"cs" entries

Four short links: 13 April 2016

Four short links: 13 April 2016

Gesture Learner, Valuing Maintainers, Google's CS Education, and AI Threats

  1. focusmotion.iothe world’s first machine learning SDK to track, learn, and analyze human motion on any sensor, on any OS, on any platform. You (or your users) train it on what combination of sensor patterns to label as a particular gesture or movement, and then it’ll throw those labels whenever.
  2. How Maintainers, not Innovators, Make the World Turn (City Lab) — cf Deb Chachra’s Why I Am Not a Maker and everything Warren Buffett ever wrote about investing in boring businesses. It’s nice to realize that we’ve gone from “you’d be crazy to throw your career away and join a startup” to “hey, established industry isn’t bad, either, you know.”
  3. Google CS Education — all their tools and resources for CS education in one spot.
  4. Will The Proliferation of Affordable AI Decimate the Middle Class? (Alex Tabarrok) — I hadn’t heard this done before, but he steps away from the A in AI to ask whether greater natural intelligence would threaten the middle class in the same way—e.g., from rising India and China.
Four short links: 21 January 2016

Four short links: 21 January 2016

Hidden Networks, Dissolving Sensors, Spies Spy, and Redirected Walking

  1. Big Bang Data: Networks of London (YouTube) — guide to the easy-to-miss networks (fibre, CCTV, etc.) around Somerset House, where an amazing exhibition is about to launch. The network guide is the work of the deeply talented Ingrid Burrington.
  2. Sensors Slip into the Brain and then Dissolve When Done (IEEE Spectrum) — pressure and temperature monitors, intended to be implanted in the brain, that completely dissolve within a few weeks. The news, published as a research letter in the journal Nature, described a demonstration of the devices in rats, using soluble wires to transmit the signals, as well as the demonstration of a wireless version, though the data transmission circuit, at this point, is not completely resorbable. The research was published as a letter to Nature.
  3. GCHQ Proposes Surveillable Voice Call Encryption (The Register) — unsurprising, but should reiterate AGAIN that state security services would like us to live in the panopticon. Therefore, don’t let the buggers anywhere near the reins of our communication systems.
  4. These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel RealScientists are exploiting the natural inaccuracies in people’s own proprioception, via a technique called “redirected walking,” to create the perception of space where none exists. With redirected walking, […] users can sense they are exploring the twisting byways of a virtual city when in reality they are simply walking in circles inside a lab. Original Redirect Walking paper.

Four short links: 20 January 2016

Four short links: 20 January 2016

Rules-Based Distributed Code, Open Source Face Recognition, Simulation w/Emoji, and Berkeley's AI Materials

  1. Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed Concurrent Fault-Tolerant Code (A Paper a Day) — To demonstrate applicability outside of the RAMCloud system, the team also re-wrote the Hadoop Map-Reduce job scheduler (which uses a traditional event-based state machine approach) using rules. The original code has three state machines containing 34 states with 163 different transitions, about 2,250 lines of code in total. The rules-based re-implementation required 19 rules in 3 tasks with a total of 117 lines of code and comments. Rules-based systems are powerful and underused.
  2. OpenFace — open source face recognition software using deep neural networks.
  3. Simulating the World in Emoji — fun simulation environment in the browser.
  4. Berkeley’s Intro-to-AI MaterialsWe designed these projects with three goals in mind. The projects allow students to visualize the results of the techniques they implement. They also contain code examples and clear directions, but do not force students to wade through undue amounts of scaffolding. Finally, Pac-Man provides a challenging problem environment that demands creative solutions; real-world AI problems are challenging, and Pac-Man is, too.
Four short links: 12 January 2016

Four short links: 12 January 2016

Civilian Drone Market, Things Learned, Playful Things, and Bottom-up CS

  1. Overview of the Civilian Drone Market (DIY Drones) — Six categories: toy quadcopters; FPV/racing; consumer camera drones; prosumer camera drones; consumers, industrial, agricultural, NGO and Research drones; winged and VTOL drones.
  2. 52 Things I Learned in 2015 — very high strike rate of “interesting!”
  3. How to Turn Complicated Things into Playful Things (Tom Whitwell) — Children are the apex players, at the top of the hierarchy. Only when they’re absent will adults play. […] You know when play is working, because the room gets noisy.
  4. Bottom Up Computer ScienceA free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals, and system library fundamentals.
Four short links: 11 December 2015

Four short links: 11 December 2015

Probabilistic Algorithms, Copyright-Free, AI Hardware, and Autonomous Vehicle Policy

  1. Real-world Probabilistic Algorithms (Tyler McMullen) — This article addresses two types of probabilistic algorithms: those that explicitly introduce randomness through a rand() call, and those that convert input data into a uniform distribution to achieve a similar effect.
  2. Class of 2016those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Malcolm X, Bela Bartok, Winston Churchill, and W. Somerset Maugham among others. (Which person in which country depends on copyright term. Not for you, America. Nor us after TPP)
  3. Facebook to Open Source AI Hardware DesignBig Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. Eight GPUs, and designs to be released through Open Compute Project.
  4. Driving Changes (PDF) — policy impacts, benefits, and considerations for autonomous vehicles. Written for Toronto but applicable to many more cities. (via David Ticoll)
Four short links: 20 November 2015

Four short links: 20 November 2015

Table Mining, Visual Microphones, Platformed Government, and NP-Hard Video Games

  1. DeepDive — Stanford project to create structured data (SQL tables) from unstructured information (text documents) and integrate such data with an existing structured database. DeepDive is used to extract sophisticated relationships between entities and make inferences about facts involving those entities. Code is open source (Apache v2 license). (via Infoworld)
  2. Visual Microphone (MIT) — turn everyday objects — a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips — into visual microphones using high-speed photography to detect the small vibrations caused by sound. (via Infoworld)
  3. 10 Rules for Distributed/Networked/Platformed Government (Richard Pope) — Be as vigilant against creating concentrations of power as you are in creating efficiency or bad user experiences. (via Paul Downey)
  4. Classic Nintendo Games are (Computationally) HardWe prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon.
Four short links: 23 September, 2015

Four short links: 23 September, 2015

Sentence Generator, Deep Neural Networks Explainer, Sports Analytics, and System Hell

  1. Skip Thought Vectors — research (with code) that produces surrounding sentences, given a sentence.
  2. A Beginner’s Guide to Deep Neural Networks (Google) — Googlers’ 20% project to explain things to people tackles machine learning.
  3. Data Analytics in Sports — O’Reilly research report (free). When it comes to processing stats, competing companies Opta and ProZone use a combination of recording technology and human analysts who tag “events” within the game (much like Vantage Sports). Opta calculates that it tags between 1,600 and 2,000 events per football game — all delivered live.
  4. On Go, Portability, and System Interfaces — No point mentioning Perl’s Configure.sh, I thought. The poor bastard will invent it soon enough.
Four short links: 16 September 2015

Four short links: 16 September 2015

Data Pipelines, Amazon Culture, Real-time NFL Data, and Deep Learning for Chess

  1. Three Best Practices for Building Successful Data Pipelines (Michael Li) — three key areas that are often overlooked in data pipelines, and those are making your analysis: reproducible, consistent, and productionizable.
  2. Amazon’s Culture Controversy Decoded (Rita J King) — very interesting culture map analysis of the reports of Amazon’s culture, and context for how companies make choices about what to be. (via Mike Loukides)
  3. How Will Real-Time Tracking Change the NFL? (New Yorker) — At the moment, the NFL is being tightfisted with the data. Commentators will have access during games, as will the betting and analytics firm Sportradar. Users of the league’s Xbox One app, which provides an interactive way of browsing video clips, fantasy-football statistics, and other metrics, will be able to explore a feature called Next Gen Replay, which allows them to track each player’s speed and trajectory, combining moving lines on a virtual field with live footage from the real one. But, for now, coaches are shut out; once a player exits the locker room on game day, the dynamic point cloud that is generated by his movement through space is a corporately owned data set, as outlined in the league’s 2011 collective-bargaining agreement. Which should tell you all you need to know about the NFL’s role in promoting sporting excellence.
  4. Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess (Matthew Lai) — Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. See also the code. (via GitXiv)
Four short links: 11 September 2015

Four short links: 11 September 2015

Wishful CS, Music Big Data, Better Queues, and Data as Liability

  1. Computer Science Courses that Don’t Exist, But Should (James Hague) — CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies. Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.
  2. Music Science: How Data and Digital Content Are Changing Music — O’Reilly research report on big data and the music industry. Researchers estimate that it takes five seconds to decide if we don’t like a song, but 25 to conclude that we like it.
  3. The Curse of the First-In First-Out Queue Discipline (PDF) — the research paper behind the “more efficient to serve the last person who joined the queue” newspaper stories going around.
  4. Data is Not an Asset, It Is a Liabilityregardless of the boilerplate in your privacy policy, none of your users have given informed consent to being tracked. Every tracker and beacon script on your website increases the privacy cost they pay for transacting with you, chipping away at the trust in the relationship.
Four short links: 2 September 2015

Four short links: 2 September 2015

Hard Problems in Distributed Systems, Engineering Bootcamp, Scripted TV, and C Guidelines

  1. There Are Only Two Hard Problems in Distributed Systems — the best tweet ever. (via Tim Bray)
  2. Building LinkedIn’s New Engineering Bootcamp — transmitting cultural and practical knowledge in a structured format.
  3. Soul-Searching in TV Land Over the Challenges of a New Golden Age (NY Times) — The number of scripted shows produced by networks, cable networks and online services ballooned to 371 last year, according to statistics compiled by FX. Mr. Landgraf believes that figure will pass 400 this year, which would nearly double the 211 shows made in 2009. […] predicted that the number of shows would slowly return to about 325 over the next few years, in large part because scripted television is expensive.
  4. C Programming Substance GuidelinesThis document is mainly about avoiding problems specific to the C programming language.