"stream data" entries

Four short links: 15 June 2015

Four short links: 15 June 2015

Streams at Scale, Molecular Programming, Formal Verification, and Deep Learning's Flaws

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 15, 2015
  1. Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale (Paper a Day) — very readable summary of Apache Storm’s failings, and Heron’s improvements.
  2. Molecular Programming Project — aims to develop computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity. Our long-term vision is to establish molecular programming as a subdiscipline of computer science — one that will enable a yet-to-be imagined array of applications from chemical circuitry for interacting with biological molecules to nanoscale computing and molecular robotics.
  3. The Software Analysis Workbench — provides the ability to formally verify properties of code written in C, Java, and Cryptol. It leverages automated SAT and SMT solvers to make this process as automated as possible, and provides a scripting language, called SAW Script, to enable verification to scale up to more complex systems. “Non-commercial” license.
  4. What’s Wrong with Deep Learning? (PDF in Google Drive) — What’s missing from deep learning? 1. Theory; 2. Reasoning, structured prediction; 3. Memory, short-term/working/episodic memory; 4. Unsupervised learning that actually works. … and then ways to get those things. Caution: math ahead.
Four short links: 10 March 2015

Four short links: 10 March 2015

Robot Swarms, Media Hacking, Inside-Out Databases, and Quantified Medical Self

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 10, 2015
  1. Surgical Micro-Robot Swarms — A swarm of medical microrobots. Start with cm sized robots. These already exist in the form of pillbots and I reference the work of Paolo Dario’s lab in this direction. Then get 10 times smaller to mm sized robots. Here we’re at the limit of making robots with conventional mechatronics. The almost successful I-SWARM project prototyped remarkable robots measuring 4 x 4 x 3mm. But now shrink by another 3 orders of magnitude to microbots, measured in micrometers. This is how small robots would have to be in order to swim through and access (most of) the vascular system. Here we are far beyond conventional materials and electronics, but amazingly work is going on to control bacteria. In the example I give from the lab of Sylvain Martel, swarms of magnetotactic bacteria are steered by an external magnetic field and, interestingly, tracked in an MRI scanner.
  2. Media Hacking — interesting discussion of the techniques used to spread disinformation through social media, often using bots to surface/promote a message.
  3. Turning the Database Inside Out with Apache Samza — replication, secondary indexing, caching, and materialized views as a way of getting into distributed stream processing.
  4. Apple Research Kit — Apple positioning their mobile personal biodata tools with medical legitimacy, presumably as a way to distance themselves from the stereotypical quantified selfer. I’m reminded of the gym chain owner who told me, about the Nike+, “yeah, maybe 5% of my clients will want this. The rest go to the gym so they can eat and drink what they want.”