The images from Japan are shocking and depressing, and what seemed at first an example of the difference between a 1st and 3rd world earthquake has produced a 5 figure death toll. But the nerd and engineer in me has to wonder about some of the things I've seen.
It's St. Paddy's day but I can celebrate a little harder this time. Two days ago, I got my notice of entry into Ireland's Foreign Birth Registry, declaring me an Irish citizen. I'm able to do that because I have 3 Irish grandparents (2 born in Ireland.) Irish law declares that anybody born to somebody born in Ireland is automatically Irish. That made my father, whose parents were both born there, an Irish citizen even though he never got a passport. Because my father was an Irish citizen (not born on the Island) that also gives me the right to claim it, though I had to do the paperwork, it is not automatic. If I had children after this, they could also claim it, but if I had any before this registration, they would not.
I decided to do this for a few reasons. First, it will allow me to live, work and travel freely in Ireland or anywhere else in the E.U. The passport control lines for Canadians are not usually that long, but it's nicer to not be quizzed. But in the last few years, I have encountered several situations where it would have been very useful to have a 2nd passport:
All great reasons to have two passports. I don't have that yet, though. (Update: I got it in June) Even though I presume that the vast majority of those who do the Irish foreign birth registry immediately want a passport, it doesn't work that way. After a 21 month wait, I have my FBR certificate, which I now must mail back to the same consulate that sent it, along with several of the same documents I used in getting the FBR like my original birth certificate. While it makes huge sense to do them together, it doesn't work that way.
ICANN is meeting in San Francisco this week. And they're getting closer to finally implementing a plan they have had in the works for some time to issue new TLDs, particularly generic top level domains.
For some time I've been advocating a concept I call the Data Deposit Box as an architecture for providing social networking and personal data based applications in a distributed way that tries to find a happy medium between the old PC (your data live on your machine) and the modern cloud (your data live on 3rd party corporate machines) approach. The basic concept is to have a piece of cloud that you legally own (a data deposit box) where your data lives, and code from applications comes and runs on your box, but displays to your browser directly. This is partly about privacy, but mostly about interoperability and control.
This concept depends on the idea of publishing and subscribing to feeds from your friends (and other sources.) Your friends are updating data about themselves, and you might want to see it -- ie. things like the Facebook wall, or Twitter feed. Feeds themselves would go through brokers just for the sake of efficiency, but would be encrypted so the brokers can't actually read them.
There is a need for brokers which do see the data in certain cases, and in fact there's a need that some types of data are never shown to your friends.
One classic example is the early social networking application the "crush" detector. In this app you get to declare a crush on a friend, but this is only revealed when both people have a mutual crush. Clearly you can't just be sending your crush status to your friends. You need a 3rd party who gets the status of both of you, and only alerts you when the crush is mutual. (In some cases applications like this can be designed to work without the broker knowing your data through the process known as blinding (cryptography).)
In media today, it's common to talk about three screens: Desktop, mobile and TV. Many people watch TV on the first two now, and tools like Google TV and the old WebTV try to bring interactive, internet style content to the TV. People like to call the desktop the "lean forward" screen where you use a keyboard and have lots of interactivity, while the TV is the "lean back" couch-potato screen. The tablet is also distinguishing itself a bit from the small screen normally found in mobile.
More and more people also find great value in having an always-on screen where they can go to quickly ask questions or do tasks like E-mail.
I forecast we will soon see the development of a "fourth screen" which is a mostly-always-on wall panel meant to be used with almost no interaction at all. It's not a thing to stare at like the TV (though it could turn into one) nor a thing to do interactive web sessions on. The goal is to have minimal UI and be a little bit psychic about what to show.
One could start by showing stuff that's always of use. The current weather forecast, for example, and selected unusual headlines. Whether each member of the household has new mail, and if it makes sense from a privacy standpoint, possibly summaries of that mail. Likewise the most recent status from feeds on twitter or Facebook or other streams. One could easily fill a screen with these things so you need a particularly good filter to find what's relevant. Upcoming calendar events (with warnings) also make sense.
Some things would show only when important. For example, when getting ready to go out, I almost always want to see the traffic map. Or rather, I want to see it if it has traffic jams on it, no need to show it when it's green -- if it's not showing I know all is good. I may not need to see the weather if it's forecast sunny either. Or if it's raining right now. But if it's clear now and going to rain later I want to see that. Many city transit systems have a site that tracks when the next bus or train will come to my stop -- I want to see that, and perhaps at morning commute time even get an audio alert if something unusual is up or if I need to leave right now to catch the street car. A view from the security camera at the door should only show if somebody is at the door.
There are so many things I want to see that we will need some UI for the less popular ones. But it should be a simple UI, with no need to find a remote (though if I have a remote -- any remote -- it should be able to use it.) Speech commands would be good to temporarily see other screens and modes. A webcam (and eventually Kinect style sensor) for gestural UI would be nice, letting me swipe or wave to get other screens.
A few recent Robocar updates for you:
Google took its car down to the TED conference in Long Beach and did a few demo drives for people. In this mashable story you can catch some videos, inside and outside, of the car driving around a cone-based course on top of a parking lot near TED.
You may have heard of Bus Rapid Transit -- a system to give a bus line a private or semi-private right-of-way, along with bus stops that are more akin to stations than bus shelters (with ticket-taking machines and loading platforms for multiple doors.) The idea is to make bus transit competitive with light-rail (LRT) in terms of speed and convenience. Aside from getting caught in slow traffic, buses also are slow to board. BRT is hoped to be vastly less expensive than light rail -- which is not hard because LRT (which means light capacity rail, not lightweight rail) has gotten up to $80 to $100M per mile. When BRT runs down the middle of regular roads, it gets signal timing assistance to help it have fewer stops. It's the "hot new thing" in transit. Some cities even give it bits of underground or elevated ROW (the Boston Silver Line) and others just want to wall off the center of a road to make an express bus corridor. Sometimes BRT gets its own highway lane or shares a special carpool lane.
At the same time just about anybody who has looked at transit and the internet has noticed that as the buses go down the street, they travel with tons of cars carrying only one person and lots of empty seats. Many have wondered, "how could we use those empty private car seats to carry the transit load?" There are a number of ride-sharing and carpooling apps on web sites and on smartphones, but success has been modest. Drivers tend to not want to take the time to declare their route, and if money is offered, it's usually not enough to counter the inconvenience. Some apps are based on social networks so friends can give rides to friends -- great when it works but not something you can easily do on demand.
But one place I've seen a lot of success at this is the casual carpooling system found in a number of cities. Here it's very popular to cross the Oakland-SF Bay Bridge, which has a $6 toll to cross into SF. It used to be free for 3-person carpools, now it's $2.50, but the carpools also get a faster lane for access to the highly congested bridge both going in and out of SF.
Almost all the casual carpool pickup spots coming in are at BART (subway) stations, which are both easy for everybody to get to, and which allow those who can't get a carpool to just take the train. There is some irony that it means that the carpools mostly take people who would have ridden BART trains, not people who would have driven, the official purpose of carpool subsidies. In the reverse direction the carpools are far fewer with no toll to be saved, but you do get a better onramp.
People drive the casual carpools because they get something big for for it -- saving over $1,000/year, and hopefully a shorter line to the bridge. This is the key factor to success in ride share. The riders are saving a similar amount of money in BART tickets, even more if they skipped driving.
Let's consider what would happen if you put in the dedicated lane for BRT, but instead of buses created an internet mediated carpooling system. Drivers could enter the dedicated lane only if:
Riders would declare their own need for a ride, and to what location, on their own phones, or on screens mounted at "stops" (or possibly in nearby businesses like coffee shops.) When a rider is matched to a car, the rider will be informed and get to see the approach of their ride on the map, as well as a picture of the car and plate number. The driver will be signaled and told by voice command where to go and who to pick up. I suggest calling this Carpool-Rapid-Transit or CRT.
Not much new to report after the second game of the Watson Jeopardy Challenge. I've added a few updates to yesterday's post on Watson and the result was as expected, though Watson struggled a lot more in this game than in the prior round, deciding not to answer many questions due to low confidence and making a few mistakes. In a few cases it was saved by not buzzing fast enough even though it had over 50% confidence, as it would have answered slightly wrong.
The computer scientist world is abuzz with the game show world over the showdown between IBM's "Watson" question-answering system and the best human players to play the game Jeopardy. The first game has been shown, with a crushing victory by Watson (in spite of a tie after the first half of the game.)
Tomorrow's outcome is not in doubt. IBM would not have declared itself ready for the contest without being confident it would win, and they wouldn't be putting all the advertising out about the contest if they had lost. What's interesting is how they did it and what else they will be able to do with it.
Dealing with a general question has long been one of the hard problems in AI research. Watson isn't quite there yet but it's managed a great deal with a combination of algorithmic parsing and understanding combined with machine learning based on prior Jeopardy games. That's a must because Jeopardy "answers" (clues) are often written in obfuscated styles, with puns and many idioms, exactly the sorts of things most natural language systems have had a very hard time with.
Watson's problem is almost all understanding the question. Looking up obscure facts is not nearly so hard if you have a copy of Wikipedia and other databases on hand, particularly one parsed with other state-of-the-art natural language systems, which is what I presume they have. In fact, one would predict that Watson would do the best on the hardest $2,000 questions because these are usually hard because they refer to obscure knowledge, not because it is harder to understand the question. I expect that an evaluation of its results may show that its performance on hard questions is not much worse than on easy ones. (The main thing that would make easy questions easier would be the large number of articles in its database confirming the answer, and presumably boosting its confidence in its answer.) However, my intuition may be wrong here, in that most of Watson's problems came on the high-value questions.
It's confidence is important. If it does not feel confident it doesn't buzz in. And it has a serious advantage at buzzing in, since you can't buzz in right away on this game, and if you're an encyclopedia like the two human champions and Watson, buzzing in is a large part of the game. In fact, a fairer game, which Watson might not do as well at, would involve randomly choosing which of the players who buzz in in the first few tenths of a second gets to answer the question, eliminating any reaction time advantage. Watson gets the questions as text, which is also a bit unfair, unless it is given them one word a time at human reading speed. It could do OCR on the screen but chances are it would read faster than the humans. It's confidence numbers and results are extremely impressive. One reason it doesn't buzz in is that even with 3,000 cores it takes 2-6 seconds to answer a question.
Indeed a totally fair contest would not have buzzing in time competition at all, and just allow all players who buzz in to answer an get or lose points based on their answer. (Answers would need to be in parallel.)
Watson's coders know by now that they probably should have coded it to receive wrong answers from other contestants. In one instance it repeated a wrong answer, and in another case it said "What is Leg?" after Jennings had incorrectly answered "What is missing an arm?" in a question about an Olympic athlete. The host declared that right, but the judges reversed that saying that it would be right if a human who was following up the wrong answer said it, but was a wrong answer without that context. This was edited out. Also edited out were 4 crashes by Watson that made the game take 4 hours instead of 30 minutes.
It did not happen in what aired so far, but in the trials, another error I saw Watson make was declining to answer a request to be more specific on an answer. Watson was programmed to give minimalist answers, which often the host will accept as correct, so why take a risk. If the host doesn't think you said enough he asks for a more specific answer. Watson sometimes said "I can be no more specific." From a pure gameplay standpoint, that's like saying, "I admit I am wrong." For points, one should say the best longer phrase containing the one-word answer, because it just might be right. Though it has a larger chance of looking really stupid -- see below for thoughts on that.
The shows also contain total love-fest pieces about IBM which make me amazed that IBM is not listed as a sponsor for the shows, other than perhaps in the name "The IBM Challenge." I am sure Jeopardy is getting great ratings (just having their two champs back would do that on its own but this will be even more) but I have to wonder if any other money is flowing.
Watson doesn't really understand the Jeopardy clues, at least not as a human does. Like so many AI breakthroughs, this result comes from figuring out another way to attack the problem different from the method humans use. As a result, Watson sometimes puts out answers that are nonsense "idiot" answers from a human perspective. They cut back a lot on this by only having it answer when it has 50% confidence or higher, and in fact for most of its answers it has very impressive confidence numbers. But sometimes it gives such an answer. To the consternation of the Watson team, it did this on the Final Jeopardy clue, where it answered "Toronto" in the category "U.S. Cities."
Some years ago I made the proposal that airlines sell half of a middle seat at half price or less so that two coach passengers could assure they would have an empty middle next to them.
Copyright © 2025, Brad Ideas
Designed by Zymphonies