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"ai" entries
Complex Addresses, AI Applications, Scaling Diversity, Audiovisual Coding
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses — 0 Egmont Road, Middlesbrough. lolwut?
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Future of the AI-Powered Application (Matt Turck) — we’re about to witness the emergence of a number of deeply focused AI-powered applications that will achieve commercial success by solving in a definitive manner very specific issues. (via Matt Webb)
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Three Things a City In Charge of its Destiny Ought to Know About Software (Matt Edgar) — Instead of asking “will it scale”, ask a better question: “Does it gracefully handle massive diversity?” […] The diversity question accommodates scaling; the scaling question tramples all over diversity. (via Tom Armitage)
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gibber — a creative coding environment for audiovisual performance and composition. It contains features for audio synthesis and musical sequencing, 2d drawing, 3d scene construction and manipulation, and live-coding shaders. If you’re looking for more ways to interest teens in code …
Smart Cities, Blockchain Innovation, Brain Interfaces, and Knowledge Graphs
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Smartest Cities Rely on Citizen Cunning and Unglamorous Technology (The Guardian) — vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, Cisco and Hitachi construct the resident of the smart city as someone without agency; merely a passive consumer of municipal services – at best, perhaps, a generator of data that can later be aggregated, mined for relevant inference, and acted upon. Should he or she attempt to practise democracy in any form that spills on to the public way, the smart city has no way of accounting for this activity other than interpreting it as an untoward disruption to the orderly flow of circulation.
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Second Wave of Blockchain Innovation — the economic challenges of innovating on the blockchain.
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Introduction to the Modern Brain-Computer Interface Design (UCSD) — The lectures were first given by Christian Kothe (SCCN/UCSD) in 2012 at University of Osnabrueck within the Cognitive Science curriculum and have now been recorded in the form of an open online course. The course includes basics of EEG, BCI, signal processing, machine learning, and also contains tutorials on using BCILAB and the lab streaming layer software.
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Machine Learning with Knowledge Graphs (video) — see also extra readings.
Transferable Learning, At-Scale Telemetry, Ugly DRM, and Fast Packet Processing
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How Transferable Are Features in Deep Neural Networks? — (answer: “very”). A final surprising result is that initializing a network with transferred features from almost any number of layers can produce a boost to generalization that lingers even after fine-tuning to the target dataset. (via Pete Warden)
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Introducing Atlas: Netflix’s Primary Telemetry Platform — nice solution to the problems that many have, at a scale that few have.
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The Many Facades of DRM (PDF) — Modular software systems are designed to be broken into independent pieces. Each piece has a clear boundary and well-defined interface for ‘hooking’ into other pieces. Progress in most technologies accelerates once systems have achieved this state. But clear boundaries and well-defined interfaces also make a technology easier to attack, break, and reverse-engineer. Well-designed DRMs have very fuzzy boundaries and are designed to have very non-standard interfaces. The examples of the uglified DRM code are inspiring.
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DPDK — a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing […] to: receive and send packets within the minimum number of CPU cycles (usually less than 80 cycles); develop fast packet capture algorithms (tcpdump-like); run third-party fast path stacks.
A Worm Mind Forever LEGO Voyaging, Automatic Caption Generator, ELK Stack, and Amazonian Deployment
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A Worm’s Mind in a Lego Body — the c. elegans worm’s 302 neurons has been sequenced, modelled in open source code, and now hooked up to a Lego robot. It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward. There is video.
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Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator — Google Research paper on generating captions like “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven” from a photo. Wow.
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Big Data with the ELK Stack — ElasticSearch, logstash, and Kibana. Interesting and powerful combination of tools!
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Apollo: Amazon’s Deployment Engine — Apollo will stripe the rolling update to simultaneously deploy to an equivalent number of hosts in each location. This keeps the fleet balanced and maximizes redundancy in the case of any unexpected events. When the fleet scales up to handle higher load, Apollo automatically installs the latest version of the software on the newly added hosts. Lust.
Javascript Testing, Dark Data, Webapp Design, and Design Trumps Data
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Karma — kick-ass open source Javascript test environment.
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The Dark Market for Personal Data (NYTimes) — can buy lists of victims of sexual assault, of impulse buyers, of people with sexually transmitted disease, etc. The cost of a false-positive when those lists are used for marketing is less than the cost of false-positive when banks use the lists to decide whether you’re a credit risk. The lists fall between the cracks in privacy legislation; essentially, the compilation and use of lists of people are unregulated territory.
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7 Principles of Rich Web Applications — “rich web applications” sounds like 2007 wants its ideas back, but the content is modern and useful. Predict behaviour for negative latency.
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Collaborative Filtering at LinkedIn (PDF) — This paper presents LinkedIn’s horizontal collaborative filtering infrastructure, known as browsemaps. Great lessons learned, including context and presentation of browsemaps or any recommendation is paramount for a truly relevant user experience. That is, design and presentation represents the largest ROI, with data engineering being a second, and algorithms last. (via Greg Linden)
Continuous Testing, Programmable Bees, Deep Learning on GPUs, and Silk Road Numbers
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Continuously Testing Infrastructure — “infrastructure as code”. I can’t figure out whether what I feel are thrills or chills.
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Engineer Sees Big Possibilities in Micro-robots, Including Programmable Bees (National Geographic) — He and fellow researchers devised novel techniques to fabricate, assemble, and manufacture the miniature machines, each with a housefly-size thorax, three-centimeter (1.2-inch) wingspan, and weight of just 80 milligrams (.0028 ounces). The latest prototype rises on a thread-thin tether, flaps its wings 120 times a second, hovers, and flies along preprogrammed paths. (via BoingBoing)
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cuDNN — NVIDIA’s library of primitives for deep neural networks (on GPUS, natch). Not open source (registerware).
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Analysing Trends in Silk Road 2.0 — If, indeed every sale can map to a transaction, some vendors are doing huge amounts of business through mail order drugs. While the number is small, if we sum up all the product reviews x product prices, we get a huge number of USD $20,668,330.05. REMEMBER! This is on Silk Road 2.0 with a very small subset of their entire inventory. A peek into a largely invisible economy.
Good Communities, AI Games, Design Process, and Web Server Library
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15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging (Anil Dash) — If your comments are full of assholes, it’s your fault. Good communities don’t just happen by accident.
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Replicating DeepMind — open source attempt to build deep learning network that can play Atari games. (via RoboHub)
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ToyTalk — fantastic iterative design process for the product (see the heading “A Bit of Trickery”)
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h2o — an optimized HTTP server implementation that can be used either as a standalone server or a library.
Knowledge Graphs, Multi-Language Declarations, Monitoring, and More Monitoring
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Google Knowledge Vault and Topic Modeling — recap of talks by Google and Facebook staff about how they use their knowledge graphs. I found this super-interesting.
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djinni — A tool for generating cross-language type declarations and interface bindings.
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monit — a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.
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perf-tooling — List of performance analysis, monitoring and optimization tools.
Ceramic 3D Printing, Robo Proofs, Microservice Fail, and Amazing Graphics Tweaks
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$700 Ceramic-Spitting 3D Printer (Make Magazine) — ceramic printing is super interesting, not least because it doesn’t fill the world with plastic glitchy bobbleheads.
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Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine (Arxiv) — a survey of mathematical proofs that rely on computer calculations and formal proofs. (via Victoria Stodden)
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Failing at Microservices — deconstructed a failed stab at microservices. Category three engineers also presented a significant problem to our implementation. In many cases, these engineers implemented services incorrectly; in one example, an engineer had literally wrapped and hosted one microservice within another because he didn’t understand how the services were supposed to communicate if they were in separate processes (or on separate machines). These engineers also had a tough time understanding how services should be tested, deployed, and monitored because they were so used to the traditional “throw the service over the fence”to an admin approach to deployment. This basically lead to huge amounts of churn and loss of productivity.
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Transient Attributes for High-Level Understanding and Editing of Outdoor Scenes — computer vision doing more amazing things: annotate scenes (e.g., sunsets, seasons), train, then be able to adjust images. Tweak how much sunset there is in your pic? Wow.
Thinking Machines, Chemical Sensor, Share Containerised Apps, and Visualising the Net Neutrality Comments
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Viv — another step in the cognition race. Wolfram Alpha was first out the gate, but Watson, Viv, and others are hot on heels of being able to parse complex requests, then seek and use information to fulfil them.
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Universal Mobile Electrochemical Detector Designed for Use in Resource-limited Applications (PNAS) — $35 handheld sensor with mobile phone connection. The electrochemical methods that we demonstrate enable quantitative, broadly applicable, and inexpensive sensing with flexibility based on a wide variety of important electroanalytical techniques (chronoamperometry, cyclic voltammetry, differential pulse voltammetry, square wave voltammetry, and potentiometry), each with different uses. Four applications demonstrate the analytical performance of the device: these involve the detection of (i) glucose in the blood for personal health, (ii) trace heavy metals (lead, cadmium, and zinc) in water for in-field environmental monitoring, (iii) sodium in urine for clinical analysis, and (iv) a malarial antigen (Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein 2) for clinical research. (via BoingBoing)
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panamax.io — containerized app creator with an open-source app marketplace hosted in GitHub. Panamax provides a friendly interface for users of Docker, Fleet & CoreOS. With Panamax, you can easily create, share and deploy any containerized app no matter how complex it might be.
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Quid Analysis of Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality (NPR) — visualising the themes and volume of the comments. Interesting factoid: only half the comments were derived from templates (cf 80% in submissions to some financial legislation).