Category Archives: W – now

T - work, W - now

Business Turns to Ants and Algorithms in Search for Profit

Foraging ants are just one example. When finding food, they lay down pheromones to mark the route to and from their nest. If something disrupts the route, the next-best alternative is quickly found. It is, therefore, what is known as a “self-healing” route.

George Danner, director of UK analytics firm Torus Business Web, says an algorithm based on ant foraging is perfect for helping companies find the optimum route for getting their products from A to B.

He has worked with a US energy major to do just this, helping it ship oil across the Gulf of Mexico more efficiently

[…]

By using this approach, Mr Danner devised a process designed to help the UK criminal justice system process cases faster, by grouping together similar kinds of offences. To a mathematician, the judiciary is just like any other factory, with complex moving parts that interact on many different levels.

[…]

“As we sit here in 2012, we are almost unlimited in what we can do. The only limitations to solving the world’s problems are ignorance and apathy.”

 

Ref: Business Turns to Ants and Algorithms in Search for Profit – BBC News

T - politic, W - now

Using Twitter’s Sentiment Analysis for Predicting Stock Market

There are two central drivers of stock price demand—fundamentals (sales, revenues, profits, etc.) and how investors feel about fundamentals (sentiment). Sentiment tends to erratically drive short-term pricing, while the longer cycles move on fundamentals. If you talk to a buy-and-hold investor, like Warren Buffett, he will tell you short-term investing (day trading, for example) is a fool’s game—there is no predicting sentiment.

But Derwent Capital Management (DCM) thinks that may have been true, once, in ancient times before information technology enabled social networks. But now there is a wealth of hard data on real time sentiment. All one must do is set up an algorithm to mine it, process it, put it on a scale—in this case from 0 to 100—and sell it to retail investors.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Wondering what your favorite stock (or currency pair or commodity) is about to do? You need merely check the the DCM trading platform’s Twitter indicator.

 

Ref: Can Twitter Tell You When to Buy and When to Sell? – The SingularityHub

M - media refs, T - work, W - now

Algorithm that Design Structures Better than Engineers

 

You are watching an optimisation algorithm come up with the best design completely automatically. The outcome is greatest stiffness shape possible for a given amount of material. And amazingly it’s a nuanced truss that isn’t far removed from the look of most motorway bridges. That’s pretty reassuring, actually.

This sample 2D image was made with ToPy – open source Python ‘Topology Optimisation’ code.

 

Ref: Algorithms that design structures better than engineers – Jordan Burgess

T - war, W - now

Software Predicts Criminal Behavior

 

 

New crime prediction software being rolled out in the nation’s capital should reduce not only the murder rate, but the rate of many other crimes as well.
Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which individuals on probation or parole are most likely to murder and to be murdered.
In his latest version, the one being implemented in D.C., Berk goes even further, identifying the individuals most likely to commit crimes other than murder.
If the software proves successful, it could influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts.

[…]

Beginning several years ago, the researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 various crimes, including homicides. Using an algorithm they developed, they found a subset of people much more likely to commit homicide when paroled or probated. Instead of finding one murderer in 100, the UPenn researchers could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

 

Ref: Software Predicts Criminal Behavior – ABC News (via DarkGovernment)

T - domestic, W - now

The Google Effect

The Google effect is the tendency to forget information that can be easily found using internet search engines such as Google, instead of remembering it.
The phenomenon was described and named by Betsy Sparrow (Columbia), Jenny Liu (Wisconsin) and Daniel M. Wegner (Harvard) in July 2011.
Having easy access to the Internet, the study showed, makes people less likely to remember certain details they believe will be accessible online. People can still remember, because they will remember what they cannot find online. They also remember how to find what they need on the Internet. Sparrow said this made the Internet a type of transactive memory. One result of this phenomenon is dependence on the Internet; if an online connection is lost, the researchers said, it is similar to losing a friend.

 

Ref: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips – ScienceMag

T - politic, W - now

A New Approach to Decision-Making

How to make sense of Philadelphia’s City Council district map?

Even with the best of intentions, districting problems can be difficult to solve because they are so complex, says Kimbrough, who specializes in computational intelligence. The key to finding the best solution, he suggests, is to start with not one but many good solutions, and let decision makers tweak plans from there.

The team created a genetic algorithms that mimics evolution and natural selection of the various districts and proposes endless solutions/variations from just a few good beginnings.

The team selected then 116 of these variations which were very good. There is now material for human decision-makers to take out a decision out of these various decisions took by an algorithm.

This is an interesting example where humans and algorithms are working together to solve a problem.

“In the end, there are a lot of human judgments that go on here,” notes Murphy. “What reallyis that neighborhood? Can you split the wards?…. Generating one solution is not a good idea because there are all these side issues that you can’t represent mathematically. This always happens, whether in political districting or in commercial applications.”

 

Ref: A New Approach to Decision Making: When 116 Solutions Are Better Than One – Knowledge Wharton

T - domestic, W - now

Ray Kurzweil – Google Now

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus.

 

Ref: Google’s New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’ – TechCrunch

T - tech, W - now

How Artificial Intelligence Sees Us

 

Right now, there is a neural network of 1,000 computers at Google’s X lab that has taught itself to recognize humans and cats on the internet. But the network has also learned to recognize some weirder things, too. What can this machine’s unprecedented new capability teach us about what future artificial intelligences might actually be like

 

This is, to me, the most interesting part of the research. What are the patterns in human existence that jump out to non-human intelligences? Certainly 10 million videos from YouTube do not comprise the whole of human existence, but it is a pretty good start. They reveal a lot of things about us we might not have realized, like a propensity to orient tools at 30 degrees. Why does this matter, you ask? It doesn’t matter to you, because you’re human. But it matters to XNet.

What else will matter to XNet? Will it really discern a meaningful difference between cats and humans? What about the difference between a tool and a human body? This kind of question is a major concern for University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has written about the need to program AIs so that they don’t display a “lethal indifference” to humanity. In other words, he’s not as worried about a Skynet scenario where the AIs want to crush humans — he’s worried that AIs won’t recognize humans as being any more interesting than, say, a spatula. This becomes a problem if, as MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal has speculated, human-equivalent machine minds won’t emerge until we put them into robot bodies. What if XNet exists in a thousand robots, and they all decide for some weird reason that humans should stand completely still at 30 degree angles? That’s some lethal indifference right there.

 

Ref: How artificial intelligences will see us – io9
Ref: Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning – Google Research

T - war, W - now

Death by Algorithm : Which Terrorist should Disappear First?

 

 

The West Point Team have created an algorithm, called GREEDY_FRAGILE, it shows a greed of connection in between terrorists. The aim of the algorithm is to visualise who should be killed in order to weaken a network.

But could human lives be treated just as another mathematical problem?

The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.

In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behavior, interests and preferences. The peril of that approach, as in finance, was the subject of a recent book by Emanuel Derman, a former quant at Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Columbia University. Its title is “Models. Behaving. Badly.”

 

Ref: Death by Algorithm: West Point Code Shows Which Terrorists Should Disappear First – Wired
Ref: Shaping Operations to Attack Robust Terror Networks – United States Military Academy
Ref: Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition. – The New York Times