"research" entries

Four short links: 17 December 2015

Four short links: 17 December 2015

Structured Image Concepts, Google's SDN, Lightbulb DeDRMing, and EFF SF

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 17, 2015
  1. Visual Genome — a data set, a knowledge base, an ongoing effort to connect structured image concepts to language.
  2. Google’s Software Defined Networking — [What was the biggest risk you faced rolling out the network? …] we were breaking the fate-sharing principle—which is to say we were putting ourselves in a situation where either the controller could fail without the switch failing, or the switch could fail without the controller failing. That generally leads to big problems in distributed computing, as many people learned the hard way once remote procedure calls became a dominant paradigm.
  3. Philips Backtrack on Lightbulb DRM — In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system.
  4. Pwning Tomorrow — EFF Publishes SF Anthology. You can expect liberties and freedoms to feature.
Four short links: 16 December 2015

Four short links: 16 December 2015

Face Matching, Engineering Rewrites, Public Domain Illustrations, and Robotic Wrapup

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 16, 2015
  1. Face Director — Disney software to match faces between takes. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
  2. Move Fast and Fix Things — blow by blow of an engineering rewrite of some key functionality at GitHub, interesting from a “oh so that’s how they do it” point of view (if blow-by-blow engineering rewrites qualify as “interesting” to you).
  3. Old Book Illustrations — public domain book illustrations, tagged and searchable. Yes, like Font Awesome of engraving.
  4. The State of Robotics for 2015 (TechCrunch) — nice summary/wrapup of what’s out there now.
Four short links: 10 December 2015

Four short links: 10 December 2015

Reactive Programming Theory, Attacking HTTP/2, Distributed Systems Explainer, and Auto Futures

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 10, 2015
  1. Distributed Reactive Programming (A Paper a Day) — this week’s focus on reactive programming has been eye-opening for me. I find the implementation details less interesting than the simple notion that we can define different consistency models for reactive programs and reason about them.
  2. Attacking HTTP/2 Implementations — Our talk focused on threats, attack vectors, and vulnerabilities found during the course of our research. Two Firefox, two Apache Traffic Server (ATS), and four Node-http2 vulnerabilities will be discussed alongside the release of the first public HTTP/2 fuzzer. We showed how these bugs were found, their root cause, why they occur, and how to trigger them.
  3. What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems — a great intro/explainer to the different concepts in distributed systems.
  4. The Autonomous Winter is Coming — The future of any given manufacturer will be determined by how successfully they manage their brands in a market split between Mobility customers and Driving customers.
Four short links: 8 December 2015

Four short links: 8 December 2015

Open Source ZeroDB, HTTP Statuses, Project Activity, and Database Readings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 8, 2015
  1. ZeroDB is Open Source — end-to-end encrypted database goes open source (AGPL, *ptui*).
  2. Choosing an HTTP Status Code — or “an alternative to engineers duelling.”
  3. Open Source Monthly — views of open source projects through their GitHub activity.
  4. Readings in Database Science (5ed) — HTML and PDF versions of the papers.
Four short links: 4 December 2015

Four short links: 4 December 2015

Bacterial Research, Open Source Swift, Deep Forger, and Prudent Crypto Engineering

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 4, 2015
  1. New Antibiotics Research Direction — most people don’t know that we can’t cultivate and isolate most of the microbes we know about.
  2. Swift now Open Source — Apache v2-licensed. An Apple exec is talking about it and its roadmap.
  3. Deep Forger User Guide — clever Twitter bot converting your photos into paintings in the style of famous artists, using deep learning tech.
  4. Prudent Engineering Practice for Cryptographic Protocols (PDF) — paper from the ’90s that is still useful today. Those principles are good for API design too. (via Adrian Colyer)
Four short links: 2 December 2015

Four short links: 2 December 2015

Regulating Addictive Attention, Microservice Middleware, Better 3D Scanning, and Anti-Disassembly Tricks

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 2, 2015
  1. If the Internet is Addictive, Why Don’t We Regulate It? — an excellent look at behaviourism, gambling machine flow, design-for-addiction, attention, regulation. As Schüll puts it: ‘It just seems very duplicitous to design with the goal of capturing attention, and then to put the whole burden onto the individual.’
  2. Zipnish — using varnish as middleware for your microservices, with Zipnish to create Zipkin-style analysis of your API performance.
  3. Using Polarisation to Improve 3D Scanning (PDF) — The proposed technique can resolve finer detail than some laser scannners
  4. Anti-Disassembly Tricks Used in Malware — also “things I remember from trying to break copy protection in 1980s games.”
Four short links: 30 November 2015

Four short links: 30 November 2015

Chinese Manufacturing, Visual Question Answering, Editing Animal Genes, and AIs for RTS Games

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 30, 2015
  1. Behind the Hoverboard Craze (BoingBoing) — Bernstein is interested in this phenomenon as “memeufacturing” — a couple of social-media stars (or garden-variety celebs) post viral videos of themselves using an obscure gadget, and halfway around the world, factories shut down their e-cig lines and convert them, almost overnight, to hoverboard manufacturing lines. Bernstein cites a source who says that there are 1,000 hoverboard factories in South China.
  2. neural-vqa — VIS+LSTM model for Visual Question Answering. Scroll to the end and see the questions it’s answering about photos.
  3. Open Season in Editing Genes of Animals (NY Times) — “We’re going to see a stream of edited animals coming through because it’s so easy,” said Bruce Whitelaw, a professor of animal biotechnology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. “It’s going to change the societal question from, ‘If we could do it, would we want it?’ to, ‘Next year we will have it; will we allow it?’”
  4. RTS AI (PDF) — standard techniques used for playing classic board games, such as game tree search, cannot be directly applied to solve RTS games without the definition of some level of abstraction, or some other simplification. Interestingly enough, humans seem to be able to deal with the complexity of RTS games, and are still vastly superior to computers in these types of games. Talks about the challenges in writing AIs for Real-Time Strategy games.
Four short links: 27 November 2015

Four short links: 27 November 2015

Android Insecurity, Clear Photos, Speech to Emotion, and Microexpressions from Video

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 27, 2015
  1. 87% of Android Devices Insecure — researchers find they’re vulnerable to malicious apps because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates. (via Bruce Schneier)
  2. A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography (Google Research) — take multiple photos from different angles through occlusions like a window with raindrops or reflections, and their software will assemble an unoccluded image. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Algorithms for Affective Sensing — Results show that the system achieves a six-emotion decision-level correct classification rate of 80% for an acted dataset with clean speech. This PhD thesis is research into algorithm for determining emotion from speech samples, which does so more accurately than humans in a controlled test. (via New Scientist)
  4. Software Learns to Recognise Microexpressions (MIT Technology Review) — Li and co’s machine matched human ability to spot and recognize microexpressions and significantly outperformed humans at the recognition task alone.
Four short links: 20 November 2015

Four short links: 20 November 2015

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

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 20, 2015
  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) Hard — We 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: 17 November 2015

Four short links: 17 November 2015

Remix Contest, Uber Asymmetry, Language Learning, and Continuous Delivery

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 17, 2015
  1. GIF It Up — very clever remix campaign to use heritage content—Friday is your last day to enter this year’s contest, so get creating! My favourite.
  2. Uber’s Drivers: Information Asymmetries and Control in Dynamic Work — Our conclusions are two-fold: first, that the information asymmetries produced by Uber’s system are fundamental to its ability to structure indirect control over its workers; and second, that Uber relies heavily on the evolving rhetoric of the algorithm to justify these information asymmetries to drivers, riders, as well as regulators and outlets of public opinion.
  3. ANNABELL — unsupervised language learning using artificial neural networks, install your own four year old. The paper explains how.
  4. Spinnaker — an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.