Analogy, Abstraction and Reasoning

Structural

4-week training on a skillset that has become more important than ever since the recent AI revolution driven by advanced reasoning models.

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Why this course According to Douglas Hofstadter, without concepts there can be no thought and without analogies there can be no concepts. Forming and abstracting concepts is at the heart of human intelligence, creativity and imagination. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others are using the abstraction and reasoning challenge (ARC) as the benchmark in training their AI models to perform at the same level of proficiency as highly experienced analysts, architects, chefs, lawyers, investigators, researchers, etc. Large concept models (LCM) use concepts as the foundational units of understanding, for more sophisticated semantic reasoning and context-aware decision-making. This 4-week course will sharpen your analogy and abstraction skills so that you can: [ ] Analyse cases, design things and solve problems better than advanced AI models [ ] Design agentic systems and applications that make use of LCMs and LLMs [ ] Develop your own domain-specific abstraction and reasoning corpus You will benefit from this course whether you are to be the human-in-the-loop, training and supervising AI systems to work well in your domain, or to be the designer and developer of even more advanced AI systems and applications. You will benefit even if you don't give a damn about 'how AI is taking over the world' and simply want to be the consummate, creative professional. Learning process You will practice analogy and abstraction by going through a catalogue of 1024 photographs – evocative images of everyday things, from airport gates to dry docks; billboards to waste bins, bag tags to shipping containers; automotive painting to cash withdrawals. Each image is an opportunity for analysis and interpretation through which you will practice the following skills: [ ] Captioning, labelling and tagging things [ ] Building ladders of abstraction, trees and chains [ ] Removing information; applying exformation [ ] Defining meaningful relationships and associations [ ] Defining problem structures and patterns [ ] Defining categories, types and classes Your learning will be aided by discussions of real-world examples such as:[ ] The family tree of a world-famous lounge chair. [ ] Grocery shopping: From the Piggly Wiggly to the Amazon Go. [ ] Solving the societal problem of airline boarding and seating. [ ] Airbnb, WeWork and Uber for X: What went wrong, what went hell. [ ] Clinical endpoints and the digital measurement of health. [ ] The City Genome Project: A proposal for EU funding. Length, format and schedule Hands-on training with cases, exercises, and discussions, divided into eight 90-minute sessions scheduled over a period of four weeks. All the course material and participation will be on Zoom, Notion and Slack. There may be optional in-person office hours and meetups in Bangalore. Tuesdays and Fridays at 16:30 IST and 13:00 Central European Time Target audience This course is for a general audience. No prerequisites in philosophy, math, biology or computer science. But curiosity and imagination are a must. You could be an analyst, consultant, programmer, policyworker, product manager, lawyer, or engineer. Your job could be to design protocols to reduce medical errors, or to help a local bus operator to reframe ride-sharing, or to help a city reduce urban waste. You could be developing new risk models for an insurance company, advising a startup on scaling its operations, or training AI to assist lawyers and consultants. Instructor <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxiqbal/?ref=strctrl.org" title="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxiqbal/?ref=strctrl.org" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Majid Iqbal</a> has more than 25 years of experience helping organisations in industry and government tackle hard problems. Analogy and abstraction have always been a part of his process, but in 2019 the Dutch Ministry of Defense hired him with following instruction: "Teach us to think more abstractly. We don't see deep enough into our problems". That was right after he wrote the book <a href="https://a.co/d/fXh63NE?ref=strctrl.org" title="https://a.co/d/fXh63NE?ref=strctrl.org" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Thinking in Services</a> in which he shows how to see the designs of services in their abstract forms to be able to make structural improvements and not just superficial changes to UI/UX.

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