1, 2007 Mohamed joined a civil suit filed under the United States' Alien Tort Statute against Jeppesen Dataplan, with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union. The defendant in the case was a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA. This was a joint lawsuit with four other plaintiffs, Bisher Al-Rawi, Abou Elkassim Britel, Ahmed Agiza, and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.

Accepting the argument of the Obama administration that hearing the case would divulge state secrets, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed the lawsuit on September 8, 2010.

==Release==

On 7 August 2007 the United Kingdom government requested the release of Binyam Mohamed and four other, men who had been legal British residents without being British citizens. He was not released however, and in June 2008 the U.S. military announced they were formally charging him.

On 16 January 2009 ''The Independent'' reported that Mohamed had told his lawyers he had been told to prepare for his return to the United Kingdom. ''The Independent'' quoted a recently declassified note from Mohamed: "It has come to my attention through several reliable sources that my release from Guantánamo to the UK had been ordered several weeks ago. It is a cruel tactic of delay to suspend my travel till the last days of this [Bush] administration while I should have been home a long time ago."

Interviewed by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News on 9 February 2009 his military lawyer, Lt-Col Yvonne Bradley, asserted that there was no doubt that Mohamed had been tortured, and that Britain and the US were complicit in his torture. Bradley subsequently took up his case directly with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on 11 February 2009.

According to Agence France Presse Mohamed had been on a hunger strike but had stopped on 5 February 2009, when his lawyers informed him he could expect transfer to the UK soon. He was visited on 14 and 15 February 2009 by a delegation of UK officials, including a doctor, who confirmed he was healthy enough to be flown back to England.

On 23 February 2009, almost seven years after his arrest, Mohamed was repatriated from Guantánamo to the UK, where he was released after questioning.

Allegations of MI5 collusion

Two weeks after his release, the BBC published claims that British intelligence (MI5) had colluded with his interrogators by getting them to ask him specific questions which led to his making false confessions of terrorist activities. In the first memo, the MI5 agent asked for a name to be put to him and then for him to be questioned further about that person. The second telegram concerned a further interrogation. The legal organisation Reprieve, which represents Mohamed, said its client was shown the MI5 telegrams by his military lawyer Yvonne Bradley.

Although his claims of MI5 collusion are being investigated by the government, the Shadow Justice Secretary, Dominic Grieve, called for a judicial inquiry into the allegations and for the matter to be referred to the police. Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty said: "These are more than allegations - these are pieces of a puzzle that are being put together. It makes an immediate criminal investigation absolutely inescapable."

On 12 March 2009 in an op-ed piece in ''The Guardian'', Timothy Garton Ash called for Mohamed's claims of torture and MI5 collusion to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, saying that any other decision "will inevitably be interpreted as a political cover-up."

On 10 February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that material held by the UK Foreign Secretary must revealed. The court regretted that it had 'to conclude that the reports provided to the SyS [Security Service] made clear to anyone reading them that BM [Binyam Mohamed] was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment." "The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972 [in the UN convention on torture]." '

UK government loses confidentiality appeal, MI5 implicated in collusion with torture

The case of determining British involvement (mainly MI5 and MI6) in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident Mohamed by the CIA, was eventually tried at court in 2009 and appealed in 2010. Despite attempts by the foreign secretary, David Miliband to suppress evidence citing such disclosure would harm national security because it was given in confidence by the US authorities, the government lost the case at the high court. On 14 December 2009, Miliband appealed against the six high court judgements ruling, that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed. In a case unprecedented, counsel for the Guardian and other media organisations, Mohamed and two civil rights groups, Liberty and Justice, argued that the public interest in disclosing the role played by British and US agencies in unlawful activities far outweighs any claim about potential threats to national security.

On December 20, 2009, a U.S. judge, Gladys Kessler, found that there was "credible" evidence that a British resident was tortured while being detained on behalf of Washington. A formerly classified legal opinion, handed down by a judge in the US district court and obtained by the Observer, acknowledges that the US government does not dispute "credible" evidence that Binyam Mohamed had been tortured while being held at "its behest".

On January 27, 2010, it was reported that the "United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the "war on terror". Among the cases listed, in which they conclude that a state has been complicit in a secret detention, the authors highlight "the United Kingdom in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed.

On February 10, 2010 three senior judges, sitting in the Court of Appeal, ordered the British government to reveal evidence of MI5 and MI6 complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, overruling the foreign secretary, David Miliband.

In response to highly critical media coverage, Mr Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, insisted that the coverage of the torture had been “baseless, groundless accusations”. He also claimed that government lawyers had not forced the judiciary to water down criticism of MI5, despite an earlier, draft ruling by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression" that undermined government assurances about its conduct.

According to the ''Washington Post'' the court order forcing the British Government to publish secret memos it received from US intelligence officials will jeopardize future US-UK intelligence sharing. The ''Washington Post'' quoted "White House officials" on February 10, 2010, who said the publication: ''"will complicate the confidentiality of our intelligence-sharing relationship."''. According to ''The Guardian'' an anonymous White House officials had told them: ''"the court decision would not provoke a broad review of intelligence liaison between Britain and the US because the need for close co-operation was greater now than ever."''

References

External links

Biography of Plaintiff Binyam Mohamed

Profile: Binyam Mohamed

AUDIO: Binyam blames UK for mistreatment

AUDIO: Moazzam Begg interviews Binyam Mohamed

Transcript: Moazzam Begg interviews Binyam Mohamed

AUDIO: Channel 4's Jon Snow interviews Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, Binyam Mohamed's US lawyer

How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions - WORLD EXCLUSIVE (Interview with Binyam Mohamed

Torture claims by British resident are given credence by American judge

Binyam Mohamed case: David Miliband steps up bid to hide proof of torture

Charge Sheets from the United States Department of Defense

Military Commissions - Muhammed Commission Transcripts, Exhibits, and Allied Papers from the United States Department of Defense

Benyam Mohammed al Habashi Case Sheet from Amnesty International USA

FAQs: What Are State Secrets from the Center for Constitutional Rights

Extraordinary Rendition: Documentary about Guantánamo Bay and Binyam Mohamed from ''Alpha One Productions''

Britain's dirty torture secrets to be laid bare: Huge payouts for victims as PM orders inquiry into security services ''Daily Mail'', July 6, 2010

Category:Living people Category:Ethiopian extrajudicial prisoners of the United States Category:People subject to extraordinary rendition by the United States Category:Ethiopian torture victims Category:Ethiopian emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:1970s births Category:Converts to Islam Category:Guantanamo detainees known to have been released Category:Torture in Morocco

fr:Binyam Mohamed

name	Hamid Gul
birth date	November 20, 1936
death date
birth place	Sargodha, British State of Punjab, British Indian Empire
placeofburial coordinates
nickname	General Gul
birth name	Hamid Gul
allegiance
branch
serviceyears	1958–1992
rank
unit	19th Lancers, Pakistan Army Armoured Corps
commands	1st Armoured Division, MultanDG Military Intelligence (DGMI)DG Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)II Corps, Pakistan Army, Multan
battles	Indo-Pakistani War of 1965Indo-Pakistani War of 1971Soviet war in AfghanistanBattle of JalalabadAfghanistan War of 1989Kashmir Insurgency Operations
awards	Sitara-e-BasalatHilal-e-Imtiaz (Military)
laterwork	}}

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, HI(M), SBt, (Urdū:حمید گل) (born 20 November 1936) is a retired Pakistani Army three star general known for heading the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the premier Pakistani intelligence agency, after the Soviet-Afghan War, and for supporting the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir against India in 1989 with the support of the militants, who fought in the Soviet-Afghan war.

Hamid Gul served as the director general of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence during 1987-89, mainly in the time when Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister of Pakistan. He was instrumental in the anti-Soviet support of the mujahideen in the Afghanistan War of 1979–89, a pivotal time during the Cold War, and in establishing the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, a right-wing political party against the Pakistan Peoples Party. He also was a vehement supporter of the Kashmiri insurgency against India, and is accused by the United States of having ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Early life

Hamid Gul was born on 20 November 1936 to Muhammad Khan, in the Sargodha District of Punjab in what was then British India but now Pakistan. He got his early education from a school in his village. He briefly got admission in Government College Lahore, before reporting to Pakistan Military Academy Kakul.

Army career

Hamid Gul was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in October 1958 with the 18th PMA Long Course in the 19th Lancers regiment of the Armoured Corps. He was a Tank commander during the 1965 war with India. During 1972-1976, Gul directly served under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq as a battalion commander, when General Zia was GOC, 1st Armoured Division and Commander, II Corps at Multan. Thus, Gul had already cemented his ties with General Zia by serving under him when both were officers in the Armoured regiments of the II Corps. Gul was promoted to Brigadier in 1978 and steadily rose to be the Martial Law Administrator of Bahawalpur and the Commander of the 1st Armoured Division, Multan in 1982, his appointments expressly wished by Zia himself.

Mehran Gate

Saudi influence

Gul was then sent to GHQ as the Director-General or DG Military Intelligence (DGMI) under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq who then nominated him to be the ISI chief succeeding General Akhtar Abdur Rahman in March 1987. He was later replaced as the ISI commander by PM Benazir Bhutto in May 1989 and Gul was transferred as the commander, II Corps in Multan. In this capacity, Gul conducted the Zarb-e-Momin military exercise in November–December 1989, the biggest Pakistani Armed Forces show of muscle since 1971 Indo-Pakistani War.

General Asif Nawaz upon taking the reins of Pakistan Army in August 1991, had Gul transferred as the DG Heavy Industries Taxila. A menial job compared to Gul's stature, Gul refused to take the assignment, an act for which he was retired from the army.

Career as ISI Chief

Execution of failed Jalalabad operation

During his time as head of the ISI and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Gul was blamed for planning and executing the operation to capture Jalalabad from the Afghan army in the spring of 1989. This switch to conventional warfare was seen as a mistake by some mujahideen leaders who considered that the mujahideen did not have the capacity to capture a major city. But the Pakistani army was intent on installing a fundamentalist-dominated government in Afghanistan, with Jalalabad as their provisional capital, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf as Prime Minister, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as Foreign Minister.

Contrary to Pakistani expectations, this battle proved that the Afghan army could fight without Soviet help, and greatly increased the confidence of government supporters. Conversely, the morale of the mujahideen involved in the attack slumped and many local commanders of Hekmatyar and Sayyaf concluded truces with the government. In the words of Brigadier Mohammad Yousef, an officer of the ISI, "the jihad [meaning the plans for Hekmatyar to be installed as prime minister] never recovered from Jalalabad". As a result of this failure, Hamid Gul was sacked by Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and replaced by Shamsur Rahman Kallu, who pursued a more classical policy of support to the militants fighting Afghanistan.

Organization of IJI against PPP

During his tenure as ISI chief in 1988, General Gul successfully gathered right-wing politicians and helped them create Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, a religio-political conservative coalition against the left-leaning liberal Pakistan Peoples Party. He has recently acknowledged this fact in various interviews and for this he was harshly rebuked in one of editorials of a major Pakistani newspaper, which asked the general to apologize first to the PPP for having done the sordid deed and after that, apologizing for lack of wits because the IJI could not maintain its two-thirds majority for long.

Kashmir Insurgency

Indian front

According to B Raman, an Indian strategic analyst, Gul actively backed Khalistani terrorism. "When Bhutto became prime minister in 1988", Raman says, "Gul justified backing these insurgents as the only way of preempting a fresh Indian threat to Pakistan's territorial integrity. When she asked him to stop playing that card, he reportedly told her: Madam, keeping Punjab destabilized is equivalent to the Pakistan army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayers." "Gul strongly advocated supporting indigenous Kashmiri groups", adds Raman, "but was against infiltrating Pakistani and Afghan mercenaries into Jammu and Kashmir. He believed Pakistan would play into India's hands by doing so."

Iranian front

In Islamabad, Gul asked that Iran should explain its bona fides regarding the pact signed with India to jointly counter terrorism. According to him, "Iran should come clear on the nature of agreement with India. Otherwise this will create doubts and apprehensions in Muslim Ummah that Iran helps RAW in putting down Kashmir jihad". He also added that in case doubts about the agreement came true and Iran was seen as working with India against "Kashmir freedom struggle", then it will be concluded that the country also supports Mossad, Israeli external intelligence agency.

Turning against the United States

General Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he was the ISI chief. But, he became passionately anti-American after the United States turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the United States had promised to help build a prosperous Afghanistan. He was further disconcerted when the USA began punishing Pakistan with economic and military sanctions for its secret nuclear program. General Gul then went on to declare that "the Muslim world must stand united to confront the U.S. in its so-called War on Terrorism, which is in reality a war against Muslims. Let's destroy America wherever its troops are trapped."

General Gul personally met Osama Bin Laden in 1993 and refused to label him a terrorist unless and until irrefutable evidence was provided linking him to alleged acts of terrorism.

Accusation of US and Israel behind 9/11

Only days after the September 11 attacks he stated that they were ''clearly an inside job''. That interview was not published by newspapers.

Post-Army career

Solidarity with Osama bin Laden

According to Zahid Hussain, in his book ''Frontline Pakistan'', Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and former Army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg were part of the 9 January 2001 Darul Uloom Haqqania Islamic conference held near Peshawar, which was also attended by 300 leaders representing various Islamic groups. The meeting declared it a religious duty of Muslims all over the world to protect the Taliban government, and the Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden it was hosting, whom they considered as a 'great Muslim warrior.'

Support for Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry

On March 12, 2007, Gul marched shoulder-to-shoulder with activists from the liberal democratic parties and retired former senior military officers against General Pervez Musharraf. General Gul faced down riot police when they tried to arrest him at a rally outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad protesting against attempts to dismiss Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. He turned against the restored Supreme Court chief justice after a bench allowed Musharraf to contest the elections in uniform.

Accusation by Benazir Bhutto

Days after the 2007 Karachi bombings, Benazir Bhutto in a letter to President Musharaf written on 16 October 2007 named Hamid Gul as one of the four persons including the current Intelligence Bureau (IB) Chief Ijaz Shah, the then chief minister of Punjab Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, then chief minister of Sindh Arbab Ghulam Rahim, she suspected were behind the attacks. Gul responded furiously to these claims. He was arrested on November 4 by the Military police in Islamabad during President Pervez Musharraf's declared state of emergency.

Terrorism charges

He has acknowledged being a member of banned militant organization Ummah Tameer-e-Nau. The United States government has included Hamid Gul's name in a list of 4 former ISI officers for inclusion in the list of international terrorists that was sent to UN Secretary General, but China refused.

Gul has been informed by a senior official in Pakistan's Foreign Ministry that he had been placed on a U.S. watch list of global terrorists, along with several others. He was shown a U.S. document that detailed several charges against him, including allegations that he had ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

On December 14, 2008 President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari in an interview with ''Newsweek'' described Hamid Gul as a political ideologue of terror.

In July 2010, Wikileaks released over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. In those documents Gul was accused of backing Taliban Insurgency against western forces to disrupt the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

See also

Establishment (Pakistan)

History of the Soviet Union (1982–1991)

References

External links

Official website of Hamid Gul

Alex Jones">Transcript of Interview by Alex Jones

Profile of Hamid Gul

Image of Hamid Gul taken by photographer Declan Walsh of Getty Images Gul's home in Rawalpindi.

Stein, Jeff. "The audacity of Hamid Gul." ''The Washington Post''. July 26, 2010.

"Gulled by Hamid Gul." ''The Washington Times''. Friday December 4, 2009.

Bibliography

Zahid Hussain. ''Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam'', New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Husain Haqqani. ''Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military'', Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.

Category:Pakistani generals Category:Pakistani Muslims Category:Living people Category:1936 births Category:Directors of the Inter-Services Intelligence Category:People from Sargodha District Category:Ravians Category:9/11 conspiracy theorists

de:Hamid Gul fr:Hamid Gul

Name	Rudy Rucker
Birth name	Rudolf von Bitter Rucker
Birth date	March 22, 1946
Birth place	Louisville, Kentucky
Nationality	American
Known for	Ware Tetralogy
Alma mater	St. Xavier High School, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University
Occupation	Author
Relatives	G.W.F. Hegel
Website	Rudy Rucker
Footnotes	}}

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946) is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (''Software'' and ''Wetware'') both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine ''Flurb''.

Early life

Rucker was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.

Rucker attended St. Xavier High School before earning a B.A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College, and a Master's and Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University.

Career

He taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo from 1972–1978. Thanks to a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Rucker taught math at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg from 1978–1980. He then taught at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1980–1982, before trying his hand as a full-time author for four years. Inspired by an interview with Stephen Wolfram, Rucker became a computer science professor at San José State University in 1986, from which he retired in 2004. A mathematician with philosophical interests, he has written ''The Fourth Dimension''; ''Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension''; and ''Infinity and the Mind''. Princeton University Press published new editions of ''Infinity and the Mind'' in 1995 and in 2005, both with new prefaces; the first edition is cited with fair frequency in academic literature.

As his "own alternative to cyberpunk," Rucker developed a writing style he terms Transrealism. Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay "The Transrealist Manifesto," is science fiction based on the author's own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker's novels and short stories apply these ideas. One example of Rucker's Transrealist works is ''Saucer Wisdom,'' a novel in which the main character is abducted by aliens. Rucker and his publisher marketed the book, tongue in cheek, as non-fiction.

His earliest Transrealist novel, ''White Light,'' was written during his time at Heidelberg. This Transrealist novel is based on his experiences at SUNY Geneseo.

Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; ''White Light'' examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop computer software (a subject also developed in his ''The Hacker and the Ants'', written in 1994). His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, "The Central Teachings of Mysticism" (included in ''Seek!'', 1999).

His recent non-fiction book, ''The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy'' summarizes the various philosophies he's believed over the years and ends with the tentative conclusion that we might profitably view the world as made of computations, with the final remark, "perhaps this universe is perfect."

Works

Fiction

The Ware Tetralogy

*''Software'' (1982)

*''Wetware'' (1988)

*''Freeware'' (1997)

*''Realware'' (2000)

Transrealist novels

*''White Light'' (1980)

*''Spacetime Donuts'' (1981)

*''The Sex Sphere'' (1983)

*''The Secret of Life'' (1985)

*''The Hacker and the Ants'' (1994) (Revised 'Version 2.0' 2003)

*''Saucer Wisdom'' (1999) novel marketed as non-fiction

Other Novels

*''Master of Space and Time'' (1984)

*''The Hollow Earth'' (1990)

*''Spaceland'' (2002)

*''As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel'' (2002)

*''Frek and the Elixir'' (2004)

*''Mathematicians in Love'' (2006)

*''Postsingular'' (Fall 2007)

*''Hylozoic'' (sequel to ''Postsingular, May 2009)''

Story collections

*''The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka'' (1983)

*''Transreal!'', also includes some non-fiction essays (1991)

*''Gnarl!'' (2000), complete short stories

*''Mad Professor'' (2006)

Non-fiction

''Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension'' (1977)

(editor), ''Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton'', Dover (1980), ISBN 0-486-23916-0

''Infinity and the Mind'' (1982)

''The Fourth Dimension'' (1984)

''Mind Tools'' (1987)

''All the Visions'' (1991), memoir

''Seek!'' (1999), collected essays

''Software Engineering and Computer Games'' (2002), textbook

''The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul'' (2005)

List on Rucker's SJSU web page. With links to each book's web page.

References

External links

The Rudy Rucker website

Category:1946 births Category:American science fiction writers Category:American technology writers Category:Writers from California Category:Clarion Writers' Workshop Category:Cyberpunk writers Category:Living people Category:People from Louisville, Kentucky Category:Writers from Kentucky Category:San Jose State University faculty Category:Swarthmore College alumni Category:American computer scientists Category:Cellular automatists Category:Wired (magazine) people Category:Rutgers University alumni Category:State University of New York at Geneseo faculty Category:American SubGenii

de:Rudy Rucker fr:Rudy Rucker it:Rudy Rucker nl:Rudy Rucker ja:ルーディ・ラッカー ru:Рюкер, Руди simple:Rudy Rucker fi:Rudy Rucker sv:Rudy Rucker uk:Руді Ракер

name	Sir Tim Berners-Lee
birth date	June 08, 1955
birth place	London, England, UK
nationality	British
residence	Massachusetts, U.S.
known for	Inventing the World Wide Web.
education	Queen's College, Oxford
employer	World Wide Web Consortium and University of Southampton
occupation	Computer scientist
title	Professor, Knight
religion	Unitarian Universalism
spouse	Nancy Carlson
parents	Conway Berners-Lee Mary Lee Woods
website
footnotes	Holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory }}

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, (born 8 June 1955), also known as "TimBL", is a British physicist, computer scientist and MIT professor, credited for his invention of the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C.

Early life

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England, on 8 June 1955, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. He attended Sheen Mount primary school, and then went on to Emanuel School in London, from 1969 to 1973. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class degree in Physics.

Career

While being an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England. The project he worked on was a ''real-time remote procedure call'' which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984 he returned to CERN as a fellow.

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web." He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser, which also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).

The first web site built was at CERN, and was first put online on 6 August 1991:

"Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website." -CERN

It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how one could use a browser and set up a web server.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.

In 2001, Berners-Lee became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, England.

In December 2004, he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, England, to work on his new project, the Semantic Web.

Current work

In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."

In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change."

Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network rights: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."

In a ''Times'' article in October 2009, Berners-Lee admitted that the forward slashes ("//") in a web address were actually "unnecessary". He told the newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said in his lighthearted apology.

Recognition

In 1994 he became one of only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame of 1994. In 1995 he won the Kilby Foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year" Award. In 1999, ''Time Magazine'' named Berners-Lee one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In March 2000 he was awarded an honorary degree from Open University as Doctor of the University. In 2003, he received the Computer History Museum's Fellow Award, for his seminal contributions to the development of the World Wide Web. On 15 April 2004, he was named as the first recipient of Finland's Millennium Technology Prize, for inventing the World Wide Web. The cash prize, worth one million euros (about £892,000, or US$1.3 million, as of May 2009), was awarded on 15 June, in Helsinki, Finland, by the President of the Republic of Finland, Tarja Halonen. He was appointed to the rank of Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (the second-highest class within this Order that entails a knighthood) by Queen Elizabeth II, in the 2004 New Year's Honours List, and was formally invested on 16 July 2004. On 21 July 2004, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Lancaster University. On 27 January 2005, he was named Greatest Briton of 2004, both for his achievements and for displaying the key British characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability", as put by David Hempleman-Adams, a panel member. In 2007, he was ranked Joint First, alongside Albert Hofmann, in ''The Telegraph'''s list of 100 greatest living geniuses. On 13 June 2007, he received the Order of Merit, becoming one of only 24 living members entitled to hold the honour, and to use the post-nominals 'O.M.' after their name. (The Order of Merit is within the personal bestowal of The Queen, and does not require recommendation by ministers or the Prime Minister) On 20 September 2008, he was awarded the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, for conceiving and further developing the World Wide Web IEEE. On 21 April 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

On 28 April 2009, he was elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

On 8 June 2009, he received the Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement, at the awards ceremony held in New York City. In October 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

On 30 March 2011, he was one of the first three recipients of the Mikhail Gorbachev for People Who Have Changed The World, at the inuagural awards ceremony held in London. The other recipients were Evans Wadongo for solar power development and anti-poverty work in Africa, and media mogul Ted Turner.

On 26 May 2011, Berners-Lee was awarded with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard University.

Personal life

Berners-Lee had a religious upbringing, but left the Church of England as a teenager, just after being confirmed and "told how essential it was to believe in all kinds of unbelievable things". He and his family eventually joined a Unitarian Universalist church while they were living in Boston. Now they live in Lexington, Massachusetts.

See also

Eelco van Asperen

History of the World Wide Web

libwww

Kevin Hughes (www)

Mundaneum

Network neutrality

Paul Otlet

Bob Taylor

Semantic Web

Vannevar Bush

Publications

Notes

Further reading

''Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science)'', Ann Gaines (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001) ISBN 1-58415-096-3

''Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies)'', Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001) ISBN 0-89434-367-X children's biography

''Weaving the Web'' Berners-Lee, Tim, with Fischetti, Mark (Harper Collins Publishers,1999) ISBN 0-06-251586-1(cloth) ISBN 0-06-251587-X(paper)

''How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web'' Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-19-286207-3

Tim Berners-Lee Gives the Web a New Definition

BBC2 Newsnight – Transcript of video interview of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web

Technology Review interview

External links

timbl on identi.ca

Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C site

First World Wide Web page

Category:1955 births Category:Alumni of The Queen's College, Oxford Category:English computer scientists Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English inventors Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Fellows of the British Computer Society Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Category:Internet pioneers Category:Living people Category:Japan Prize laureates Category:Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the Order of Merit Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Category:People from London Category:People from Barnes, London Category:World Wide Web Consortium Category:Computer pioneers Category:Royal Medal winners Category:English Unitarians Category:HTTP Category:People educated at Emanuel School Category:Unitarian Universalists

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