Fathom this! In: Words spoken, echoes heard

Units of measurement

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:39:50 +0200

Tips for Better Ideas

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:49:22 +0200

Tips for Better Ideas. A neat little inspirational video.

Gel Videos: Ted Dewan

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:37:00 +0200

Gel Videos: Ted Dewan. "Cars drove dangerously fast on Ted's residential street in Oxford, England -- until he began installing activist art on the street. It brought the community together (even the mayor got on board), slowed the traffic, and improved the experience for everyone involved."

The forgotten tunnel under Brooklyn

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:59:49 +0200

A Diamond Below: “Unbeknownst to the thousands of people who walk and drive along the busy streets of downtown Brooklyn every day, they are treading on a 170 year old secret. At 17 feet high, 21 feet wide and 1,611 feet long, it is a big secret indeed, and one filled with greed, murder and corruption.” Yet another place to visit! Via Kuutio.

A room filled with dirt

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:26:03 +0200

I want to see this in person.

Newcomb's paradox

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:08:22 +0200

Newcomb’s paradox. A strange look at a hypothetical situation of whether or not to trust a “fortune teller”. Via Mikolas.

HS: Jos Suomi olisi suostunut syksyllä 1939…

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:20:37 +0200

Helsingin Sanomien Kuukausiliitteen arkistoista: Jos Suomi olisi suostunut syksyllä 1939…

Comeau's I am other people

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:06:16 +0200

I am other people is Joey Comeau’s new project. The first interviewee is Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics.

Big Ideas (don’t get any)

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:21:32 +0200

Big Ideas (don’t get any). Radiohead as played by… well, watch it! Via Aleksi.

Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:16:19 +0200

Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo. Video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas's TED presentation. Wow.

I like Emily's afro

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:32:26 +0200

Emily had an afro is Aric Allen’s poetry-slash-blog-thing. I like it.

Peculiarly Auxiliary Wisdom

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 01:50:47 +0200

Never being
a big reader of Jorn’s Robot Wisdom (yet knowing who he is
and respecting his work) I find myself
peculiarly fascinated by his Auxiliary Wisdom. So away
you and visit his excessories

Commodore's unsung history

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:37:45 +0200

The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore is a fascinating read. Well, the first sample chapter is (pdf version also available). There’s also excerpts of chapters 12 and 19. Via Retromania.

Portrait of the Blogger still a great read

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:32:48 +0200

Julian Dibbell’s Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man is over five years old, but it’s still a great read.

Paul Ford writes novel

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 19:15:28 +0200

And what a backstory there is to it: Paul Ford started writing a column under a fake persona, and scored a book deal. I’m buying the book today. I have not kept up with the author of a long-time favorite Website of mine.

Project Aardvark

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 17:37:12 +0200

I’ve enjoyed reading the Project Aardvark weblog. Fogcreek’s idea is great: four interns create a working, saleable software product in the course of one summer. Last Friday, they finally revealed their product.

Unimagineable

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:52:38 +0200

There’s something mesmerizing about this. He sure loves SNL and celebrities.

Robert Evans meets Andrew Blake

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 18 May 2005 22:23:07 +0200

Robert Evans, the subject of the most stupefying bio I’ve ever read, meets the “Helmut Newton of porn,” Andrew Blake. A great read. Very Thompsonesque.

Jordan: New Spring

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 15:25:20 +0200

I can’t believe I’m admitting to reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Let alone reading New Spring, a friggin’ prequel to the ten novels already published. Well, my name is Ilya, and I’m a fantasy reader. There, I’ve said it. Yes, I’m a fantasy reader, though I hope my reading list shows that I don’t read fantasy exclusively. In fact, about a year and a half ago, I found that I couldn’t stomach most fantasy novels. Ever since, I’ve half-joked that “real literature” has ruined me for fantasy. But back to Jordan. New Spring felt nicely familiar, like visiting Grandma’s. I can’t help it: I liked it. I am a little miffed, though, that Jordan is writing prequels instead finishing off the Wheel of Time series. I’d like to finish that and be over with it. There is only one fantasy series that I’d ever recommend non-fantasy junkies to read: George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (the fourth book is still under progress).

Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 15:06:54 +0200

Unlike most Vonnegut novels, I actually had a hard time getting into The Sirens of Titan. Maybe it was because it is one of his early works, maybe because it was a British edition, which was set in a horrible Bodoni-style font. I managed to finish The Sirens (no feat at all, of course, I always finish the books I start), and it was okay. Not as good as Galapagos (a low book of Vonnegut’s — despite the deeply resonant ideas it revolved around), but better than Vonnegut’s early short stories collected in Welcome to the Monkey House.

Joey Comeau's debut novel to go for $1400

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:35:02 +0200

Joey Comeau is raising money for his tuition by serializing his unfinished novel online. The first chapter of Lockpick Pornography is up and waiting to impress you. Comeau writes disturbing and hilarious job applications at Overqualified and creates the webcomic A Softer World together with Emily Horne.

Overview of Intelligent Systems

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 15:59:48 +0200

Yesterday’s Presenting Computer Science lecture was on intelligent systems, given by Petri Myllymäki. Professor Myllymäki would be a great person to interview, many things he said would make good soundbytes. That’s probably why this is the first lecture I’ve gotten around to noting here. One of the course requirements is to write brief summaries of the lectures and to use the topics as starting points for our own thoughts on the matter. I don’t really care for this “study diary” method, but it’s fairly easy, and probably does help put the different fields of study in perspective. Most of the lectures have been fairly boring, but this isn’t really the fault of the lecturers. It’s a tall order to not only introduce an entire field of study, but also cover how it’s taught at the university, and go into specifics of the latest research�”all in an hour and a half. Myllymäki is a senior research scientist at HIIT’s Complex Systems Computation Research Group (CoSCo). Update: Myllymäki’s presentation is available online (pdf).

Computer science asks: what can we automate, and how? So artificial intelligence research asks: how can we automate intelligence? We don’t have to define intelligence. We’ll leave that to philosophers. For us, it’s suffice to say that intelligence is behaving intelligently. So what do we need for intelligent behavior? Learning�”adaptation�”for one thing. And for learning we need memory and the ability to generalize. The world doesn’t repeat itself. This is one reason why rules-based behavior works in a laboratory environment but fails in the real world.

In order to generalize, we need to make models. Models allow us to assess situations, and to predict outcomes. Models are also mathematically computable.

About ten years ago, the term artificial intelligence fell into disrepute. Mainly because it failed to meet the expectations and demands of business.

Historical AI research was focused on cases such as making a robotic arm pick up a green ball and place it on a red block. This worked in labs, but failed in the real world, where perfect geometric shapes are rare. Thus was born the “science of uncertainty”�”along with “intelligent systems,” “soft computing,” “real-world computing,” “complex systems computing,” and “deep computing,” which was named after a certain chess playing machine.

Research projects Some projects and research that Myllymäki talked about:

B-course, a free data analysis server. B-course is based on Bayesian and simplistic causal networks, and features no user-defined variables. This is notable because most neural network tools compete by how many hundreds of variables they allow to be toggled. This, of course, makes them extremely difficult to learn and use. According to Myllymäki, B-course has had over 10 000 users, so CoSCo’s approach has been successful.
Next Generation Information Retrieval. Besides building a core search engine to compete with Google, CoSCo wants to use natural language processing and (probabilistic) statistical modeling (PROSE) to refine searching. CoSCo’s search projects include: Search-in-a-Box, topic-specific search, mobile search, and collaborative search. Rather than compete with Google’s server farms, CoSCo plans to build a superpeer-based network of servers from different universities and institutions (Alvis). Myllymäki had interesting things to say about Google, but more about that later.
Mobile device location. Rather than being based on traditional basestation triangulation, CoSCo’s system uses antenna signal strengths in low powered, consumer antenna equipped devices, such as mobile phones. Two field tests were conducted in Manhattan in 2001 and 2002, so the system provably works in high urban environments where tall buildings interfere with both GPS and traditional basestation triangulation positioning methods. The system has been commercialized by Ekahau, which uses it to locate devices on WLAN networks. “We’ve got millions of dollars from grannies from Florida, ” Myllymäki joked about Ekahau’s venture capital funding.
The MDL Research site. Minimum description language was founded by Jorma Rissanen, a HIIT Fellow and a professor emeritus at the Tampere University of Technology.

Unattributed quote, paraphrased: By 2010, there will be over one yottabyte (10²⁴) of data online (on the Internet and in corporate intranets).

We need both mathematicians and great hackers

Researchers must be very careful when creating intelligent systems. When working with a small sample group or in a closed environment, there is the danger of making the system over-taught or over-learned (ylioppinut, in Finnish). An over-taught system will give you perfect results within its own test data, but will choke when given new [incongruous, as in real-world] data.

Intelligent systems research overlaps algorithm and information systems research. But one way that intelligent systems differs from other fields is that it can’t reformulate its problems. Many times research problems turn out to have complex and ugly solutions that can be made into beautiful and elegant formulas by restating the problem. While I like beautiful mathematical formulas, real-world problems can’t be jiggered.

For example, in the mobile device location problem, the interference of tall buildings could have been eliminated by increasing the power of the device’s antenna. This is a typical engineer’s answer. But mobile phones don’t have powerful enough batteries or antennas. We want to create solutions that work now.

At CoSCo, we need all kinds of people. Besides guys who like to prove new mathematical formulas, we also need great hackers. Most of the people at CoSCo have been there for over ten years, so there’s alot of long-term involvement.

Intelligent systems is fun field. But it’s not only fun and games, we are reliant on outside funding, so we need to achieve results that work.

A whiff of paranoia and a dash of recklessness

Information retrieval is so fundamental to networks that, as nice and useful as Google is, we can’t afford leave it rely solely on an American corporation.

Myllymäki’s slides had quite a striking collection of bullets on Google. I didn’t catch them all, but here’s the top of the list:

Google’s immortal cookie (expires in 2038)
Google records all it can
Google retains all data indefinitely
Google ignores privacy policy questions
Google hires spooks (NSA)

What exactly Myllymäki meant by these wasn’t all clear, but he did say that these issues are taken very seriously by CoSCo senior research scientist Wray Buntine, a former Google employee. There was also a link to Google Watch.

“We want to do to Google what Linux did to Microsoft.”

What if Google started giving preferencial treatment to American companies over European ones? The EU understood this: as soon as we asked them this question, the money started coming in. (The Alvis superpeer semantic search project is EU funded.)

While the Google stuff sounded almost paranoid, it constrasts sharply with what Myllymäki almost off-handedly said about the ethical considerations of their research.

We’re kind of like the scientists who developed the atom bomb. We don’t think about the ethical ramifications of how our research will be applied. I hope someone does.

Suomenkielisi� kirjoja verkossa

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 17:26:57 +0200

Suomenkielisi� kirjoja Project Gutenbergiss�. Via Jaska.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:33:47 +0200

The University of Virginia’s ebook library contains Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Revolution Betrayed

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 15:29:24 +0200

While there’s little chance I’ll ever read it, Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed in available online.