Kick Off:
There’s a new chip out from scientists at MIT. The “Swarm” chip can speed up some algorithms many hundreds of times, and it does it by automatically splitting programs into many tiny pieces that run simultaneously on its “swarm” of processors. The best part is that programs don’t need extensive rewriting to use the new chip. This is an amazing accomplishment: normally, programmers have to completely redesign a piece of software to get these kinds of speedups.
Swarm caught my eye because some of the technical approaches it uses are similar to approaches we’ve implemented in Pyfora. In both cases, the goal is to achieve huge speedups without programmers having to do a lot of work. In Pyfora’s case, we did it by taking regular Python programs and disallowing certain kinds of operations that are hard to speed up. In Swarm’s case, they built a new chip architecture that’s incredibly efficient at handling some of these same issues.
I don’t know how long it will be before Swarm chips are commonplace, but there are some practical ideas in their implementation that I plan on incorporating into my own work in Pyfora. More importantly, our approaches are somewhat complementary – so if they do make Swarm chips available, running Pyfora on top of it will produce some truly amazing results. Congrats to the MIT team – it’s some beautiful work! There’s a very nice technical writeup about it here.
In the News:
The Russian government is trying to record everything going across the Russian internet and wants telecom and internet companies to make all user communications available to the government. Not only are there ethical questions, it’s quite doubtful that this is even technologically possible. It’s not clear that Russian ISP infrastructure can store so much data, and most web traffic is encrypted by software not in the control of the ISPs, so they can’t decrypt it. I’d hate to be the federal security agents that Putin just mandated get this done within two weeks!
You hear about Internet security a lot. And if you read this newsletter regularly, you hear about Quantum Computing a lot. They may not seem connected, but if Quantum Computing becomes a reality, it is so powerful that it will make it possible to decrypt secure internet transmissions. Google, of course, is preparing for that early. Here’s a good Verge story.
Snapchat is building in more advanced photo search to its tools. This newest one has “object recognition” in it. The interesting point: it runs on your phone, not in the cloud, which will be a major selling point for Snapchap users who have very private photos on their phones. What I think is interesting is this is one of the first uses of the new deep learning technology running on a phone. Google extended their machine-learning technology TensorFlow to run on iOS relatively recently.
In the world of open source software, Mozilla – the maker of the Firefox browser- is building a tool to to ingest the web-link-graph and provide recommendations. This is a bit like Google without an explicit search function. It will instead deduce your searches and proactively give you recommendations. Since Mozilla is driven by desire to keep the web open, it makes me wonder who will own all this data processing infrastructure and the data that comes out of it? Will that be open too? In any case, I am sure there will be some exciting technology to come out of this project, and since Mozilla is so committed to openness, we will hopefully all get to use it!
In Industry:
Can data solve the same-day grocery conundrum? It’s become common wisdom that it’s hard to turn a profit with same-day grocery delivery and many a start-up has failed at this. But Instacart says that data analysis is the key. Here’s a good interview with Jeremy Stanley, Instacart’s vice president of data science, about why.
Genetic data can be very helpful in medical research and lucrative, too. That DNA company – 23andMe – that was started by the ex-wife of a Google founder has been selling data about its customers to drug companies, MIT Technology Review writes.
Unrelated to 23andMe, Microsoft is experimenting with using DNA as a storage device. That means DNA might someday replace flash memory in your computer’s hard disk. Interesting stuff.
You may not think about it while you are jamming out, but data analysis is behind much of the music industry’s recent come back. This story does a good job explaining the Musical Genome Project, which turned music into structured data and more recent steps by Spotify to “deconstruct, analyze, and categorize music.”
Quirky Corner:
Just look in people’s eyes. That’s what Google plans to do with technology it’s building to use artificial intelligence to spot common diseases simply by scanning eye balls.
Uber as the new big brother? The company will use data to monitor its drivers.
Braxton McKee is the technical lead and founder of Ufora, a software company that has built an adaptively distributed, implicitly parallel runtime. Before founding Ufora with backing from Two Sigma Ventures and others, Braxton led the ten-person MBS/ABS Credit Modeling team at Ellington Management Group, a multi-billion dollar mortgage hedge fund. He holds a BS (Mathematics), MS (Mathematics), and M.B.A. from Yale University.
