Category Archives: W – now

W - now

Ray Kurzweil joins Google as Director of Engineering

 

What are the future plans/agenda of Google? Knowing the views that Ray Kurzweil has on human beings (cf: singularity).

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.

“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”

 

Singularity Hub reached out to Kurzweil to learn what he and Google aim to accomplish. He told us, “We hope to combine my fifty years of experience in thinking about thinking with Google scale resources (in everything—engineering, computing, communications, data, users) to create truly useful AI that will make all of us smarter.”

 

Ref: Kurzweil joins Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing – Kurzweilai
Ref: Ray Kurzweil Teams Up With Google to Tackle AI – SingularityHub

T - politic, W - now

Data Cruncher Who Helped Obama Win

The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

 

Team Romney has therefore devised a clever app that finds which friends are most likely to be influential on Election Day, given their geography and history of Facebook political activity.

 

 

Ref: Inside the Secret World of the Data Cruncher Who Helped Obama Win – The Time
Ref: Wrath of the Math: Obama Wins Nerdiest Election Ever – Wired
Ref: Romney’s New Facebook App Knows Which Friends Are Most Influential – TechCrunch
Ref: Google, Facebook And Twitter Want You To Use Their Election 2012 Web Tools – TPM

T - war, W - now

WikiLeaked Data Can Predict Insurgent Attacks

And yet the military has spent millions developing predictive tools. They don’t work very well. Darpa’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System actually predicts few crises. Its predecessors, which date back to the 1980s, were arguably even more inaccurate. But those seek to predict big, sweeping geopolitical events. Researchers have had better luck estimating expected fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But predicting violent events with news reports as data?

Ref: WikiLeaked Data Can Predict Insurgent Attacks – Robert Beckhusen

T - domestic, W - now

Google Now

Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.

It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them.