IFTF's Future Now

Neurocomputing Data Mining Environment

NeuCom - A Neurocomputing Environment for Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery and Intelligent Decision support systems. Based on evolving connectionist systems (ECOS). Here is a PDF overview of ECOS. Brought to my attention by Steve Cayzer of HP Labs UK . Several demo downloads available at the site, have just started to take a look at them. An interesting comparision would be with SPSS/Clementine, another mining environment that includes stat and neural methods.

Mobile vs. desktop spam

South Korea, a pioneer in so many things mobile and Internet-related, breaks more new ground, according to TheFeature:

The Korean Information Security agency says in the first 10 months of 2004, it received 244,151 complaints about unsolicited text messages and calls to mobile phones, compared to just 78,063 complaints about spam e-mail, seven times more than in 2003. A KISA official went on to tell The Korea Times that junk mail to phones now outnumbers e-mail spam, a trend that's expected to continue.

Assault on batteries

TheFeature has a short article on efforts to solve one of the key problems in mobile and ubiquitous computing: lousy batteries.

[R]esearchers are developing new batteries that could keep tomorrow's mobile gadgets alive for the long haul. Some use microfabrication methods borrowed from the computer chip industry. Others exploit atomic physics in the form of nuclear microbatteries. The aim of them all is to put all the power you'll need right in your pocket.

The article talks about microbatteries made with photolithographic technology, and research to develop batteries that get their energy from thin radioactive films.

Recreational Knots and the Structure of DNA

Its a holiday, and my recreation sometimes takes me in the direction of mathematics and visualization. I know most people don't think of math as recreational, but there is much beauty there if you just look for it. There is a branch of math called knot theory, a part of whats called topology. Inspired by the complexity of tying knots, but this takes it to a completely different place and level of complexity. Wikipedia also provides a nice intro. Robert Scharein's KnotPlot site has lots of examples and resources, animations and construction methods. Is there a practical application of these methods beyond pretty pictures? It turns out that it has been used to understand the structure of DNA. Any other examples out there? At very least they are beautiful graphics. Brought to my attention by colleague Wim Van De Velde.

RFID at Wal-Mart

In todays NYT (registration required) an article on the current state of the Wal-Mart RFID test.

... the pilot testing this year has offered evidence that, before most businesses can justify big investments in the technology, its costs must fall sharply and the scanners must be able to read tags faster and in more varied conditions. To drive down costs, manufacturers want the recently adopted American standards to be made compatible with those being developed elsewhere. Still, if the size of the challenge became apparent in 2004, so were the ways in which it could be tackled. Wal-Mart and others say that, in 2005, not only will tagging be expanded, but there will also be a sharp increase in the testing of software and business strategies that use the data captured from the tags ...

Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management

Work ongoing at HP Labs in Bristol UK, at their Semantic Web Research Group. where they have done some interesting work that uses the simplicity of blog posting to construct intelligent repositories of what they call 'knowledge snippets' ... information nuggets we would like to store, annnotate and share ... Steve Cayzer of the Labs, in a provocative recent article (link below) discusses the interaction of this simplicty with the ability to store and retrieve knowledge based on embedded intelligence.

Any kind of knowledge management method presupposes you have some critical mass of knowledge to manage. Without having content, no one will use the source. With a simple blog you can easily add and annotate such snippets, but the only way to retrieve is a search. Improvements like Google Desktop Search, make this easier, but it still suffers from the strength of its precision and recall.

Blogs like the one you are reading also contain links, to augment the knowledge they contain by simple reference. This kind of knowledge loading can be improved by adding semantic metadata to the snippits and to their links. The querying and search can be aided by this knowledge. The result is a form of the Semantic Web, overlaid on a simple blog structure.

Of course, this does make the use of the blog structure more complex. It has to be loaded with the semantic knowledge, perhaps through the use of a pre-arranged ontology for classifying and sharing knowledge.

This is important work .. with the potential of linking very simple knowledge storing ideas, like blogs, with more complex knowledge management classification and retrieval methods.

Cayzer also usefully surveys other knowledge-loading mechanisms for blogs. For more detail, and updated research see Cayzer's Semantic Blogging site, which contains a demonstrator for a semantic blog.

And the full December CACM article: Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management, an instructive read. (Full article regrettably only available to ACM subscribers)

The Apple Graphing Calculator story

A great story by Ron Avitzur about the effort to create the Apple Graphing Calculator. Not only is it well-written, it has lots of interesting things to say about the culture of Apple, the virtues of organizations that are just open enough to tolerate under-the-table creative work, and what motivates people to do interesting stuff:

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up....

Apple at that time had a strong tradition of skunkworks projects, in which engineers continued to work on canceled projects in hopes of producing demos that would inspire management to revive them. On occasion, they succeeded. One project, appropriately code-named Spectre, was canceled and restarted no fewer than five times. Engineers worked after hours on their skunkworks, in addition to working full time on their assigned projects. Greg and I, as nonemployees who had no daytime responsibilities, were merely extending this tradition to the next level....

The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends....

Apple became the ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was willing to help us. We got resources that would never have been available to us had we been on the payroll....

Unfortunately, they weren't able to reproduce the effect elsewhere: "We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

[Via Paul]

AutoCart Drive-through Supercenters

An interesting new concept .. a drive-through supercenter ... the article discusses some of the technical and logistics aspects of the offering.

For background, consider ... in 1916 Albert Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity, and in the same year Clarence Saunders invented the American self-service grocery store, a Piggly-Wiggly in Memphis Tennessee. Before that time, stores had clerks who chose products for the consumer. That choice was minimal. Shoppers were effectively insulated from their choices. Saunders opened up the floor, giving access to aisle and package to everyone, changing the way shoppers interacted with package goods. Both Einstein and Saunders had profound effects on the world as we know it. And both of their approaches are continually being re-examined.

Even Clarence Saunders prototyped an automated store concept in 1937, which he called the Keedozzle, and another called the Foodelectric, but they were far ahead of any technology to support them effectively. Concept like the below start to address the automation concept without the difficult delivery scheduling logistics and cost.

For this new try at store automation FKI Logistex is providing the technology, which looks like an order-picking method. Another article.

First Drive-through Supercenters Planned for Late 2005
DECEMBER 20, 2004 -- LAS CRUCES, N.M. - AutoCart, LLC, based here, said it plans to roll out the world's first "drive-through supercenter" format, a 130,000-square-foot facility equipped to deliver more than 25,000 SKUs directly to consumers in their cars. The first of the supercenters, designed with 60 ordering/pickup stations, are projected to open in December 2005 in Albuquerque, N.M. and Tucson, Ariz., according to AutoCart ... Store features will include interactive drop-down touchscreens at all order/pickup stations, allowing customers to place orders and communicate with retailer representatives on-site; the ability to order off-site by phone, fax, PC, laptop, or PDA; and the delivery of orders in a shuttle/lift, which will open up next to the car so that shoppers can take out their bags and drive away in a matter of minutes ...

The New Media in 2014

A clever 8 minute video from bloom.org that examines the direction of the new media extrapolating current actions by Google, Microsoft and Sony ... thought provoking ... A time-shifted transmission from the Museum of Media History, 2014 ...

Update: I missed all the information in Slashdot on this ... several comments point out its orgin and more information, see here and also a transcript.

Army's Hollywood Sim

Wired News has a piece on the new generation of "military simulator that's part video game, part Hollywood sound stage with a serious dose of theme park thrill."