At the HTM workshop earlier this week, Numenta demoed their nupic 1.6 release and showed some pretty impressive advancements in the learning algorithms they have been developing. Their prototype HTM is a vision system that does recognition on objects like cows, ducks, and cell phones–they’ve trained it extensively and it can recognize these objects from pretty much any angle, and it recognizes objects both in photos and in crayon type sketches. This system should be commercial grade within a year, I expect.
Qualia labs presented some motion capture demos were astounding–their HTM was able to distinguish between 4 distinct action performed by lab actors with 98% accuracy. One of my main goals in attending the event was to assess the state of the current nupic platform; I was expecting to see a tool ready for experimentation, but I think now that within the next year the platform will be solving some real problems.
Some of the most interesting demos to me were those involving “unsupervised training.” In unsupervised training, you feed data into an HTM and tell it to identify n states. The HTM then identifies patterns in the data and categorizes the data into n-groups. A motion capture demo, for example, instructed an HTM to identify the motions of actors into 4 states: the HTM ended up dividing movements into walking, sitting, jumping, and running. Although this is a somewhat trivial example, one can imagine how unsupervised training could reveal interesting patterns in large data sets–for example, feed in data about people’s blood sugar levels or some piece of information about their genetic sequence. Tell an HTM to split the subjects into a few groups, and then correlate the results with data like presence of certain diseases.
When I arrived in Palo Alto, I had quite a casual interest in Numenta and expected that nupic would be a technology to incorporate into whatever else I’m working on in about two years. Perhaps because of the impressive demos, perhaps because of the energy you get just from going to an event like this where there are a bunch of people excited about something, or, perhaps by chance, I am definitely now considering diving more fully into nupic sooner than later.
Just watched an awesome clip of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band performing live in NYC. He spends about 3 minutes handling the crowd, like a general commanding his army. It’s not an easy task, and he takes a minute to wring his shirt, which is drenched with sweat. He’s exhausted, but still smiling. I’ve never seen anyone work harder to entertain a crowd than the Boss. He’s by far the best live performer I have seen.
You can tell everyone on stage loves what they’re doing–watch Bruce dance around the stage and everyone in the band smiling at each other. It’s a beautiful thing. Just watch the video (and feel free to leave a video comment).
Weston Price was a dentist and scientist in the early part of the 20th century. Practicing dentistry in Cleveland, he was amazed at the poor state of his patients’ teeth and the suffering it inflicted. At the time, dental health was even worse than it is today, with some children in their teens already being fitted for dentures. Being a religious man, he could not bring himself to believe that ‘physical degeneration’ was what God intended for mankind. He traveled throughout the world looking for cultures that did not have crooked teeth or dental decay, and that also exhibited general health and well-being. And he found them. A lot of them.
These cultures were all considered ‘primitive’ at the time, and were not subject to the lifestyles or food choices of the Western world. He documented, numerically and with photographs, the near-absence of dental cavities and crooked teeth in a number of different cultures throughout the world. He showed that like all animals, humans are healthy and robust when occupying the right ecological niche. Price had a deep respect for the nutritional knowledge these cultures curated.
He also documented the result when these same cultures were exposed to Western diets of white flour, sugar and other industrially processed foods: they developed rampant cavities, their children grew with crooked teeth due to narrow dental arches, as well as a number of other strikingly familiar health problems.
I was just giving this Paul Graham essay another read while waiting for my sister to join me for dinner and found a quote I really dig:
Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven’t decided yet whether they’re going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon.
Typically, I don’t agree with a lot of Paul Graham has to say (eg, NYC owns Cambridge imo), but his quote on ambition was quite a gem. His full essay is worth a read.
I just saw three twitter posts in a row about Tiger Woods and the phrase “The Future of News” sprang to mind. I think I first heard the phrase in John Borthwick’s essay with that title, but there have been several times since I’ve started using twitter that I’ve seen this phenomenon in action.
It happened twice this weekend: just now regarding Tiger and earlier regarding Tim Russert. It’s interesting how much seeing the same topic repeated 2-3 times in a row makes you notice it and pay attention.
Idea for a twitter app: use some linguistics tools to parse incoming tweets from my friends into phrases, people, events, and places. Group tweets by theme, showing me hot themes, and bubble up stuff I should care about because lots of my friends are talking about it. Since I only have a small group of people I’m following, I don’t require this filtered view, but I can imagine how it would be quite useful if I had a huge group I was following on twitter. Perhaps more useful to me would be something that consumes all content published by all my friends (twitter, facebook, blogs, tumblogs, etc) and creates a nice filter view on that.
Excellent interview with Joe Kraus on Google’s social web projects - read - listen
In particular, check out what Kraus has to say about Google’s “do no evil” philosophy as sound business strategy:
I understand the notion that a company of Google’s size often gets perceived as having a grand master plan of the way the world is going to work over the next ten years. I can understand how people might project something diabolical.
The truth is far more simple than that. The trust is that Google’s fate is directly tied to how good the web is. As the web goes, so goes Google. If you look at something like Google Gears, which tried to solve the problem of one deficiency of the web, which is it didn’t work offline. And the reason that Google did Google Gears is not because it was some grand plan to make more money as a result of Google Gears, but as a result of the fact that by making the web better and by making it a place where people spend more time, where people store more information, that ultimately that benefits Google indirectly.
The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to do more searching, and the more money that Google makes. So, it is very indirect, but it is also betting on the web as a platform of the next decade.
OpenSocial is like that as well. OpenSocial doesn’t have any monetization component. If you’re an OpenSocial container like MySpace, you don’t have to use AdSense. You can use whatever advertising system you want. You don’t have to have advertising. So, this is really about making the web better - making it a great platform for developers and users - and ultimately, because Google is a big part of people’s web experience, the belief that to better the web means the more time, the more (even if you just boil it down) the more searches people do… That’s ultimately what the benefit is.
We just held Google I/O, which was our annual developer conference. And the whole theme, in all the things we’re doing, we’re really about, “How do we make the web a better place for users and developers?” So, for developers - be it App Engine as a way to allow developers to have an easy development and deployment environment for applications, so you don’t have to build so much from scratch. Or Gears, in terms of making an application both work offline and having a local data store, so you can do more for end users. Or OpenSocial or all the APIs that’s Google’s providing. It’s really about, “How do you make the web a better experience?” And ultimately, we think Google benefits from that.
Ran across this renaissance man lecturing at TED. Pretty cool vid.
Nathan Myhrvold is a professional jack-of-all-trades. After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he’s been a world barbecue champion, a wildlife photographer, a chef, a contributor to SETI, and a volcano explorer.
Nav just introduced me to an excellent blog by Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures. After reading a few posts, I quickly added it to my Google Reader, cause this guy is clearly pretty smart.
The single best way to manage consumer demand is by increasing prices. One way to improve energy efficiency would be to put systems in every business and every home that clearly shows users the cost of their consumption.
