Sean McBride

"Probabilistic topic models aka Topic Models are probabilistic generative models which uncovers hidden thematic structures in large collection of documents. Its statistical nature does not need any information other than the text itself. It does not use metadata, labels or annotations to build up the topics from the text. One needs to define only the number of clusters(this is quite hard, albeit). There are various different inference algorithms that enables fast inference in the corpus and some of the them also work in an online fashion so that one does not have to load the data into the memory." - Sean McBride

"After leaving IBM Research where he worked on the SyNAPSE neuromorphic silicon chip, Greg Corrado became one of the founding members and the Co-technical Lead of Google’s Large Scale Deep Neural Networks Project. He is now Senior Research Scientist at Google and in this talk gives some insight into the project. Corrado has also undertaken extensive research in artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and scalable machine learning and has worked on brain inspired computing at Google for some time." - Sean McBride

Since Mondoweiss on Friendfeed now focuses increasingly on non-Mondoweiss stories, I changed the name of the group to MPFF (Mideast Politics on Friendfeed) -- not realizing that the older URL would become inaccessible. The new URL for the same group, with the full archive, is here: https://friendfeed.com/mpff - Sean McBride

"This piece is going to describe the future of the Internet and the Internet of Things. This isn’t just a potential future—it’s a virtual inevitability. Not many have heard it. You’ll be one of the first. The concept is called Universal Daemonization, and I’ve been writing and presenting on the topic for about a year now." - Sean McBride

"For humans this will come in the form of Personal Assistants like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, which will parse the daemons around them and do things like update their preferences, submit food orders, send social pokes to people nearby with similar interests, and requesting more information about products of interest" - Sean McBride

"A lot of people didn’t see the shale oil and gas revolution coming, and now a new report says many are failing to anticipate a coming energy explosion that will transform the energy sector to a similar extent. Plummeting module prices and rising module efficiencies are driving a solar boom so big it may face only one obstacle: Its own success. “The comparison is that the magnitude of the impact solar can have on the market is similar to the impact shale gas has had,” said Wood Mackenzie Research Director Prajit Ghosh. “The economics of solar is already competitive in many parts of the U.S. and that will only get better.”" - Sean McBride

1. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin) 2. Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924) 3. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916) 4. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1992) 5. Shoe Shine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) 6. The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) 7. La Femme du Boulanger (Marcel Pagnol, 1938) 8. Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) 9. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) 10. Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934) - Sean McBride

"The company behind Viv, a powerful form of AI built by Siri’s creators which is able to learn from the world to improve upon its capabilities, has just closed on $12.5 million in Series B funding. Multiple sources close to the matter confirm the round, which was oversubscribed and values the company at north of nine figures. The funding was led by Iconiq Capital, the so-called “Silicon Valley billionaires club” that operates a cross between a family office and venture capital firm." - Sean McBride

"But Viv Labs is not alone in pursing its goal. Google bought AI startup DeepMind for over half a billion, has since gone on to aqui-hire more AI teams and, as Wired noted, has also hired AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil to join its company." - Sean McBride

"Before pressing to Numenta’s remarkable (and likely correct) approach to general AI at an IBM talk (YouTube video), let’s consider the question of how much you and I are already uploaded and super intelligent, and how it might feel like to upload. I proceed in three parts: 1. A quick review of how we're already partly uploaded and very smart; 2. An small, excerpted fictional narrative of a man and a woman uploading in the near term future; 3. Some optional notes for mathematicians and physicists to encourage discussion of Numenta's presentation at IBM." - Sean McBride

"I myself can’t exactly tell you how much of my mind resides in my cranium or in the clouds. Fidelity and USAA run my trading rules throughout the trading day while I subconsciously pick my way through city traffic absorbing updates on actionable geopolitical tensions, epidemics, natural disasters, science and technology news, planning out my workday and evening activities with a family of two schoolchildren, a wife, and a dog according to Google Now—okay Google?" - Sean McBride

"In 1990, my cloud-brain resided in the technical library and knowledge base of my peers at the Air Force Research Laboratory Shiva Star facility. Now my cloud-brain resides in my pocket and in every room at both work and in my house tying me to global contacts, conversations, and repositories of knowledge, simultaneously arming me with free or nearly free tools like R, Octave, or Wolfram Alpha that run multitudes of algorithms for me as if I were cloned many times over, each being many times better than the kid with the pencil, paper, calculator, and spreadsheet of twenty-five years ago. I know not where my brain starts or ends." - Sean McBride

1. crawl 2. scrape 3. parse 4. mine 5. classify 6. tag/label 7. aggregate 8. infer 9. repeat - Sean McBride

Loop endlessly; improve all the component algorithms endlessly. - Sean McBride

Keep expanding the crawl space -- go wider and deeper. - Sean McBride

# smart news discovery tools to be used in combination: 1. Flipboard 2. News360 3. Nuzzel 4. Prismatic 5. Smartnews 6. Zite - Sean McBride

Nuzzel may be the best of the lot at the moment -- but it is only as good as the Twitter feeds you have chosen to follow. - Sean McBride

"Heat waves and floods caused by climate change could mean disaster for the Big Apple's five boroughs by the end of the century, with sea levels now predicted by a new report to climb by as much as 6 feet by 2100. According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change, an independent body composed of climate scientists, New York could see a 6-foot increase under a worst-case scenario that has been revised from previous estimates that 2 to 4 feet would be the maximum rise." - Sean McBride

and how would one do that? What software would you use? - Greg GuitarBuster

So far, with my own custom software. Mass market tools are still on the horizon. - Sean McBride

"Summary:The traditional search engine will evolve into a digital personal assistant that tracks your activities and automatically delivers helpful information, according to Microsoft's Stefan Weitz, whose excellent book takes an optimistic view of this future while acknowledging the potential pitfalls." - Sean McBride

"In Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter, Stefan Weitz, director of search at Bing, suggests that search could be the 'hinge' linking us and the technology that describes almost everything around us, and the implications of that are profound. Because if search can cover everything -- indexing and understanding everything in the world, gaining senses like hearing, touching and even smelling as well as seeing everything, and communicating in different way with us and with other systems on our behalf -- then we have a lot of questions to ask about how those systems are designed and what we want them to be able to do. If search is going to connect us to the world, then in some ways it will become our world." - Sean McBride

"The question is whether that's a good or bad thing, and Weitz notes some of the issues explicitly as he goes along. He devotes several chapters to covering the technical problems, the self-perpetuating business models and the privacy and security issues that could derail his idea of search as an ever-present assistant, gently improving your world without you doing anything more than living your life ("all watched over by machines of loving grace", as the poem puts it). That might be a nudge to order something healthy, drinks that get more expensive the drunker you get, an agent that shows you relevant messages and documents just before a meeting or any other way the system could anticipate your needs." - Sean McBride

"But Weitz admits that he's a techno-optimist and highlights the potential benefits along with the risks. And along the way, you get a detailed survey of key developments from the beginning of web search -- with one of the clearest explanations of what the graphs that connect information are really about -- to the way all our technologies are starting to matter to search. Images with metadata, video that gets automatically transcribed, identity information from social networks and the signals that clicking 'like' might represent, apps that drive services in the real world like Uber and IFTTT, smart devices and sensors, digital invitations to events, places where you check in, payment systems: Weitz shows you how much of the developed world is already digitized and looks at systems like Wolfram Alpha that pull together that information and turn it into answers. (For a book written by someone who works at Microsoft, there is very little Microsoft-specific technology here, apart from a few fascinating glimpses of experimental systems running at Microsoft Research)." - Sean McBride