Four short links: 27 May 2015

Domo Arigato Mr Google, Distributed Graph Processing, Experiencing Ethics, and Deep Learning Robots

  1. Roboto — Google’s signature font is open sourced (Apache 2.0), including the toolchain to build it.
  2. Pregel: A System for Large Scale Graph Processing — a walk through a key 2010 paper from Google, on the distributed graph system that is the inspiration for Apache Giraph and which sits under PageRank.
  3. How to Turn a Liberal Hipster into a Global Capitalist (The Guardian) — In Zoe Svendsen’s play “World Factory at the Young Vic,” the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? […] And because the theatre captures data on every choice by every team, for every performance, I know we were not alone. The aggregated flowchart reveals that every audience, on every night, veers toward money and away from ethics. I’m a firm believer that games can give you visceral experience, not merely intellectual knowledge, of an activity. Interesting to see it applied so effectively to business.
  4. End to End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies (PDF) — paper on using deep learning to teach robots how to manipulate objects, by example.
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