Monday, November 7, 2016

Watson, Beep...Bleep...

Ever since I started using Texas Instruments sensor tags interface with IBM Watson, I have been an audience of this fascinating and uniquely-amazing service. I tried other similar services but Watson-Cloud stood out in terms of it's performance. Digging deeper into this fascination, I went ahead and analyzed my blog posts with Watson tone analyzer.

It seems I have been angry in most of my blog-posts, Excessively Joyous is others, and unrealistically sad in some. I have been consistently open and conscientious with all of my posts, as per Watson, while Confidence varied from 0.20-0.60.
It's difficult to tell if Watson analysis is right or if I really was angry while writing those posts. But that is not a concern. The gap between our understanding may never be resolved. Not unless Watson can let me spawn a NN for my stuff and sync it up only with what's going on in my head.

A global brain may never be able to solve few things in totality which a multitude of local brains can, Perhaps.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Paradigm-Embrace

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.
- Srinivasa Ramanujan ( The Mathematician ).

It's true some-equations do evoke an expression of a divine thought. Off-lately there is much traction around a paradigm called Deep-Learning. It's a field of AI which has not only revived the idea of artificially designed intelligence, but also, may as well, be the beginning of a whole new world of cognition. This article will not suit well with some who are considering the third wave of AI as yet another wave, and are confident that this one like it's predecessors will get subdued with time.

Revival of this field of thought is attributed to a very smart and subtle tweak by Prof. Hinton and others, which essentially utilizes fractal based layering of deep layers for reduced complexity and increased relevance. Like various other designs in nature fractal nature seems to be a key for information processing.

Information around us is exploding at an exponential rate, but this growth, instead of being random, may be following a fractal evolution path. If so, intelligent designs similar to Deep-learned-nets will provide a framework for following this growth, and most importantly will help nudge this explosion towards a relevant future direction.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

The Listener

Listening is an art of correlation. It brings together the three attributes of attention namely selection, motivation, and sustenance together. The act of 'paying attention', which otherwise seems random(in terms of what, where and when) gets organized and streamlined by effectively listening. This is not necessarily for a sound(as in hearing), but for any kind of reception (vision, thought, feeling, or faith).

There is an initiative started by Roger Nelson of Princeton university called Global-Mind or GCP(Global Consciousness Project). For those unaware, the project has a set of time-synchronized Random Number Generators(eggs), placed at different locations all around the globe. These RNGs generate a random number every second and report their data to a central location. The central location groups and statistically analyses the data, to generate few parameters like the z-score for each egg. The z-value is then arranged in a tapestry of colored-dots, as below. Each dot represents score from an individual egg(horizontally) against time(vertically).  

Since the numbers generated are random, there should be no correlation among them, so you should not see any visible pattern on the tapestry. On the contrary, the project found that on specific dates there were indeed some patterns found, and these dates corresponded to massive events around the globe. Events like earthquakes, global tragedy, or New year celebrations seemingly deviate these random generators from their norm, and correlate their outputs in a mysterious way.  Essentially, when a large number of people are being receptive to a global event, these eggs start to show significant correlation.

There is no scientifically known reason for why these deviations happen. but they do. Some-One is listening to everything and everyone around us after-all.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Head-and-Shoulder

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” 
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Euro seem to have fallen out of limelight against dollar. Not long ago, it was being dreamed and debated as a replacement of USD as the currency of choice for trade and reserve. Thanks to eurozone policies, this dream doesn't seem to be coming true, anytime soon. Stability is one of the key ingredients that EURO has lacked in recent times. This post, however, tries to cover the expected future of EUR against USD, and it seems its going downhill. How far is the obvious question. If we look at the historical prices, since it's inception, against dollar, there is a very obvious pattern to it. The pattern as technical analyst call it as the head-and-shoulders.

The red line forms the base with the head ( the circle in orange ) that rests over two shoulders ( the circles in red ). This pattern is bearish in nature, and in most of the scenarios causes prices to fall lower. If this is the case, the price should breach the red-line and fall to the next support level(0.6 by 2020). 
Alternatively, the blue and the red line establish a channel, and the prices should bounce off the red-line and approach the blue line(1.84 by 2022).  This is only half of the story, the other half depends on the eurozone fundamentals and the red-line. 

The world actually looks confusing through a looking-glass. 

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Embedding Excellence

About 10 years ago, and around the same time, we had to shutdown our telematics start-up because of lack of operating capital. Even though the company was trying to establish a footing in the network of embedded devices market ( pervasive computing, as it was called back then ), it lacked the desired infrastructure and the required capital to allow for experimentation. Anyhow, this post is not about a failed start-up.
This post is about the incoming tsunami called Internet-of-Things. The idea of interconnected devices  , in everything, capturing and relaying information for analysis to AI-backend, in the cloud, has just started to churn the investment and tech-world. Google's acquisition of Nest, and Verizon's acquisition of  Hughes Telematics will vouch for the effects of this expected mayhem, and this is only the tip of what follows next. I call this mayhem, because this will brings giants from technology, telecom, automotive, industrial/home automation, services and few others at loggerheads with each other.  I believe, IOT will not only enable ubiquitous computing, but also will establish a platform for future innovations.
There is a pattern in financial technical analysis, called as Elliot Waves. I don't know why it occurs, some say it occurs based on human psychology, but that's left to debate. The key is that it occurs.


The 3rd wave is supposed to be the longest lasting and most rewarding. If we look at the charts of major indices from around the world starting 1970-1980, we'd notice this pattern shaping up in most of them. The Wave2 for this pattern seem to correspond to the dent put in by the 2009 fallout. 

Imagine IOT riding the elliot 3rd wave, connecting the world in a manner it's was always supposed to be connected, and thus paving way for a greater collaborative effort to achieve better resource utilization for solving some of the critical issues that planet may face in future.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Flixomatic

There is a story written recently, with the net and about flix. The story was written at the time when the network space was still ruled by telephone people from 1905, and television people from 1940(the troubled times). As with any other story, this one too had it's share of criticism and skepticism, well to a point where it was almost at the verge of being wiped-out from the slate.
There are three reasons I am writing this post:
1) I have been an audience of Netflix story for quite some time now( perhaps, one of the initial few ).
2) I shorted NFLX back in March, and got a 400% return on investment by May. So I feel obliged towards those on whose behalf I made a positive trade.
3) CBS and HBO are launching their own Net story online, with an expectation to cash on the decreasing popularity of traditional media distribution. I think they are wrong, or at-least CBS is.

A device agnostic-personalized interface is the key ingredient of this story. Switching web-address or mobile app to watch different content doesn't suit well for overall user experience. And when you will multiply a convenient user-experience with a very large number, you will realize the impact of this user-story.

What is there to imagine here, you'd ask.
A 1000$ NFLX in two years perhaps, I'd say.