Foldable display concepts by Johnny Lee

Johnny Lee from Carnegie Mellon University demonstrates some of his ideas on how we can simulate displays on flexible and foldable surfaces in order to fit large interactive display into our pockets. Tracking is accomplished using the Wii Remote and IR LEDs.



via Aaron Rutledge

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe

Microsoft Beats Google for Facebook Deal / WSJ

WSJ: 2007-10-24T16:48-04:00: Microsoft Inks Deal with Facebook

Wall Street Journal reports moments ago that Microsoft just agreed to invest $240 million for a minority stake at Facebook (Google). The companies have discussed a valuation for Facebook as high as $15 billion.

Google Vice President Tim Armstrong declined to comment on any Google discussions with Facebook.

User distribution for social networking sites by the end of 2007 - Research Data
Source: DataMonitor (Google)

• 35% = Asian
• 28% = Europe + Middle East +e Africa
• 25% = North America
• 12% = Caribbean

Related

• Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook / 2007-10-25 / New York Times
• Microsoft Pays $240 Million for Stake in Facebook / 2007-10-24 / Bloomberg
• Google News Launches Facebook Application / 2007-10-20 / Slashdot

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Economist special report: Innovation

The Economist published a special report on innovation on the October 13th-19th 2007 issue of the magazine. The report is broken down to seven articles spanning 20 pages and I don't want to distill it too much, so I will break it down to seven posts.

Source: Economist / Illustration by Noma Bar

Something new under the sun
Something new under the sun | Economist.com
Innovation, long the preserve of technocratic elites, is becoming more open. This will be good for the world, argues Vijay Vaitheeswaran
Listen to Audio / Buy PDF / Interview with the author

Highlights / Digest

• "The energy and car industries have not been innovative in many years because they have faced no real crisis, no impetus for change," [Vinod Khosla] inists. (Mr Khosla helped to found Sun Microsystems)
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, had earlier hosted a gathering of leading environmentalists, political thinkers and energy experts to help shape an inducement to get things moving: the Automotive x Prize, to be unveiled in early 2008. The organisers will offer at least $10m to whoever comes up with the best "efficient, clean, affordable and sexy" car able to obtain the equivalent of 100 miles-per-gallon using alternative energy.
• Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation, as this report will show is becoming both more accessible and global.
• North America still leads the world in research spending, but the big labs' advantage over their smaller rivals and the developing world is being eroded by two powerful forces.
  1. Globalisation, especially the rise of China and India as both consumers and, increasingly, suppliers of innovative products and services.
  2. The rapid advance of information technologies, which are spreading far beyond the internet and into older industries such as steel, aerospace and carmaking.
• One way to arrive at a useful definition [of innovation] is to rule out what innovation is not. It is not invention.
• New products might be an important part of the process, but they are not the essence of it.
• Clever ideas have always been everywhere, of course, but companies were often too closed to pick them up. The move to an open approach to innovation is far more promising.
• "We firmly believe that innovation, not love, makes the world go round," insists John Dryden of the OECD.
• With manfacturing now barely a fifth of economic activity in rich countries, the "knowledge economy" is becoming more important.

Read the full article on Economist.com

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Harness corporate social networks to spur collaboration / McKinsey Quarterly

In McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 4, McKinsey research discusses how corporations can better harness the power of information employee networks to spur collaboration and unlock value.

I confess that this article caught by eye originally because it opened with a sentence which supports my blog post on the formation of networks, social or not:

In any professional setting, networks flourish spontaneously: human nature, including mutual self-interest, leads people to share ideas and work together even when no one requires them to do so. As they connect around shared interests and knowledge, they may build networks that can range in size from fewer than a dozen colleagues and acquaintances to hundreds. Research scientists working in related fields, for example, or investment bankers serving clients in the same industry frequently create informal—and often socially based—networks to collaborate.

Article at a glance (quoted from abstract)

• Most large corporations have dozens if not hundreds of informal networks, in which human nature, including self-interest, leads people to share ideas and collaborate.
• Informal networks are a powerful source of horizontal collaboration across thick silo walls, but as ad hoc structures their performance depends on serendipity and they can’t be managed.
• By creating formal networks, companies can harness the advantages of informal ones and give management much more control over networking across the organization.
• The steps needed to formalize a network include giving it a “leader,” focusing interactions in it on specific topics, and building an infrastructure that stimulates the ongoing exchange of ideas.

Harnessing the power of informal employee networks
Formalizing a company’s ad hoc peer groups can spur collaboration and unlock value.
Authors: Lowell Bryan is a director in McKinsey’s New York office; Eric Matson is a consultant and Leigh Weiss is an associate principal in the Boston office.
Abstract | Article

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Google = How I get to know my family

About half a year ago, I started having lunch with a different person at work everyday. The conversation is always interesting. And it is from these conversations that I realize just how diverse people really are—their interests span across multiple disciplines—which is not immediately readily apparent just by looking at their resumes on LinkedIn.

Another thing that I took note, however, is how well people know about their family. All of them are able to tell me exactly what their parents and siblings do for a living. I envy them, because I could not.

When I was growing up, about the only thing that I know about what my dad does professionally is that he teaches marketing at a university, but that's about it.

The other things that I know about my dad come from daily observance:

• We subscribe to ten newspapers which he skims through every morning.
• He also asks me to use the microwave stuff for him because he is immensely afraid of the microwave, after witnessing the scary details of the first-generation microwaves in America in the 70s when he was studying for his PhD.
• I also know that my dad likes books, because aside from having a books-filled study *and* library, the bookshelves creep all the way out to the dining room and continued to fill out every single wall where a bookshelf can be installed.

My knowledge of my family expanded significantly, however, when Google started indexing data:

• Because of Google, I now know that my dad is best known for his research in business negotiation, cross-cultural marketing, marketing ethics, social marketing and tourism marketing.
• Because of Google, I noted that aside from owning many books, he also writes many books.
• Because of Google, I noted that aside from reading a lot of news, he also appears on the news.
• Because of Google, I noted that not only does he publishes a lot on journals, he also gets many citations.
• Because of Google, I am no longer shameful of having a dad who is afraid of microwaves.

After getting much satisfaction from Googling my dad, I moved onto my sister:

• Because of Google, I noted that she has she is not as searchable as my dad
• Because of Google, I noted that the second search results that comes up (like many of my friends' SERP) is on the SML Universe property.
• Because of Google, I noted that she was the first person in my family to make it onto the Google Patents Search
• Because of Google, I also noted that one of my medical illustration was published on Nature but my sister has apparently neglected to give me credits, thus ruining the main reason why I decided to help her out at the first place: getting my name published on a respected scientific journal.

Since day one of my SML Family Google Research, the number of search results generated has always been on the order of 1. my dad, 2. my sister, 3. me and my mom, no where to be found. I also noted that no matter what I do, I only get double-digit results.

That all changed this year. Finally, I have done something that made SML Family history. Starting in 2007, the SML Family Google ranking will have been officially repositioned to 1. Me, 2. Dad, 3. Sister. Eat that!

This is of historical importance to me, since I have never been able to beat my sister in any other field other than piano, which no one cares about anyway. With the growth in the amount of data, search engines will continue to have significance in our everyday life, and as such, I am content.

Vanity aside and most important of all, is that because of Google, I can now talk about my family as though I really know them.

For a brief moment, I felt the peace of not having to stand out too much from the crowd.

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Get more from less / McKinsey Quarterly

In McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 3, Stephen Corbett, a principal at McKinsey's Toronto office, discusses the challenges of adopting the lean production approach in nonindustrial environments and shows four examples of how managers met these challenges in a variety of operating contexts.

Contexts

1. Applying lean production to the public sector: Governments at all levels must deliver more for less. The principles of lean manufacturing offer surprisingly apt solutions.
2. Applying lean to application development and maintenance: To make application development and maintenance more productive, IT managers are getting lean.
3. Better manufacturing in China: An interview with two of PLP's top executives: Bill Haag and Wu Yu explain the lessons of a lean transformation at the Chinese factory of a manufacturer based in Cleveland.
4. Toward a leaner finance department: Borrowing key principles from lean manufacturing can help the finance function to eliminate waste.

Key points from example 2: Applying lean to application development and maintenance

• The McKinsey study shows that applying the principles of lean manufacturing to ADM (Application development and maintenance) can increase its productivity by 20 to 40 percent.
• Transforming ADM begins with a diagnostic phase to find waste.
• A large financial institution going through the diagnostics discovered two main causes of waste:
  1. The process for defining project requirements was chaotic and inefficient. IT had no standard way to get a comprehensive description of the requirements for maintenance requests, so developers had to keep asking questions to clarify them, which led to delays and rework.
  2. There was also no clear way to prioritize projects. As businesses requested exceptions and rush jobs, developers shifted focus from one application to another, and some projects were never finished.
• After the diagnostic phase, IT managers launched a pilot program focused on three lean principles:
  1. Improving the work flow. To make the work flow smoother, the managers scheduled bimonthly software releases, with clearly defined steps and a capacity based on the available resources (designers, coders, and testers). this predictable schedule allowed the business to plan for current and future releases and diminished the tendency to rush late requests into the process.
  2. Balancing workloads. To even out the workload, the managers defined work groups more flexibly. Developers and testers were cross-trained to work on projects throughout the organization. Managers could now deploy people more efficiently; when one group was busy, it could borrow developers or testers from another.
  3. Managing performance. A "dashboard" was created so that problems could be recognized early. In one case, managers saw that a task was taking longer than estimated and therefore redistributed the developer's workload to minimize the disruption. The decision to track the performance of individuals encouraged developers to take on additional tasks, since their efforts were now more visible
• The pilot surpassed expectations, boosting productivity in the targeted application maintenance areas by 40 percent in less than two months. IT's business counterparts were more satisfied with the process, and employee morale reportedly rose.
• As a result of this success, the company rolled out the effort to the rest of the application maintenance organization to other parts of IT.

Full article:
MKQ: 2007 Number 3: Beyond Manufacturing: The evolution of lean production

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How social media influences change in the marketing practice / MKQ

In the McKinsey Quarterly article titled The evolving role of the CMO (MKQ 2007 Issue 3, pp.29-39), David Court discusses how the change in technology influences change in marketers' roles and how CEOs can help them set priorities and drive organizational change.

Some interesting points noted (quotes):

• User-generated media account for almost one-third of all the time individuals spend on the 100 most visited US Web sites, up from roughly 3 percent just two years ago. Consumers skeptical of push ads are flocking to a medium they trust more.
• Although good for consumers, this explosion of user-generated content comes with big risks for business. Individuals and nongovernmental organizations that don't fully understand the products of a company... can sometimes have as much influence over its image as its marketing communications unit... thus proving to be a short-term PR nightmare for many companies.
• It is, for example, the marketing department that is likely to develop (as Toyota Motor has done) programs to position a company in online communities such as Second Life, the leading virtual marketplace, which provides low-cost opportunities to learn how role-playing consumers would design and use new products
• A deep understanding of the needs of consumers in these markets and the trade-offs they make will be critical in designing products and retail formatss that strike the right balance between price and quality.
• Within marketing, for example, the ability to build brands across an increasing number of media, including vehicles dominated by user-generated content, will be critical.

The article concludes with three ideas for CEOs seeking to help their CMOs and ensure that their companies thrive:

• Take time to understand what's really happening with customers.
• Foster the right connection between the CMO's efforts and those of the other parts of the organization.
• Be a "thought partner" for the CMO as he or she transforms the marketing organization.

Read abstract or the full article on MKQ's website

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Human Computation / Google TechTalks

Recently I proposed an alternative method for human identification on my blog so when a friend sent me this video via Del.icio.us, I was absolutely delighted:

Google Video: Human Computation / Google TechTalks 2006-07-26


Luis von Ahn

• Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ph.D. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005
• B.S. Mathematics, Duke University, 2000
• Recipient, Microsoft Research Fellowship

Key points

• Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs.
• Utilize human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.
• Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software.
• Luis von Ahn advocates a novel approach: constructivly channel human brainpower using computer games.
• ESP Game = an enjoyable online game that help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords
• These keywords can be used to improve the accuracy of image search.
• People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

Fun Facts

• Number of human-hours spent playing Solitaire in 2003 = 9 billion human-hours
• Number of human-hours spent building the Empire State Building = 7 million human-hours (6.8 hours of Solitaire)
• Number of human-hours spent building the Panama Canal = 20 million human-hours (less than a day of Solitaire)

Related Web Sites

• www.captcha.net
• www.espgame.org
• www.peekaboom.org

Related SML

• FlickrAnalytics.com
• SML Pro Blog: Flickr Analytics / SML Analytics
• SML Pro Blog: Human Identification Algortihm

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Platform = (Programmable + Customizable) Systems / Marc Andreesen

Marc Andreessen (Google), co-founder of Mosaic + Netscape + Ning, attempts to give a definition to "Internet platform" in his blog post: The three kinds of platforms you need on the Internet. Key points:

• A "platform" is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers
• If you can program it, then it's a platform. If you can't, then it's not.
• There are three levels of Internet platforms:
  1. Access API: developer's application code lives outside the platform, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
     • Examples: Flickr, Del.icio.us, eBay, etc.
     • Problems: The entire burden of building and running the application itself is left entirely to the developer. Requires very high technical expertise and financial resources.
  2. Plug-In API: apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API.
     • Examples: Photoshop, Firefox, Facebook.
     • Problems: The entire burden of building and running the application itself is left entirely to the developer. Technical + financial burdens on developers can rapidly become overwhelming.
  3. Runtime Environment: applications run inside the platform itself.
     • Examples: Ning, Salesforce.com, Amazon, Second Life, Akamai
     
     

As with Cliff notes, you don't actually learn anything from reading the gists, so go read the full article on blog.pmarca.com (indexed by SML Search)

SML Thank You

I would like to thank David Bausola (Del.icio.us / Google / LinkedIn) for sending this wonderful article to me via Del.icio.us! (David Bausola / SML Thank You)

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Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

More sex is safer sex / Steven Landsburg

Source: Possible Side Effects / 2007-07-08 / New York Times

Steven E. Landsburg (Google), a professor at the University of Rochester recently published a book called More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, where he applied economics theory in everyday life. The book is largely based on his column called Everyday Economics on Slate Magazine.

I haven't read the book yet, but it looks quite interesting based on the book review on New York Times, where he suggests that the AIDS epidemic is "the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism."

You can also read the first chapter of the book on New York Times' Web site.

Pattern Recognition = Key to Fight (HIV + Spam)

Source: Business Week: 2007-10-01: print edition. pp.68, 70

David Heckerman (Google), a physician as well as a PhD in computer science at Microsoft Research, was doing research on better spam-blocking when he noted that those same technology can be applied to blocking HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.

From Heckerman’s perspective, HIV is like a cagey spammer. After attacking a cell, it injects its own genetic material and proceeds (much like a spam jockey who has commandeered as an unprotected computer) to manufacture thousands of copies of the virus.

The trouble? Complexity and mutations. HIV-infected cells often wear mutated nameplates that immune systems haven’t learned to read. In this sense, vaccines have been like faulty spam filters, the ones that block e-mails promoting “Viagra” while letter ads for “V1agra” scoot through.

But Heckerman is upbeat. He argues that by revving up the computing power and blending thousands of new variable, researchers are making progress. One key, he says, is to map the patterns of mutation and incorporate them into medicine. These mutations, he says, appear to vary according to a person’s immune system. If researchers can find the patterns, they’ll be closer to making effective vaccines. Yet if they conclude that the mutations are utterly random, then “we’re in big trouble,” says Heckerman.

Read the full article here:

Business Week: 2007-10-01: Info Tech: Using Spam Blockers To Target HIV, Too: A Microsoft researcher and his team make a surprising new assault on the AIDS epidemic.

Related SML

• SML AIDS (org)


• SML Pro Blog: AIDS


• SML Pro Blog: Pattern Recognition = Key to fight (HIV + Spam);

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Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Human Identification Algorithm

Are you human? (Sorry, We Have to Ask). Can’t read the text? Listen to it.
—Digg - Submit Item

You have seen it time and time again. That required step when you submit stories these days for human identification. It composed with letters that are salted with noise and artifacts to defer a bot's attempt to fill out the form and thus spam.

It was a smart idea, but algorithms catch up and soon they don’t work quite as well anymore. So the level has of difficulty for OCR comprehension increased bit by bit everyday. It has become so complex these days that even I cannot identify what characters they are supposed to be.

Perhaps because of the number of complaints received, now we also have the audio version of the same thing. What are they going to do when the audio recognition algorithm got better?

In my opinion, this human identification process simply does not work. Algorithms will get smarter everyday for visual or audio algorithms. A better way is to ask logic questions. For example, ask people to verbally describe the difference between a nerd and a geek. Ask them why they they are reading your blog.

Opinions are largely based on logic, but it is also largely based on creativity, and creativity is something that cannot easily be programmed yet—until the natural language algorithm catch up on it. Another difficult thing that comes natural to us but fairly difficult to do for a machine is comprehension.

I have tested this behavior with a survey which ask the question: Name the odd-man-out among the following: AOL / Google / MSN / Yahoo and state the reason supporting your answer. I get very interesting answers. They are all very inspiring and as such I know that they are not machines.

Being able to go through those answers and pick out the human responses are also most definitely a task that ought to be done by a human. I do not think that there is a computer program that can decipher how creative something is yet. However, I have fears that there are projects underway that is attempting to understand creativity using brute force.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Google Answers, and I discovered that they are no longer accepting new questions. This was a site where users submit questions and get answers responded by other users. The snippets are very interesting and no doubt allow Google to index more interesting data that is not readily available on the Web. Having the ability to train an algorithm to act like human is a very ambitious activity, but it appears that the algorithm training has paid off.

I visited Google Translate and Google Language Tools recently and I am very impressed with their English to Chinese translation capability.

Unlike English, Chinese uses a defined set of characters. Where Latin languages generally create new meanings by the use of new words, the number of Chinese characters do not change. New meanings are created through the combination of the order of these characters. As such, while Chinese children are rarely able to read newspapers until they are graduating from primary school, there will be no more new words to learn after that. It's all pattern recognition after that part. It's a bit like iconography systems, where new meanings are created out of a predefined set of modifiers.

Despite the language's complexity, I witnessed that the Google Translator is able to handle English to Chinese text relatively easily, which is light years ahead of the translation tools I have used before, and it definitely makes me wonder what else Google Research is brewing inside their labs these days.

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Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Sexual Relationship Database = World Health Optimization Management

In the his book titled Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi suggested that:

[AIDS] must have followed the route already spotted in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts.

...The scale-free topology at AIDS’s disposal allowed the virus to spread and persist.

...Whereas the early spread of AIDS was attributed primarily to homosexual sex, today heterosexual sex is the leading means of transmission. As we’ve established, hubs play a key role in these processes. Their unique role suggests a bold but cruel solution: As long as resources are finite we should treat only the hubs. That is, when a treatment exists but there is not enough money to offer it to everybody who needs it, we should primarily gives it to the hubs.

...The problem is that we do not know for sure who the hubs are.

SML Reference: Barabasi. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life. pp 138-139 (Google Books)

Analyzing the sex web is a huge undertaking.

Whereas most will be happy to disclose their personal or professional relationships using sites like Facebook, Friendster or LinkedIn, few would be readily compelled to disclose personal information about their sex life.

Finding out the topology of sex is important in the ever-changing web of human existence, however. So it is not at all surprising that a scientific research tool called Sexual Relationship Database was created.

According to the Website, the World Health Optimization Management created the project “in an effort to better understand society’s interconnected nature.” For this project, a sexual partner is defined “as a human with whom a person has had oral, anal or vaginal sexual contact.”

Like the Wikipedia, anyone may edit the sexual histories. To ensure accuracy of the study, the organization requires that users log in with a valid email address. They also reserve the right to ban users who knowingly provide false information.

Here is a map of the sex web of a few celebrities to get you started:

• Brad Pitt


• Britney Spears


• Paris Hilton

Related Blog Posts

• SML Pro Blog: Innovation = Synergy of existing ideas


• SML Pro Blog: Product Space + Wealth of Nations = Visualizing Economics


• SML Pro Blog: Sex


• SML Pro Blog: SML SEO = See-ming Lee + Search Engine Optimization

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Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (SML Pro Blog) / SML Research. All rights reserved.