On dining experience

I had to post this:

Dining in the Dark

It's an interesting article about a restaurant in L.A. that serves food in complete darkness. Apparently it's the latest thing in Europe, but just now arriving in the US. It must be really odd!

iPhone and the web

So now that the iPhone is out, I'm preparing to start seeing pages that were built for the iPhone, with a fancy logo in the bottom or on the side saying "iPhone optimized". Actually, Apple already has instructions for it: Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone. It has some interesting limitations like:

• Mouse-over events
• Hover styles
• Tool tips
• Flash

Flash is what really caught my attention, actually. Adobe is working really hard to push their Flex framework. Can this be an important challenge for people? Not that it can kill Adobe's framework, unless somebody comes with a new framework that works on the iPhone. That could make things interesting.

Anyway, just musing about technology, while I need to get back to working on a paper that has been on my table to work on for over a month now. Time to get to it.

Strange curve fitting

This is a cool article on Cosmic Variance:

The Best Curve-Fitting Ever

It shows that interpretation is everything when looking at real data. And you have to add to it that when you are reading a news article you never know when you are looking at real data or not.

Second Life and the future of virtual worlds

Ok, I promise it's the last post of the evening. This is a report about Mitch Kapor's talk about the future of Second Life and how it's wonderful:

Second Life chairman's stump speech takes us down the rabbit hole

It it quite interesting. I did go around Second Life once or twice. With this very limited experience, I can't say I've enjoyed it too much. But from what I've been hearing about it, it seems intriguing to say the least. We'll see where it takes us, I guess. Mitch is a crazy visionary with more money than he probably can correctly spend around. But he should keep his ideas coming, as one day we might get something useful out of it! :-)

Very strange article - the power of pheromones

This is a very strange article from nature.com:

Powerful urine is mind-altering

It talks about how strong pheromone smell can cause neurons to grow. It's just strange...

A month of half-finished posts

I guess I gave up on trying to write long and interesting posts. I have tried at least a half dozen of them, from search engines (reaction to this sort-of interesting article on ComputerWorld), to contextual ontologies, to photography (I've been trying Aperture and Lightroom - I do prefer Aperture simply because I'm much more interested in photo organization than adjustments), to responsibility. But I never finished any of them, so I decided to just write about what is going on with my life lately.

I've been busy - busy and planning on being busier in the next few months. I have something like 5 trips planned from now to early October. The most interesting of them is the one at the end of September: Yellowstone. I always wanted to go there, and now I'll finally make it there (I hope - air and hotels are already booked). It's exciting.

Work has been a little on the chaotic side. Maybe because I'm getting a little tired, maybe it's just because there are launch dates around and lots of projects coming down the pipeline. Many exciting things, many scary open problems. Coming from a research background I'm always attracted to the open problems - attracted and full of ideas about what to do and how to do things. But I know deep inside that it's all going to take a lot of time, a lot of energy, and maybe nothing will really come out of it. So I get psychologically scared away (yes, I didn't even count the number of projects I've started on my computer at home and didn't get much anywhere).

It's a little sad sometimes not to be able to follow-through with an idea. You start, get excited about it, spend time to setup the environment to work on it and then that's where you get. In the end what I see is that I isolate myself from things, and don't get anything accomplished to compensate this isolation.

Oh, well, that's how it works. Now it's time for me to concentrate on something else and, maybe, just maybe, reply to some emails that have been sitting in my inbox for over a month now...

Silly or what? Ebay vs. Google

Isn't this just silly:

EBay pulls ads from Google's U.S. ad network

I don't know too much of the context here, but just by looking at this article it seems like something is wrong about the age of the people that decide things on those companies...

Sun, barbecue and flash face

In the end the weather forecast for yesterday was so static that I considered not very useful and quite time-consuming to enter it every day. The day was quite sunny with a high about 80˚F... Perfect barbecue weather. There were about 30-34 people here and quite a lot of food. The only thing that didn't quite work so well is that I was a little to quick on starting the charcoal grill and it ended up being a little too cold (the vegetarians/koshers were not very well fed from the grill).

Anyway, after a long night of sleep (I don't even know how many hours I slept last night... Something like 9, I think), I went around today looking for something interesting and found something that was quite intriguing to me:

Ultimate Flash Face

It's a "simple" (as a concept, quite complex implementation) flash website that allows you to create a face. So I've spent about 30 minutes trying to generate faces for people I knew from memory and... I wasn't able to! Probably it comes with the Y chromosome or something like that. Quite disappointing...

What is in for me today? Well, I have another party later in the day and some work to do. I also will try to go for a bike ride to try out my new bike, but I'm not sure this will actually happen. I don't know if I'll have time for it.

I knew I was going to miss a day...

Well, at least I'll make it less than two days. Here is the current forecast for next Saturday's weather:

Weather.com: Partly cloudy, high 82°F, low 54°F, chance of precipitation 10%

AccuWeather.com: Partly sunny, High: 74°F Low: 54°F

WeatherBug.com (only partial): Mostly sunny, high 75°F

University of Washington: Not really sure where their forecast comes from, and also I'm not sure how to interpret it, so I'll paste it in and then think about the interpretation some other time: SATURDAY...MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE MID 70S TO LOWER 80S. && TEMPERATURE / PRECIPITATION PUYALLUP 60 43 70 / 50 40 10 TACOMA 60 42 69 / 50 40 10 SEATTLE 59 48 66 / 50 40 10 BREMERTON 59 42 68 / 50 40 10 EDMONDS 58 47 66 / 50 50 10 EVERETT 57 47 65 / 50 40 10 $$

KiroTV.com (also partial): mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 70s to lower 80s.

KOMO TV (also partial): mostly sunny. High 77°F

I guess that's it... Now writing this takes a lot of extra time, but I'll keep trying. One difference now is that there is no rain forecast on any of them. There was no rain forecast for today but I woke up and it's raining...

Anyway, yesterday was a busy day. I even got a phone call from a friend that I haven't talked to in a LONG time. But I missed the call! I'll try to call him later today, and will write about it some other time (some odd coincidences that I've decided to discuss when I know more details).

Continuing the weather countdown

Not many changes today (as of 9:20 PM PST):

Weather.com: Mostly Cloudy, max 70°F, min 51°F, chance of precipitation 10%

AccuWeather.com: Cooler with rain, High: 62°F, Low: 47°F

Countdown for the barbecue

So on next Saturday Amy and I are hosting a barbecue here at home. Barbecues are fun, but they tend to be very susceptible to weather variations. So, just because I'm a scientist, I decided to start a countdown with the weather forecast from multiple sources and see how they vary as we get closer to the date.

Today, May 25, 12:40 AM:

Weather.com: Mostly cloudy, low 55˚F, high 72˚F, precipitation chance 10%

Accuweather.com: Rain, low 49˚F, high 64˚F

Each source is a little different in the way they provide weather. Some only have a 7-day forecast, so I'll try to keep adding them as they enter the range. I'll just hope that weather.com is more correct than accuweather.

Brainstorming

Lately one of my favorite things to do at night is to just pick up a subject and brainstorm about it, writing down whatever I feel like is relevant. It's quite interesting, because after I finish the activity I read back what I've written and enjoy how naive and contradictory all my ideas are.

Let me give you a hypothetical example. Let's say that today's subject is knowledge acquisition. So I start by writing:

- Knowledge is defined by the relationship between elements
- There are no elements, just the relationships
- The absolute is defined by a relative sense to what is culturally or personally defined as the absolute point

And there is goes... It's a fusion of not very actionable pieces of ideas. Not very exciting then, but it continues, and gets worse:

- Branch traversal is interrupted when relationships are not found or when they become too low in interest to continue
- Interest is defined by the types of relationships between things
- Types are also relationships to moods or goals

Conclusion, I'm back to saying that there have to be some absolute elements to knowledge: here the "moods and goals". How can you think of knowledge without being able to point to something and say: the book... the table... the book is on the table (sorry for you native English speakers).

Anyway, it's fun. And what makes it more interesting is that I don't expect to get anything out of it. I'm through with creating a new project every other day like a couple of weeks ago. Time to relax and just keep my mind active.

Talking about keeping my mind active, I was reading a paper earlier today: "Mining Nonabiguous Temporal Patterns for Interval-Based Events" by Shin-Yi Wu and Yen-Liang Chen. It's an interesting paper where the authors propose methods to find patterns on the relations between interval-based events by classifying pair-wise relations using a very simple set of 7 possible relations. It's pretty and all, but when you get to real world case, the stock analysis, they make a whole set of simplifying transformations that make the problem, let's say, silly. They use three "event types": (1) the stock price increases for at least 3 days, (2) the stock price decreases for at least 3 days and (3) the stock price increases and decreases at least 3 times. Also they discuss 3 period lengths: week, month and season. Talk about arbitrary definitions here. All stock prices go up and down at least 3 times in a week. They usually do that in a 5 minute period.

In any way, there are some interesting ideas in the paper, like the process to try and predict stock movement with their correlation patterns that was found. Interestingly some of their graphs show an almost random predictive accuracy for the interesting things and very good accuracy for behaviors like "season trends". Not very meaningful, I guess. Also what I liked about the paper that sparked the brainstorming that I've mentioned before is that what they mine is not the events themselves, but the relationship between the events.

Learning using generative approaches

On my way back home today (much earlier than usual), I started thinking about learning methods. Learning is both one of the most interesting things that you can think of in the computer science side of the world, but also one of the most traveled paths. Everybody wants to teach their computer to be a little smarter and not expect to just repeat what you say.

So, with all this already done, why did I decide to think about it? Do I have an answer to the machine learning problem? Yea, right! I never have answers, but I do have questions and the will to read papers and pursue things that make my evenings more meaningful. And today what I'm looking at are generative models.

Like with all research, you have to start with defining what you mean by the names you use. So, the generative models that I'm talking about are the ones that the system itself generates inputs to itself. The idea behind it is that you learn by doing it. Not necessarily actually doing it, but by rehearsing doing it inside your world model, your brain. Actually, we are very good at that! We can even understand intangibles, like other people's emotions, by trying to map their experiences and facial expressions to what we would do and determine what we would be feeling if we did it, thus what the person should be feeling.

Also, another interesting example is why are people usually scared during scary movies, or sick during bloody scenes? It's because we are constantly trying to understand it by applying what happens to ourselves and we do feel scared, we do feed the sickness of our pain that isn't there.

So, back to computers: I believe (like many other researchers that have tackled this problem) that one of the key methods for robust learning (and I'm not talking here of any learning - there are many ways for computers to learn, some very good), is to allow our learners to replay and internalize what happens.

This is much easier said than done, actually. It's very easy to think of learning in the normal learning way: synchronous. You present a case and potentially the answer or a hint about the answer and you let the learner take one step towards learning the model. Then you present the next one and so on. The problem of generative models is that the "will to learn" has to be an action from the learner. The learner should determine what it wants to learn and maybe generate what it thinks it should learn.

This post is already getting much longer than anybody should handle, so I'll try to make it easier and think of an example. Let's say that you want to teach a computer to play Sudoku.

Supervised method:
The "teacher" shows a Sudoku puzzle and then a solution (that can be a step towards the solution, or a piece of the puzzle with a step towards the solution). Then it shows another puzzle and a solution. It keeps showing different puzzles (well, sometimes you can repeat a puzzle to make sure it takes another step towards the solution of that puzzle) and solutions until you decide to stop and show some new puzzles and ask for the solution to see if it learned.

Reinforcement learning:
This is actually a type of supervised learning. It's focus is either on delayed gratification: you let the computer try a couple of things and then you zap it if it's not doing very well; or you give it candy if it's doing well. Also another possibility is not providing the next correct step, but just say if it's right or wrong. It feels much more like nature teaches animals, but it is limited to what saying right or wrong can make you learn. My Ph.D. research started with looking at reinforcement learning techniques and they are slow to learn and usually not very robust (well, if you can claim robustness on something that converges in way too many iterations)

Unsupervised learning:
In this type, you allow the computer to see the different games and let it find patterns in them by itself. Then it can use these patterns to solve other games. It's usually also based on showing the learner a set of examples but not saying anything about them. It's interesting, but it's usually very limited in what it can be applied to. I'm not sure it would create a good Sudoku player.

Generative learning:
In this case you can start with any of them methods. But then you allow the learner to either pass back to the teacher a whole new puzzle and ask for a solution, or request a recall of a specific puzzle, or even stop looking for puzzles and trying to predict what the next puzzle would be. Actually prediction is a very interesting consequence of these types of approaches. You are not really any more trying to answer the question like A + B = ?, but you are now trying to look at things like A + ? = C. You know what C should be because of your learning, but now you are trying to find other Bs that satisfy the same model. Then you try to look at other As. And then you try to vary C and look again. You build the model by constructing the question and not the answer.

Again, as you must have already realized, I quickly left the realm of Sudoku. So you can't try to implement what I've just written here. Yes, and I'm aware that nobody even thought of doing it besides me - and I haven't actually implemented anything myself, just written a lot of notes on OmniOutliner about what questions I'm trying to answer. And, of course, with no answers themselves. Things like:

• How to make a learner use a 4x4 Sudoku as a learning ground for a 9x9?
• Should the learner actually learn position and movement too? E.g., should it interact with the outside world like: show me the element to the right of the element I've just seen
• Should learning involve separate learning modules for bad and good examples?
• How much can you predict before seeing an example? (how much should you learn from the instruction manual - sort of like the ontology duality of intent/extent)

Oh, well... At least I have fun and keep my mind occupied! :-)

The public web

I was reading the news this morning and I couldn't let this one get away without me posting it on my blog:

Woman denied degree because of MySpace profile

A classic!

There are lots of interesting things that happens in a world where things you do are more publicly accessible. It's similar to the keynote speech by Jon Kleinberg I've heard during the last SIGIR: all the 6-degree-separation endless discussion has to be revalidated. Now that social networking sites makes your social network publicly visible, all numbers and goals change. It's much easier for a person living in a cave to have hundreds of friends. On the same lines, it's much easier for a person that is trying to know more about another person to find people or direct evidence out there. In the past you had to hire a private investigator or things like that.

I could now start reciting a number of science fiction authors that predicted this shift on the concept of privacy, but I'll just end this post and start my day.

So many ideas, so little time...

Lately I have been suffering from the old idea burst. I'm trying to write down all the ideas and all the things I have to do for each of the ideas, but I feel bad that I never get to actually execute any of them. My ideas don't come from a vacuum - it's worse, they compound on projects that had not yet been finished.

For example, I'm working on a metadata vision document. As I start to work on it, I decide that I need some examples of what I'm saying, so I start a project on building a sample ontology with the concepts that I'm trying to outline in the document. Then this weekend I look at what I'm doing and decide that this won't be enough. I need an application that makes use of all this structured (or not-so-structured -- and that's part of the document) information and does something fun, like organizing your purchases, or helping on researching for products. And there I went...

Another thing that is going on is that one paper that I've sent to a journal only now came back (about 1.5 years after sending) with some requests for changes. So I went through the paper and found out that some references are clearly outdated and that I need to work on the paper again. So there I went to sketch out the changes that I need...

I've also worked a little bit on "low-level" work stuff, like cleaning up things that I needed to clean from a long time ago. A good thing is that at least this I got done this weekend!

Anyway, that's all I have to say right now. I have something like two posts in Draft now that I can't seem to be able to finish them. One is a little long-ish, but the other probably is too centered on a couple of experiences I had in the last few weeks and I'm always a little worried on the wording I use when talking about other people.

The year of the babies

After having two posts never leave the "draft" stage, here I am trying to write now something "lighter"... Hopefully I'll be able to finish this one quickly.

So, yesterday I got news that a 6th person within my close circle of friends/co-workers is pregnant! My first reaction was to think that this is normal, because I'm just getting in the age that people tend to start to develop their families, so my friends that should have about the same age as I have are starting to have babies. But this is not really true. Only 3 out of the 6 are actually in the same age range as I am. Some of the others are actually not even on their first kid.

It is so odd... There must be some sort of overarching psychological component to this change. Something about world politics/economics that hinted people that maybe it's a good time to start spreading. I went around to search for people observing this phenomena with better ideas than me, but I'm still unable to find evidence. Oh, well, maybe not enough people blog about this - maybe I should start.

Alive

Yes, yes, I'm still alive. With a lot to say, but not much time to say a lot. Life has been quite busy lately mostly with work-related things. Last weekend I spent a whole lot of time doing a procedure to make sure that people can correctly sell Jewelry on Amazon (whatever you want to make out of it). And I still can't say I have slept enough to compensate.

I've been looking around for things I should know that I don't have many books about. My latest thing was "Categorical Statistics", so I went and bought two books on it:

Categorical Data Analysis (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics): A book that has a good coverage of the basics about categorical statistics. Seems straight-forward and not too difficult to read.

Bayesian Models for Categorical Data (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics): As all my experience with Bayesian statistics, this book is much denser. Not that easy to read, but also seems quite interesting. I'm still trying to go through it to extract the core of its teachings, but I keep having flashbacks of my Bayesian Decision Theory class that used Box & Tiao's book. Hard class, quite a good instructor. A little too focused on Linear Models, as the professor had written a book about them, but very good.

Anyway, that's my life lately. I've been trying to do some fun things from time to time too, but most of them have been to play random computer games and getting tired for them after an hour or so. Oh, well...

Desperate people with money spend money desperately

I found this quite strange:

Microsoft: Use our search, we'll give you incentives

Microsoft using the fact that they have leverage with companies to get what they want. The question is whether companies have enough power over their own employees to do anything. But I'd have to admit that sometimes I do use Live Search and... I can't say I've been satisfied with the answers that it gives. This is not a scientific conclusion, but subjectively there is a lot of room for improvement yet. I do like that they have done a lot on trying to understand some types of questions and provide dictionary/encyclopedia answers to them, but the search itself is just not too good.

Getting back to a world that has changed

I will have to admit that this weekend I haven't done much. My neck has been really bothering me and I haven't been able to do anything for any length of time. I could be able to lie down and watch TV for some time, but I don't allow myself to do that.

So, in these brief periods of going around and trying to do something, I went around online and checked how PC games are doing. It's been sometime that I don't look at what is out there and I felt that it would be a fun thing to look.

In this looking around, I found some suggestions that I should try the Supreme Commander demo. So there I went to download it...

The first thing I realized when I wanted to download it is that all websites require you to register to download (with exception to a couple that allow you to do the download anonymously but with a restricted bandwidth). And then they would put you in a queue if you don't pay for the service.

I found this very strange at first. After Google, the Internet for me was free and anonymous! But when I realized that the demo that I was downloading was actually a 1 GB file I started to understand it. 1 GB download!? That's very ridiculous! No wonder if they don't restrict what people download they will spend a lot of money on bandwidth so that people can get a software that contains no advertisement (except from the reminder that it's a demo and you should buy the full version). Tough business model.

In any way, I did download the game (in about 20 minutes) and played it for some time. It's not bad, but I found that I needed some more knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts. It was hard to organize an offensive (or defensive force) without being able to select all, or a well-defined part of all my bombers or interceptors, and so on.

But in general it does fall in the basic build and attack type of game (at least in the first campaign level). You have one type of foe at a time: airplanes that you need to use the interceptor for; ground troops that kill your airplanes that you need to use ground troops for (and move them using a transporter); ground turrets that decimate your ground forces that you need bombers for; ground-to-air turrets that you need ground forces for; and so on. So the idea is: find what you are up against, build the forces and deploy them in order.

Anyway, time to move. I have a LONG day ahead of me. Things this weekend didn't work as well as they should and my hurting neck is just making me tired and not very productive. I have no time to be unproductive! (you might be thinking - if he had a lot of work to do, how come he played games this weekend? Well, most of my work right now is to wait and monitor a build that is taking an amazing 10 hours to break... Not very exciting)

Learning about Kaplan and Geiger

Time is going by and there isn't much I have to talk about. I've been busy doing a lot of random things, like buying stocks a couple of days before the market dropped, working on the garden, having so many meetings in a day that I don't even have time to have lunch... And life keeps going on.

One thing that I've been paying attention to lately is a very interesting lecture I'm listening to: Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to 20th Century. I guess what is interesting me the most is not really the "religious" or sociological side of it, but only that I'm now starting to make sense out of names that were used during some informal conversations with some friends in the past. Suddenly I know what they meant when they were discussing Abraham Geiger or Mordecai Kaplan! It's interesting how Brazilian Jewry is so different from all this. It's so much more conservative. Even some synagogues that are considered "Reform" make it the norm for men and women to sit separately and there are no women being part of the service itself. This has been abandoned a long time ago every in the Conservative movement in the US and Europe.

It's been interesting. Not really life-changing, maybe because I'm not in the right mood for a life-changing decision right now, but definitely I've been learning things.

Alright, time to accept that I'm falling asleep on my keyboard right now and go to sleep.