Archive for January, 2011

My Ninja, Please! 1.31 : Machine Learning

Imagine this problem: you are blindfolded and sat next to a person typing on a standard keyboard. You listen to the person type for 10 minutes. Click-clack, tip-tap. Your task is to learn to recognize what they are typing by the sound of fingertips striking keys. Sounds pretty tricky, but some researchers at Berkeley developed an AI system that can do just that.

How does it work? This is where things get even more impressive. The input to the system is a 10 minute sound recording of a person typing. The algorithm uses this recording to build a model of the sounds generated by certain keys being struck. Amazingly, there is almost no knowledge built into the system from the start. The initial model does not know how many keys there are or where the boundaries between keystrokes are.

Most machine learning systems begin by using data that has been labeled by people - this is called "supervised learning". The Berkeley system doesn’t need an annotated dataset. It doesn’t even need to know the alphabet being used. To think of the equivalent task being performed by a human, you have to imagine something like a blindfolded Russian listening to someone type English, although even that doesn’t go far enough, since Russian and English share some semantic and syntactic linguistic universals that an AI system isn’t privy to.

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Five Startup Lessons from Aaron Levie

Having started Box.net in his college dorm room, CEO Aaron Levie has learned some valuable lessons. In this clip, Levie elaborates on five lessons: 1) Do something that was not possible three years ago, 2) Do something you are extremely passionate about, 3) Don’t compromise, 4) If you feel comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right, and 5) Don’t write your obituary too early.

.:ecorner.stanford.edu->

What Your Resume Really Says About You

Click to read the situation, the evaluation and the advice of a would be job seeker.

.:pchristensen.com->

Its the first leg of you being an entrepreneur. You get to innovate, destroy, create , hire , sell, communicate, experiment, err, recover, learn, teach, train, counsel and share while you use cutting edge technologies at work and get to use the products before anyone else in the world.

Living Google

What is Innovation?

Image source

I've never been a theoretician of processes, and always believed in intuitive approach to getting things done, but recent establishment of Innovation Process had me take a step back and do some thinking. There are a lot of creative people in our industry, but not all companies register as innovative. At the same time, a lot has been written and said about Innovation by better and greater than me. In this post I try to crystallize three points, which in my mind are obstacles when transforming an organization into an innovator.

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Economic freedom is the implicit right of any individual to own any kind or any amount of property and to unite voluntarily with others for purposes which relate to property in any particular. Impositions by any agency of force, regardless of the end in view, are essentially contrary to freedom. If one believe in freedom, one must believe in economic freedom-full latitude of choice in any and all economic areas, for each person. This can never be accomplished by any procedure, organized or otherwise, which uses violence (even the violence implicit in taxation) to take from an owner anything which is rightfully his.

The Butterfly Effect of Entrepreneurship

No guaranteed pay-check; no water-cooler conversations to split the day up; no big corporate budgets for projects and pitches.

But no-one said it would be easy. It takes hard work, commitment, lots of compromise and hard knocks to get to the point where you want to be. But the satisfaction and kick-back that you get when you get there makes all the struggle worthwhile.

One of the "tricks" I've used over the years (and offer up to clients that I feel fit the need for the example) is comparing entrepreneurship to the stages of the butterfly.

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And so I also tell them that the corporation has proven to be a powerful engine for focusing the efforts of individuals to maintain economic liberty. Because tyranny is far more likely to come from the public sector than the private, those who for selfish reasons strive to maintain both a democratic capitalist society and, of particular relevance to the present argument, a substantial sphere of economic liberty therein serve the public interest.