Watching BREXIT odds live on “betfair”. Here, predicting a slight edge for “exit” a few minutes before the clinching votes come in.
Kick Off:
It was a crazy end of the week for many of our clients because the markets went into turmoil after the Brexit vote. Above is a screenshot I took Thursday night while the votes were being counted. It shows the betting markets. The results were predicted there many minutes before the BBC called the election. It’s interesting because we often use data to try to predict asset prices, but here, the prices themselves can be predictive of future events. Currently, the betting markets have Hillary winning the election at slightly less than 75%. Given what I saw on Thursday, I think this is where I’m getting my live election coverage!
In the News:
Kudos to engineers at the University of California Davis who announced this week their creation of the world’s first 1000 processor chip. This will have a great capacity for crunching large parallel datasets.
Social security payments for robots? Yep, only in Europe. There’s a draft motion in the European Parliament that would require companies that hire advanced robots to pay social security and other benefits on them. Given how many companies are using robots to cut costs, this sort of movement could change that equation. I just want to know: who gets to collect the benefits?
In Industry:
So as a data practitioner, I generally lean towards preferring to have more data about things. But there are times the consumer in me comes out, and this instance of a company tracking 100 million phone users without consent is one of those times. It’s great to see the rules being enforced.
Dr. Google is here. 1% of all searches on Google are medical symptoms and Google said this week that it will begin giving out health advice based on what you’re searching for.
It’s not just doctors who should fear what artificial intelligence is going to do to their jobs– it’s also housekeepers. Elon Musk’s A.I. Researchers are creating robots to do household chores.
I’ve been following the news out of the LIGO Observatory in Louisiana. This year, this big news has been the two gravitational waves the observatory discovered, the first observations of their kind. This week, the observatory said that the waves came from two big suns that formed 12 billion years ago. The part I find most interesting is the complex data simulations these researchers are using to figure all this out. They use what is called a “synthetic universe” which is a computer model that maps out stars colliding. This turns out to be hard to do – the wave-detector produced a bunch of data that researchers had to analyze, but before the synthetic universe model, it was not very clear how to analyze the data since we don’t know what we’re looking for. “Synthetic universe” is neat because it models both the stars colliding, and also the detector – that way we can tell what we should be looking for in the detector! It’s a great example of how some datasets require really sophisticated techniques to make sense of them.
A shout-out to the Fintech Innovation Lab, which Ufora was a part of last year. The NYC initiative graduated a latest group of companies this week. You can read about them here.
Quirky corner:
Let’s just reflect on the name of the machine learning company that Twitter just bought: Magic Pony Technology. Yes, that’s right. Maybe I need to rebrand.
What’s happening at Ufora:
I’ll be speaking at two events this week, so please come out and support the home team. First, I’m giving a talk about our open-source technology Pyfora at the New York A.I. meetup on Tuesday. The other speaker is a neuroscientist and his talk looks pretty great, so this should be a fun evening. Secondly, I’ll be a panelist on The Power of Big Data, an event hosted by Swissnex. You need tickets for this one, and I have a few, so let me know if you’d like to attend.
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.
