Finally, however, in the last decade Hinton and other researchers made some fundamental conceptual breakthroughs. In 2006, Hinton developed a more efficient way to teach individual layers of neurons. The first layer learns primitive features, like an edge in an image or the tiniest unit of speech sound. It…
As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. via Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review.
Inference, particularly with large data sets, and disparate solution criteria, is one of the tougher challenges of current computing models. Probabilistic computing may unlock an alternative approach to tackling complex problems by enabling systems to infer solutions that lie outside the current linear computational models: Probabilistic programming languages are in…
Just under the radar, there’s been a lot of activity in the ProjectVRM space of late. Various clusters of work are underway in the VRM space, including identity research and personal data store development. On the latter, Phil Windley has an excellent post explaining the framework in which personal clouds…
Conducting a census of India is a monumental task. The last such undertaking happened in 2011 [wikipedia]. While the raw data reveal, well, raw statistics, delving deeper into census data is a fascinating exercise. On that note, I recently wandered upon a new weblog that is devoted to extracting insights from India’s…
An excellent post on big data and the customer experience over at the Harvard Business Review blog. Of note: Expand the Value You Create for CustomersImproving the customer experience is a fine idea. But companies often take it to extremes. It’s always a good idea to look for new ways…
Having tried nearly every to-list, task manager over the years, I think I’ve finally found one that works for me with Trello. I have stuck to it as my go-to application for managing a wide array of both personal activities and collaboration across groups. Many of the current generation of team collaboration/task…
During a recent conversation I had with Mark Angel [founder of Knova Software and most recently the CTO at Kana], he was quick to point out that the ‘spreadsheet’ stage of cloud computing had yet to arrive. His point was that most of the computational horsepower of the cloud was…
David Kay is one of the best knowledge management consultants (if not best consultants) I’ve known. As anyone who knows him will attest, David’s one of the few consultants that ‘gets it’. Real change in organizations, particularly with knowledge management, is not as much about technology implementation as it is…

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