Cultural Computing to AI and ML

Human expression is an interesting combination of what he perceived so far and the context in which he/she is operating. Is marketing, product presentation – a context manipulation?  Let’s not call it a context manipulation – but rather context creation. When a person is in a particular context he/she tend to make certain decision, or respond in a particular manner. Context has positional significance, cultural significance and also location and time significance. When a person is in group with A, B and C on a particular day and he listens to a news – how is he going to react to that news? It is not just decided by news but by overall context, culture and state of mind of individual. Cultural computing or computational culture is about modeling culture, parametric and non-parametric association and learning based on cultural properties of events and their impacts. Though culture is typically about social behavior it is outcome of our interactions and different scenarios we come across. As many psychologists suggest – it is the context that impacts on behavior. Then does context decides our culture? Probably not. Even in similar context two individuals may behave differently. Can this difference in their behavior can be attributed to their cultures? Well probably yes. Before making it too much scientific discussion let us simplify these terms. Over the period of time due to multiple contexts we come across, due to people we impact along with overall environment we are brought up we have our way of social behavior… The people with similar social behavior belong to a particular culture and this behavior and responses altogether can be termed as a culture. There is very high chance that people who share similar culture may respond a particular situation in very similar way. Though there are very personal emotional traits. These emotional traits along with context and culture ultimately decides our resulting behavior. When a person works with different group there is transition in his/her behavior and slowly his cultural properties may change. In some group of people this change may take place at faster pace while there may be tendency in certain groups to hold on to original behavior irrespective of exposure and hence change may be bit slow. Hence cultural computing deals with all aspects related to computing of this scenario including:
1.     Computationally determine which group of people share common culture
2.     Computationally understanding impact of one culture on another culture
3.     Understanding impact on behavior of a particular person when she/he will be exposed to a different culture
4.     Computational and feature based relationships when two groups possessing different culture comes together
5.     Impact on culture due to repetitive exposure to certain context
6.     Cultural traits and computationally understanding importance of certain traits to perform better in a given situation

This subject is typically not limited to above factors but it can even help us to look into computational aspects related to overall impact on country, society or even groups when different cultural groups become part of the system. Hence computational culture deals with computational aspects of cultural transformation. I found this research interesting and useful. It can tell us about initiatives to be taken… It can give insight into selection and above all it can give us insight into cultural transformation, cultural evolution and that can build foundation for next generation AI and Machine Learning…