Kick Off:
As the world grieved the shootings in Orlando, an important ethics question is gaining attention in the technology and data world. ISIS has been very active in social media and other online sites recruiting followers, so how can data modeling be used to detect impending terrorist attacks? A study released in Science Magazine on Thursday provided some interesting answers. The researchers analyzed data collected from websites where ISIS is active. They were able to identify escalation in activity before ISIS attacks. This piece last year in the MIT Technology Review gives an inside look at how ISIS uses the Internet, and I suspect we will see more examination of this.
Given that people affiliated with ISIS are starting to livestream on Facebook after their attacks, it would be interesting to see if their online activity before the attacks would have given hints of their planned actions. It seems only a matter of time until the technology industry is asked to play a bigger role in this fight. With so much of it playing out online, data will play a key role.
In the News:
There’s the big Microsoft acquisition that everyone’s talking about — its $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn – but there’s another smaller one that’s interesting too. On Thursday, the company announced it had acquired a 7-person company called Wand Labs. This is a company that specializes in using voice-commands to run apps, removing the need to tap open and operate apps on your smartphone. It’s part of a broader push in the tech industry to use bots to let users control things by talking (think of Amazon’s Alexa, Facebook’s Messenger and Microsoft’s Cortana). But it’s also part of a transition in the industry away from experiences that are set within one app, or even within one device, into experiences that criss-cross through all the technology you are using. As this good Fast Company analysis of the Wand acquisition says, it’s about integrating “disparate apps and services via a conversational layer.”
It’ll be interesting to see how the different tech giants approach this transition into a more integrated world. As Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times smartly noted of Apple this week, Apple has prized its devices, but “many of its competitors have been moving beyond devices toward experiences that transcend them. These new technologies exist not on distinct pieces of hardware, but above and within them.”
The way all of this new technology works, of course, is through artificial intelligence that is trained on masses of data. To me, one of the best ways to follow this trend will be through watching the company Viv. What is Viv? Read this great John Battelle essay.
On Thursday, Google announced a new artificial intelligence and machine learning research center. Though Google is already doing lots in this space, this heralds a bigger, more coordinated investment. Hopefully, all this investment will result in new open-source technology for the broader machine learning community, as it did with Google’s powerful technology TensorFlow.
$50 million just disappeared. On Friday, some of the people warning about the reliability of a new virtual currency project were proven right when a hacker zipped away with $50 million from it leaving only a taunting message. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization seems to be a cautionary tale now. After computer scientists warned about the holes in the currency system in May, one of its founders told Nathaniel Popper of The Times: “Of course this venture is fraught with risks” but “this technology represents the future of the Internet.”
In Industry:
Clean data. It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the cool ways we can model data and make it run faster. But the data itself that you input is so critical to the reliability of your findings. This is a thoughtful piece on how to think about the data that you input and how to help it be as clean as possible.
Transportation & AI:
You’ve heard a lot about driverless cars. But how about driverless driverless buses? With this, which the robot not only drives the bus but also serves as tour guide. That’s what IBM is experimenting with in Washington DC and Miami, and not only is it AI-driven, the buses are also printed on a 3-D printer. A full explanation here
Also…
Data and simulation are widely used in industrial engineering to design physical objects. A new advance in computational fluid dynamics (which is used to design things that interact with fluids, like propellers or chemical plans) makes it possible to more accurately simulate the physics at the boundaries between fluids and other objects. It’s easy to get excited about all this flashy new artificial intelligence. But we shouldn’t forget that massive computing power and data analysis have been driving industrial processes for a long time, and advances here can be quite valuable.
Quirky Corner:
Facebook is about to start tracking what stores you go into. This is so that advertisers get a sense of whether you are buying something after seeing their ad. Turn off the location services part of the Facebook app if you don’t want to be a Facebook data point.
And Amazon is working on training its virtual assistant, Alexa, to recognize emotions. So even if the humans aren’t comforting you when you are distressed about something, perhaps Alexa will.
What’s happening at Ufora:
Our colleague Alexandros Tzannes, who normally works remotely, was in town last week at our offices here in NYC. In addition to working on a number of our client projects, Alexandros spearheads our GPU computing effort (you can see some of his recent code here) which is making some exciting strides and will be ready for wider consumption later this summer. It was great to have him in New York!
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.
