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?

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix – Future Plans

This is the third installment of "Celebrating Innowix's 3^rd Birthday" blog entries. We are making some of our plans public and invite comments, feedback and even expect to collaborate a bit with some of you.

Plans for 2011

1. Hire at least 2 (two) architects in the company as partners
   

   To be achieved by Q2-2011
   

   Even though I have people working for me, I am looking for those key confidants who can come along and join the adventure. There are always risks in running a company but the rewards and fun outweigh the risks. I have been talking to few folks whom I respect very much and have invited them to join. I am very hopeful that some of them will see the benefits and come over (Mr. AP, AM, VP, PV, NP, DD, VC, NG and PB – are you reading this?).
   

2. Sign-on two new clients
   

   To be achieved by Q2-2011
   

   Even though Innowix has been doing well so far, we are dependent on one or two clients. This has to change to reduce the risks and dependency on one client. Hopefully this will materialize by early 2011.
   

3. Delivery of at least one project as prime (preferably leveraging the case management framework)
   

   To be achieved by Q4-2011
   

   This one is a tricky one and little difficult to achieve! However, without a successful implementation, a framework is no good. It will be very sad to say "There are no case studies for the Case Management framework"! Hopefully that will not be the case.
   

4. Achieve certifications in the area of Project Management Professional (PMP), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) (http://www.opengroup.org/togaf9/cert/index.tpl) and IT Architecture Certification (http://www.opengroup.org/itac/).
   

   To be achieved by Q1-2011
   

   These are obvious and should have done few years back but I guess the timing is right now.
   

5. Work on few "Hobby" projects which may turn into new service offerings in future
   

   Throughout 2011 (not having a specific target may not be such a good idea! Let's see how this goes through 2011.)
   

   These are exciting times in the technology industry. New consumer technology platforms are emerging as giants in the IT industry and before we know it, they will be invading the Business IT. Apple and Google are classic examples. Some of the Business IT solutions are now trying to find their foothold in the consumer area. Then there are some who are trying to "cross-pollinate" technologies and solutions in various domains and we would love to be one of those key players. Innowix has been playing with quite a few ideas (some of them are good and some are lame – at least from my perspective) and one or two look promising.
   

   These projects include developing applications on Windows 7 & Windows Mobile 7 and Android, iOS (including Apple TV!). The applications we are focusing on will be business centric and less consumer centric. However, if an idea comes up which makes sense then consumer facing application will also be a good starting point.
   

   Building something like this alone may not be feasible which we are trying to manage the cash flow and future growth. So, I may be looking for partners who have similar interests. If anybody is interested in investing some funding, we are all open for it!
   

6. Offer Architecture Workshops to potential clients
   

   By Q1-2011
   

   Again, Innowix is partnering with couple of key partners who have been very supportive of us in our past endeavors. To drive further projects for Innowix and our partners, Innowix will offer a one day Architecture workshop free of cost to our clients where we will come in and review their IT processes and practices (Enterprise Architecture, Governance, IT Strategies, Technology Platforms, related implementation strategies and governance, Solution delivery methodologies and practices, Future trends and adoption approaches etc.) and provide high-level guidance on where they should focus. Obviously one day is not sufficient for us to gather and assess everything thoroughly but we are confident that we should be able to hit few high-level points effectively. Innowix also stands to gain an understanding of our client's industry and their IT practices to enrich and validate our IT architecture approaches. Our Innowix Architecture Framework will serve as a Solution Accelerator for such a workshop.
   

Conclusion and answer to question – "What does Innowix do"?

As I had mentioned in my previous blog post "Envisioning and Pragmatic execution - Two faces of progress" (http://bloginnowix.blogspot.com/2010/07/envisioning-and-pragmatic-execution-two.html), we have to maintain our balance while looking forward and running. Our future plans are driven by this philosophy. Few items are strictly for the "balancing and running" and few are wishes for "forward looking" projects and plans.

In general, Innowix is in the business of innovative application of information technology to solve business problems and improve business efficiencies. The focus has always been on IT architecture as streamlined IT architecture has the most positive impact on the application of information technology.

Your comments, feedback, inputs and pointers will be highly appreciated. Of course, if you wish to collaborate with us on any of these, please drop us a note via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix – Tasks and Projects in Progress

This is the second blog entry celebrating Innowix's 3^rd Birthday where we describe some of the work-in-progress projects and tasks.

 

Work-in-progress (To be completed in next 2 to 3 months)

1. Helping a bank in Asia Pacific with setting up a Business Process Management (BPM) Center of Excellence (CoE)
   

   This is a very interesting project where I am utilizing some of the Innowix training material around BPM and validating the approaches and recommended practices. For any large organization such as this Bank's, the technology is not an issue but the application of technology within the constraints and frameworks of the organization becomes bigger challenge.
   

   [Sidebar thoughts] The interesting thing is that the bank's BPM platform is FileNet P8 BPM. The issue I have is whether that is a long-term viable BPM platform for an organization when IBM has WebSphere Process Server (also being utilized at the Bank for system workflow) and Lombardi. Next few months will tell us how things are going to work out. I would love to see IBM's roadmap which should depict Lombardi forming a process modeling and Business Architecture tool with quite a few traits from Telelogic's Rational System Architect (creating that Social BPM framework), FileNet's Process Engine capabilities merging within WebSphere Process Server Platform with tight integration capabilities with FileNet's Content Engine and Cognos providing business monitoring capabilities (this last part as I understand is already happening). Let's see what IBM say at their Information on Demand 2010 conference and at Impact 2011 conference.
   

2. Respond to RFPs and deliver projects in partnership with couple of key players for State Govt clients in Health and Human Services (HIE, Child Support, Child Welfare (SACWIS) etc.), DMV, Education, Unemployment Insurance (UI), Transportation and other domains
   

   Innowix has been very fortunate to have large consulting houses as our clients. We are tier-1 vendor for one of top five consulting giants in the State and Local Government business. However, from the growth perspective, Innowix has to look at and partner with other players as well who are emerging in this market. We are currently working with couple of such partners who play in different areas within State and Local Government space. Here's hoping to win and deliver couple of good projects together.
   

3. Working on building out a flexible framework for Case Management and few other foundation tools to augment technology in the market
   

   I have been toying with this idea for some time now. More and more I look around and the need for such a case management framework is becoming more evident. However, I am planning to put something together which need not be a complete product which can be simply deployed and being used on day one but rather a set of components which can be integrated into a large line-of-business application which can rely on this framework. This framework will have key integration points for security, document imaging and management, reporting and customer management etc. More on this in future blog entries. The platform of choice is also open. Of course, putting something in the cloud will be the most attractive given the shape of IT industry. However, the architecture is flexible to leverage cloud computing platforms for all or portions of the framework.
   

4. Working on maturing training for SOA and Business Process Management (BPM) targeting Executives, Sr. and Mid-level managers, Architects and Designers & Developers
   

   SOA is now so 2005 buzzword. However, there are still efficiencies to be gained from the adoption of such an approach. Innowix training material serves as an Introduction to SOA and goes into details about adoption approaches, best practices and governance aspects.
   

   BPM is still a technology which will take next couple of years to mature. SOA forms the underpinning (plumbing approaches) of BPM (business centric application). Executing a BPM project or adopting BPM within an organization requires special attention to defining how businesses can leverage it to become more efficient. BPM is an easier concept for business folks to understand and adopt than SOA.
   

   
    

Next, review our future plans.

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix - Achievements

Well folks, it has been three years since I started in this venture and so far it has been an exciting journey. It is not all smooth sailing as we had few ups and downs (mostly positives!). I am enjoying the lifestyle where I know my constraints and limits and what I can do with those limited means. No complaints or regrets whatsoever.

On this third anniversary, I thought of writing down the achievements, work-in-progress items and most importantly future plans.

Achievements

1. Definition and application of Innowix Architecture Framework and related Solution Accelerators
   

   I have blogged about Innowix Architecture Framework before here. I had a chance to apply it to my second engagement for defining IT Strategy for one of the southern states. The framework helped define clear context for each branch of the organization and define their goals, processes, deliverables and transformation roadmap.
   

2. IT Strategy for a southern state
   

   This project was completed back in 2009 where we helped the CIO of the Transportation Cabinet of this state define an IT Strategy for effective IT services delivery.
   

3. Architecture assessment and Performance Engineering for an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system for a healthcare provided in Detroit area
   

   This project was completed back in 2008 where Innowix helped setup a Performance Engineering approach for a large EHR project running on Microsoft .NET platform.
   

4. DMV Solution for an eastern state
   

   Engaged on a large project and led the architecture definition for technology platform and help arrive at application architecture. This is for a state government in the doming of Motor vehicles.
   

   The project itself is an enterprise-wide system modernization and implementation project encompassing business processes for most of the agency and their field offices. We are utilizing IBM WebSphere suite of products.
   

   Innowix led and completed the formal deliverables for the technology platform definition. Innowix was also responsible for planning out the functionality for first release of the project which went into Pilot this month and is being deployed around the state. This release consists of document scanning and management for specific business process based on EMC Captiva and IBM FileNet products.
   

   We are now engaged in system design and development specifically in the area of implementing business processes on IBM WebSphere Process Server and SOA and Interfaces implementation using WebSphere Message Broker.
   

This has been a very exciting project where I have met tons of talent and a great customer team. Traveling to the location was a little downside but in an all it has been a fantastic experience.

 

Next up, check out what are we working on.