A friend asked: What Blogs do you read?

Here are some of my favorites.

Kurzweil - Accelerating Intelligence - http://www.kurzweilai.net/  - very good insights into the evolving field of AI and Future of technologies

Lifehacker - http://lifehacker.com/ - Generally good and useful content

J.D. Meier's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/ - Very good content around Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices and now he has moved on to Azure area. He maintains a personal blog called “Sources of Insight - Skills for mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun” at http://sourcesofinsight.com/ - worth reading  

MSDN Blogs – http://blogs.msdn.com

Nick Malik’s Inside Architecture blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nickmalik/ - Good insights into Enterprise Architecture and general debate on value of EA etc.

Mashable - http://mashable.com/ - good commentary on social happenings

Some personal interest stuff - Engadget, Gizmodo, My Next and other similar blogs on consumer electronics

I do maintain (rather attempt to maintain and update) two blogs:

Blog Innowix - http://bloginnowix.blogspot.com/- Promoting my company

Nitya Nivedan (mostly for kids) - http://nityanivedan.blogspot.com/ - Some of the cool happenings in the world and pop culture items to expand their horizons

Content consumption in Social Web World

My content consumption style has changed significantly. I am more into Twitter feed and checking out the headlines on the blogs mentioned above and many more on my personalized iGoogle page which includes the latest news from multiple sources, finance and stock market pulse, my e-mails, Facebook updates, weather and few other things. If something interests me more then I click on the link and read the details. 

Otherwise, 6 to 8 word headlines (less than 100 characters!) is sufficient. ADHD has kicked in and finding that one long article and reading through has become more and more difficult.

That is why books are much better to read - on paper. Much less distractions and impulses to jump around. 

Your thoughts? 

Puzzle Party 2011 Conclusion

The Puzzle Party 2011 is over. It was held on Aug 6, 2011 at Kensington Metro Park Shelter C (Spring Hill Shelter). It was a hot and muggy day but it did rain a little during the afternoon. However, shelter was big enough to accommodate all the participants well.

We had approximately 50 participants ranging in age from 2 years all the way to 60+.


Read more at Google Site page: https://sites.google.com/site/puzzleparty2011/conclusion

Innowix Puzzle Party 2011

Welcome to 6th annual Innowix Puzzle Party. For those who haven't participated in past, please check out the arrangements and conclusion from 2008 party at http://sites.google.com/site/puzzleparty2008/Home.

Location: Shelter C - Kensington Metro Park, Milford, MI
Time: 11 AM onwards

We hosted Puzzle Party 2010 at New Jersey with friends who worked on the project with me. It was just held for couple of hours but it was loads of fun as usual (fun for me while they solved the puzzle and then fun for them when we talked about solutions!). That is why we didn’t have here in Detroit Metro area (and also that my partner-in-crime Puzzle Master Pattabi moved to California).

One of the promises we had made during the conclusion of 2009 was that we will entertain puzzles from the participants and Puzzle Masters will become participants for those puzzles. So, please bring your puzzles (be gentle please!). We will entertain at least one puzzle per team (may be more if time permits).

This time around, you will have nothing to bring. You are welcome to bring some games to play in the park.

Here’s the rough program:

11 to 1:30 – Gather, games and lunch (sponsored by Innowix)
2 – 4 – Puzzle solving
5 – Prize distribution
5:15 onwards - Games or go home

Send in your RSVP. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Hiren

IBM Watson leads way to Singularity but will have to learn Roboethics and obey Asimov’s 3 (and some) rules of Robotics to behave

Update 2: IBM's Watson site http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

Update 1:
Here's a YouTube video on how they built Watson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc
IBM is already working on applying Watson technologies to Healthcare. From IBM: "... a doctor considering a patient's diagnosis could use Watson's analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance's voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible. This could help medical professionals confidently determine the most likely diagnosis and treatment options."

Original post below...



This subject has been beaten to death by now and every geek is smiling with pride that a computer beat two human beings in the Jeopardy! challenge. It is an amazing feet for humans to create such a machine, teach it all the knowledge and teach it how to "listen" to answers and find the best question (yeah – that's how the Jeopardy! is played). Check out Day 2 on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLdkJpAtt1I. Alex also shows some of the hardware behind Watson.



This was a massive effort on IBM's part where they spent close to $100M for hardware and software. The hardware specs are impressive - (90 IBM Power 750 servers using 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores taking up almost as much space as was taken by Eniac – the first computer built in 1940s (just to keep things in perspective folks – in 70 years since we have machines which almost act like humans so imagine what next 30 years will bring? Read on – Singularity is almost here!).

The software is even more astonishing! Remember, you have to follow all the rules of Jeopardy! This means that you have to know

• What are the categories?
  
• What's the value of each question?
  
• Whose turn is it?
  
• How much to wager for the "Double Jeopardy!" question?
  
• Should I answer if the other contestants' answers were not correct?
  
• How much to wager for the "Final Jeopardy! Question"?
  

For the most part, these are simple algorithms to implement. The biggest issue is to understand Alex Trebek's spoken instructions, answers and any other jokes etc. to filter them out and create a machine understandable question to which it can go find an answer.

Watson did pretty well with factual questions but when the questions had some correlation (I really cannot explain but here's an example: The category was Computer Keys and the answer was "___ is where the heart is!". The question is "What is Home". Watson's potential matches were totally out of context).

Here's where our ability to "program" a computer to learn context and references falls short. How do you teach that? Well – how do you teach kids such things? Is this simile? Will it understand idioms and figure of speech? How about rhetorical expressions?

Well – those types of advanced "emotional" and "lateral thinking" aspects will take time to program into a computer. However, the time is not too far. Hopefully in my lifetime we will have an event known as Technological Singularity.

As per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity):

"A Technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and allege that a post-singularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of superintelligent entities."

Time magazine has covered this subject in their latest issue well.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html

The gist of it is that by 2045, we will have Technological Singularity (TS) and beyond that we cannot imagine (unless you really stretch your brain muscles!) where the new innovations will take us. Very interesting read – I highly recommend it. However, one of the key points which TIME didn't do enough justice is around Ethics and Morals for the time when we achieve TS and machines become self-aware and start building and innovating in unimaginable ways. It is like raising kids – you have to teach them right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil etc. Presumably our yardstick of good/bad or right/wrong are generally accepted and will be so in future too! But the point is that somebody will have to teach these computers these emotional items so that when we get to TE, we are not staring at SkyNet from Terminator which knowingly or unknowingly tries to eliminate humankind.

This brings me to the Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics).

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
   
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
   
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
   

These are very simple rules and if you program the Robot's OS (rather put these instructions in the CPU itself!) then we should not have to worry about it too much. Now, there will always be cases where a robot may have to "pick between the lesser of the two evils" – meaning making a choice in a situation where it has to figure out possible courses it can take which may ALL hurt humans and then it has to calculate the path of least damage. That is the most painful part for human beings and I am not sure how to teach that to a machine.

Anyways, the Wikipedia article goes on to introduce additional rules including a zeroth rule:

1. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
   

Fourth law:

1. A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases.
   

And fifth law:

1. A robot must know it is a robot.
   

Please read the Wikipedia article for full details on these laws and what types of scenarios various authors came up with which required them to introduce these laws. Very interesting and mind bending reading at times!

So, these laws have evolved into the Roboethics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboethics) and eventually to Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence).

Bottom line is that these fields will have to merge and a good reference framework for good vs bad, right vs wrong will have to be defined without being prejudiced about attributes of human beings including religion, sex, shape, size, color. May be we should start teaching these things ourselves first before we can effectively teach these to our kids and eventually to the artificial intelligence in the machines.

Another thought that occurred to me about learning was around how do babies and kids learn? The mechanics of learning involves getting exposed to various stimuli including parents, TV, teachers and now Internet, books, movies, radios, environment and many other such factors. Watson had to be fed entire encyclopedias, knowledgebase and other such knowledge works and it created complex data structure which were efficient for searching etc. We human beings also do similar exercise right from the time we are born. It is just that the breadth and depth of the subjects taught to us are not as wide as what Watson was taught! So, theoretically, you could record ALL stimuli a baby is being exposed to and keep teaching machines from that experience. This knowledge augmented with the established knowledge of humankind (like what was fed to Watson) can be an awesome resource for humans. It is like that Matrix movie where she learns to fly a helicopter in matter of seconds by simply downloading the entire manual and flying instructions!

Gordon Bell of Microsoft is already recording everything he is getting exposed to using video camera and a microphone. Check out http://totalrecallbook.com/ - the title says it all – Your Life, Uploaded. The digital way to better memory, health and productivity. So, kids - start early! Record everything on Facebook and Twitter and then we will find a way to tie those learning with what you learn at school and what others learned through the history, geography and other subjects and then you can pass exams easily. Hey – but why do you need an exam then! Well – you will need exams to ensure that you can use this stuff effectively! What's the point if you cannot search the answer to 2x2?

Anyways, in conclusion, I am sure a time will come where we will be able to easily tap into the vast knowledge of humanity using highly contextual searches (natural language search) and that will make our lives better. Just make sure that we teach our kids the right stuff and so that they can program those machines accordingly!

Back to Watson and how it can help us today. They are thinking up many applications where Watson can help. First and foremost is medical field where once fed with all the aspects of human anatomy, symptoms, diseases and medicines etc., you just have to tell that I am having these health issues and it will diagnose the issue accurately and also recommend a course of action. Similar things can be applied for many other fields including insurance, fraud detection and many other fields. I am sure IBM is going to get 10 times the return on the investment they made on Watson!



(Phew! This was a long rambling…).



For more details around how Watson came around and what are some of the implementations behind it, check out following links:

CNN - Behind-the-scenes with IBM's 'Jeopardy!' computer, Watson By John D. Sutter, CNN (February 7, 2011 8:29 a.m. EST) http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/07/watson.ibm.jeopardy/index.html

Also, some good details around algorithms and implementation of DeepQA can be found here: http://www.taranfx.com/artificial-intelligence-algorithm-behind-ibm-watson

The actual whitepaper - "Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project" - is available here: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf

Yago is one of the knowledge base which was fed to Watson. YAGO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAGO_%28database%29) is a knowledge base developed at the Max-Planck-Institute Saarbrücken. The knowledge base contains information harvested from Wikipedia and linked to Wordnet. It knows more than 2 million entities (like persons, organizations, cities, etc.), and knows 20 million facts about these entities. YAGO has a manually confirmed accuracy of 95%. It can be queried online. The YAGO ontology is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I imagine that they would have fed it Encyclopedia Britanica along with CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/) and Internet Movie Database - IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/). How about the complete catalog of Library of Congress?