Alexey Smirnov's blog

In my spare time I like to read WIRED magazine. A few recent issues were focused on innovation from the United States point of view. According to the magazine, innovation happens within big companies such as Google and Microsoft, as well as smaller startup companies.

Meet Generation Y: The inside story behind Y Combinator. This article describes a startup incubator which is very difficult to get in. It is like, if you are a boss at some big company and you think, Gee, this company is doing lots of junk and I can do so much better, then you can get into Y Combinator and enjoy guaranteed funding in the order of millions USD to build your startup. And this company generated prominent startups such as Dropbox, scribd, reddit, Posterous, out of which I use none. Btw., I think digg is all but dead. Apparently, they are desperately looking for a new big thing, but they have not hit it yet. Those companies mentioned above are cool and nice but few people use them outside of Silicon Valley. So it is like incubator located in Silicon Valley, generating jobs for Silicon Valley, and produces some cool software that local people enjoy.

On the other hand, Bill Gates takes a broader look at the world. After fighting with malaria in Africa, he decided to tackle world’s energy problems. Together with his former colleague Nathan Myrhvold they have designed a new power plant which they want to build completely by 2020. Also Bill Gates says that solar panels are just nice decoration, but they are of little use beyond that.

Another article is dedicated to Kinect hacking. It turns out that Kinect is one of the best-selling computer gadgets in entire computer history – over 10 million pieces sold so far. I will tell you honestly – I don’t know anybody who owns a Kinect! But it seems very cool indeed as it enables numerous applications including 3D scanning and virtual reality.

Google is also a cool company. Android is the only mobile platform that threatens iPhone. According to WIRED, Android advocates complete openness and lack of censorship whereas iPhone is quite the opposite. The article goes beyond technical differences between Android and iPhone. It describes the way Google was able to make a deal with Verizon and Motorola, the latter two companies were in trouble, so they signed up for the deal that they initially didn’t like in order to survive. It looks like Google is advocating mutual use of radio frequencies, which traditional carriers violently oppose. But somehow Google managed to lure Verizon away from its traditional standpoint. And this is indeed a big indication of change going on in the mobile market.

I have read a few recent issues of WIRED magazine. It has changed once again. Currently, it does not talk about technology much, despite the fact that many interesting things happened recently in the IT world. Companies such as Apple and Microsoft are all but forgotten in this magazine. Instead, its main focus these days is DIY (do it yourself) movement. WIRED magazine actively promotes all kinds of DIY activities. Almost in every issue there is an article describing a small group of people who were able to revolutionize the world in one way or another.

I don’t really know why they are so obsessed with DIY projects. In one of the issues they claim that open-source development movement is a thing of the past, that open-source is ruled by dictators. More likely, however, that they are taking a broader view on open-source, not just software, but hardware, gadgets, and just everything can become open-source. The magazine states that only a few years ago there were just a dozen of people who could create reasonable DIY projects, so they were not sure it was possible to fill in just one issue of MAKE magazine with interesting content. These days, there are enough projects to fill in 10 MAKE magazines every month. In other words, the DIY movement really took off.

Do these DIY project have any practical meaning? Not really. Most of them are just for fun, the most common project is a weather station that broadcasts info to your Twitter account. Do you need one? Certainly no. But thousands of people have done this for no obvious reason. DIY is a new craze. Or is it just a forgotten obsession from half of a century ago, just like virtualization? (think IBM and mainframes whose OS had virtualization capabilities, but those projects were soon abandoned in favor of micro-computers).

So the DIY age is round the corner. Everybody should get familiar with the following cool technology. Arduino is an open-source hardware board which you can program. Not only WIRED magazine thinks it is cool. Google has announced during I/O conference that Android platform will support devices built using Arduino. This looks like an attempt to standardize hundreds of devices from various manufacturers and allow them to take advantage of Andriod platform. Now, instead of writing Android apps, which there are millions of, people should try to build a cool gadget.

Another cool idea is creating 3D models. Yes, I like to do that as well thanks to Google Sketchup, which opened the awesome modelling world to me given my mediocre drawing skills. WIRED magazine suggests one make another step forward – build your models from real materials: wood, steal, even gold – and open and online shop! To get a real tangible model you need an expensive device called 3D printer. Luckily, they are getting cheaper. A 3D printer is an indispensable tool for those who need to custom parts for their bicycle or want to build a small airplane. It turns out you can do it in your garage nowadays (don’t forget to order the engine, pretty much the only part you need from outside).

But if you don’t have a 3D printer you can use web site such as Shapeways: upload your model, select a material, and you will get a real model by postal mail. Is not that amazing?

But crowed innovation is not limited to software and hardware. It can be just about anything! And there is a special web site that facilitates getting money to fund your next project. It is called Kickstarter. Describe the idea, set a fundraising goal – and just wait for a couple of weeks. Many, really many projects took off through such a community-driven funding. Everybody can donate 1 dollar. And when thousands of people are doing that the result is amazing.

Another topic that WIRED magazine deals with is various high-profile criminal investigations. I don’t know how they are related to technology. I am very surprised to see a lot of such stories in such a magazine.

• Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy? This story says that Anthrax suspect was not proven to be guilty before he committed suicide. Poor guy.
• How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central. This small town accounts for a large percentage of scams.
• What Made This University Scientist Snap? A story of a crazy scientist.
• The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist. Some criminal gang killed a pizza delivery guy.
• Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners’ Jungle-Built, Kevlar-Coated Supersubs. Some unknown people built a submarine in a swamp.

While in Russia I glanced through a number of issues of Communications of ACM and Wired magazine. I have found the following articles interesting:

WIRED MAGAZINE
The web is dead

This article analyzes the usage patterns of Internet. It states that 10 years ago the most useful Web application was web browser. Nowadays, with increased amount of video content the web browser is not an important application. Moreover, web is becoming a closed platform, which also happened in other industries. The reason is that heavy industry giants are able to leverage the platform better than smaller groups. Such giants steal away customers and gradually enslave them to make sure that they use only non-free products. iTunes and Facebook are cited as examples. In addition, going mobile contributes to this trend. The authors believe that good browsing experience is not possible for mobile at all, this is why lots of smaller applications are developed, each serving its special purpose. But these applications are using proprietary protocols for communication with their servers. This is a pessimistic article.

The other articles are from CACM

Straightening Out Heavy Tails

This article is dedicated to discussion that happened between the inventor of Long Tail concept Chris Anderson and a few other people who are trying to prove that his concept is wrong. Chris seems to defend his theory.

Beyond Smart Grid

These guys are true geeks! They invented a single device that will measure power, water, and gas consumption of every device in your house. Such device is useful if you want to cut your utility bills.

Securing Elasticity in the Cloud

This article tries to explain that cloud computing is not just hype. There are fundamental ideas behind it, in particular the fact that machine resources become divisible.

Robin Milner: The elegant pragmatist

Inventor of ML (programming language).

The Resurgence of Parallelism

Another article in the series which claim that every new technology is just old forgotten technology. They are saying that in 1960s IBM diverted resources into mini-computer because it was an easier sell, instead of pursuing super-computing even though lots of promising ideas having been developed at that time.

An Interview with Ed Feigenbaum

An interesting view of AI field. In particular, Ed claims that knowledge is more important than algorithms. He says that we will have intelligent machines only after we teach computers to read and understand books. This explains to me why Semantic Web is so important. This way machines start to comprehend data.

A Tour through Visualization Zoo

A great article describing how to generate cool visualizations. It uses an example of a software which consists of a number of packages. I think the following image is the coolest way to visualize software development. Each circle is a package; it includes additional circles corresponding to the packages it depends on.

Committed to Success

This year’s winner of ACM Turing Award. Inventor of XEROX Alto computer.

Eric Brewer: Change Agent

A guy who made a billion USD during dot-com boom and lost it after the bubble exploded.

Why Cloud Computing will Never Be Free

The directions in which cloud computing will evolve. The main idea is SLA, or service-level agreement.

Automatic Program Repair with Evolutionary Computation

This article presents an algorithm that can fix certain types of bugs automatically. We have explored automatic patch generation when I was a graduate student in Stony Brook. However, our method was targeted toward buffer overflows. This method is applicable to a broader class of bugs, but it has its own limitations. For example, it repairs the program only by copy-and-paste approach, that is, it is assuming that the missing statement that is needed to fix the program has appeared somewhere else in the program’s source code. This is a serious limitation, I think. I doubt that the method explained in this article will ever receive wide applications.

New trends in computing appear every now and then. Dealing with massive amounts of data is not new but a few interesting applications that can greatly benefit from our increased processing power are on the horizon. Wired magazine describes these applications in the following two articles that appeared recently:

Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure


What You Want: Flickr Creator Spins Addictive New Web Service

The first article deals with the problem of how the new drugs are developed. It turns out that the biggest problem is not whether it is useful or not but whether it poses any danger (or in other words has any side effects) or not. For example, aspirin was discovered in 1899 but it was not until a 100 years later that it was noticed that patients who take aspirin regularly have descreased risk of heart attack. In this case, the side effect was positive. However, in many other cases it is negative. The difficulty of testing a new drug is that it takes a lot of time to establish a strong correlation between taking a drug and a certain change in patient’s body. The problem is that increased body temperature is a possible result of many things – food, outside environment, which people the patient talks to, etc. A more comprehensive monitoring system is needed to take those things into account. However, working with such a multi-dimensional data set is only possible with use of automated tools and requires lots of processing power. This is what Google is good at.

The second article describes Hunch, a system that tries to build a psychological model of you. It asks you a number of random questions, for example whether you believe in alien’s kidnapping or not and then matches your answers to those of other people. Then it can give you recommendations based on what people with similar answers like. The system makes a step further, however. It can try to guess your answers to arbitrary questions based on what people who are similar to you answered. I have tried to allow Hunch to learn a fair amount of my preferences – I answered over 100 questions. After that it started to recommend what seemed like interesting guesses. However, when it tried to predict my answers its rate of correct answers was around 50%. Therefore, the system did not learn much yet. On the other hand, a human being is a lot more complex creature whose model obviously does not fit into 100 questions.

Another system mentioned in the article which I liked a lot more is Aardvark. It uses a unique combination of computing technology: messaging, tagging, social networking, etc. Its idea is simple and I guess many people have thought of it. What if you have a question but you don’t know who to ask. Then most likely you head on to a web forum or a mailing list and ask. The problem is that you have to find an appropriate forum and wait a couple of days to get an answer.

The problem is that Internet does not allow you to find right people instantly. Try typing Who knows Chinese out there in a search engine and see what happens. Aardvark is a kind of social search engine. Once you type your question the system determines its topic and tags it appopriately. Then it searches over its database of users who have indicated that they are experts in this particular area. In addition, Aardvark will check who is online at the moment to avoid sending your question to someone who is possibly on vacation. The expert will get an IM notification from Aardvark asking whether (s)he wants to help. If yes, the expert can type the answer immediately and even chat with the person who asked the question. The whole process is real-time which actually encourages people to ask questions.

I have tried Aardvark both to ask questions and to answer linux questions. In either case the experience was positive. I got answers that were quite valuable. For example, when I asked how to learn Chinese I was given a link to a web site with online language course which even had an iPhone app to facilitate learning. I could not find it otherwise in app store.

Aardvark contacted me through Google Talk a few times. It is actually fun to talk to a robot because this way you can help out real people. I guess this is one cool application of artificial intelligence – robots are helping people to socialize!

I used to read WIRED magazine a few years ago. Then when I started working I only had time to read what was absolutely necessary – Communications of ACM.

However, this spring I decided to subscribe to Wired magazine again. I was impressed when I got a copy of the magazine – it has totally changed. To start with, nowadays it is half advertising, half content magazine. I guess this is because of the economic crisis. In other words, it is possible to throw away half of the magazine right off the start.

What remains is also not necessarily interesting. I used to like wired-tired-expired section as well as those new pesky words from the underground that Wired was decyphering to the rest of us. Those sections are gone.

But there are few interesting articles still. In June 2010 issue a number of interesting people are mentioned including Nicholas Carr and Daniel Shirky. I have read books of these authors. The magazine advertises their new books which I definitely need to check out. There is an interesting research article as well called Traffic Cop. It describes brave attempt of few people to build a model of traffic in NYC as a giant spreadsheet. By introducing a number of parameters to the model and adding an ability to fiddle with them it becomes possible to optimize traffic in NYC. This work is so necessary for lots of cities with traffic jams!

To summarize, Wired magazine is always fresh and surprising but not necessarily what you want to read. I can only explain this as an attempt to attract more readers, for example causal technology enthusiasts are more interested in space junk and organ transplants whereas computer specialists are appreciating computer technology content. To me Wired looks more like Popular Mechanics nowadays, at least earlier it was more related to geek culture. On the other hand, the definition of geek is also changing.

I have read the first three issues of Communications of ACM of year 2010: January, February, and March. Overall, I have noticed that CACM is aiming at a broader scope, not only CS-topics but also biology and physics. Therefore, nowadays it is more like Science magazine or Nature. But of course in every article there is a computational aspect that connects computer science with another area of knowledge. I found out that cross-disciplinary articles are more engaging than purely technical articles. The nature has lots of secrets that computer science helps reveal.

Jan 2010
Rebuilding for Eternity. Bundler – open source version of Photosynth.
Automated translation of Indian Languages
New Search Challenges and Opportunities
Data in Flight. Implementation of StreamSQL. Stanford streams, MIT Aurora, SQL Stream.
Other people’s data – XIgnite

Last but not least – two articles that discuss Google’s parallel engine – Map-Reduce. I have noticed that CACM contains lots of articles dedicated to Google’s technology, for example there is an article discussing the evolution of Google file system in one of the following issues. At the same time there are no articles from other software giants, for example Microsoft, Apple, or IBM. This is not because those companies do not innovate. Everybody knows that programmers went nuts writing iPhone apps. The reason of Google domination is I believe that amount of sponsor money that it gives to ACM. It is fine, Google has created lots of innovative frameworks but other companies deserve attention as well.

Map Reduce and Parallel DBMSs: Friends or Foes?
MapReduce: A Flexible Data Processing Tool

Feb 2010

The best issue I have ever read! To start with, its cover story is dedicated to new model of computation, quantum algorithms. This topic is not new. When I was an undergraduate student in Russia in late 1990s there was lots of buzz of how quantum algorithms can change the cryptography. With its strong mathematical tradition, Russians were trying to explain quantum algorithms from the number theory point of view. To me it was totally incomprehensible. Or I should say that my mind was more inclined toward an algorithmic perspective of quantum computers. In this article CACM does a great job on explaining the notion of quantum algorithm at the level that was most appropriate to me as a software engineer. It briefly mentions computational complexity challenges and explains how quantum algorithms might help tackle those.

Recent progress in Quantum algorithms

Type Theory comes to age. Aura, Jif for security. Philip Walder
An interview with Michael Rabin

A few billion lines of code later.

Another great article in the same issue! When I was a student (again) but this time in a graduate school in the United States I was lucky to witness the emergence of a new technology – practical bug detection using static analysis. But I will start with a brief introduction on how industrial research is transformed into a widely adopted mature technology.

In my life so far I saw two such events. More experienced people might name a few other cases but here is what I can say. In late 1990s computer graphics has advanced rapidly because of increased processing power. Researchers began experiments with massive amounts of data or images. This is how light field mapping technology was developed simultaneously at several universities as well as at Microsoft and Intel. Its idea is to build a 3D model of an object from a number of images taken with an inexpensive camera. I was lucky to participate in the development of this technology as an undergraduate intern at Intel-Nizhny Novgorod in 2001-2002. However, it was only a research project which was soon abandoned. However, in year 2010 there is a commercialized version of this technology Photosynth that Microsoft has created.

When I joined graduate school in Stony Brook in 2002 application security was a hot research area. Everybody was thinking how to protect the programs against viruses. This is why we have created DIRA – a dynamic protection tool that instrumented programs with additional instructions that made it resilient against buffer overflow attacks. But again, the project was soon abandoned. However, Dawson Engler was able to transform the technology landscape with his static bug finder. In this article he describes his experiences with making commercial tool from a research project.

Software Model Checking takes off
Assessing the Changing US IT R&D Ecosystem

March 2010
Chasing the AIDS virus

Cover story is another must-read article! It explains the mechanics of AIDS virus. I never thought that it can transform itself to avoid the medicine it is exposed to.

Making decisions based on the Preferences of Multiple Agents

This article describes various algorithms of voting with applications to social networks. Very comprehensive discussion.

Engineering the web’s third decade
Orchestrating coordination in pluralistic networks
GFS: Evolution on fast-forward
Global IT management: structuring for scale, responsiveness, and innovation

These days I am reading every other issue of Economist, those that contain special reports. A special report is a 10-15 page report that deals with a particular issue, for example financial crisis. It consists of a number of articles. Each article sheds light on a specific side of the topic, the articles are typically arranged in a logical order.

The financial crises special report explains the multiple reasons behind the troubles that world economy faced. It turns out that the underlying theory of risk evaluation was developed in mid-20th century. I noticed that Economist is always doing a good job on analyzing the history of a particular event. The underlying theories are always developed long time before their applications start to make a difference.

The use and misuse of computational models to evaluate the risk was the primary reason behind the crisis. A simple example of an error-prone model is when bank A owns shares of bank B and bank B owns shares of bank A. If one them collapses then the other will collapse too. But models often ignored this domino-effect. Of course, not everybody was that stupid. But the problem was that as soon as one bank began announcing higher yields other had to follow to stay competitive. Thus, the mathematicians were forced to bend their models to make them fit the desired higher yield.

Another article describes how the risk managers were treated. Various tricks were played to reduce their influence on the decision of borrowing money. One common trick was to work quietly on a proposal for weeks and show it to risk team only a couple of hours before the approval meeting so that they would not have time to evaluate it properly.

The rest of the report is devoted to how to avoid repetitions of the crisis. Of course, banks need to have bigger reverses in cash. Also they need to prepare themselves, they need to understand which factors lead to such crisis. They are playing board games now when a bank is put into a simulated crisis and the management needs to think how they got into such mess.

But regulators also need to do a lot. Too big to fail is one issue that they need to address. Another problem is that the Central Bank was kind enough to lend big amounts of money with low percentage which stimulated the desire of banks to borrow. If a bank has lots of money then it starts to attract kinds of customer it would typically not mess up with. It might even promise a higher yield than average but obviously such good life ends as soon as cheap money supply stops.

Another special report that I read deals with information deluge. Again, Economist begins with a history lesson: in 1917 a manufacturing manager complained on the effects of a telephone. It was called a big time-waster and confusion-generator. But Craig Mundie is saying that big data opens new horizons for new economies. Farecast, a system that Microsoft built allows to estimate when to buy a flight ticket depending on the expected change in the price.

Economist provides lots of examples how various companies saved using better information processing tools. For example Nestle found that nearly 9 million of its records were either obsolete or duplicate. Another example is Chinese company Li & Fung that operates a supply chain. One of the most important technologies is videoconferencing which allows buyers and manufacturers to examine the color of a material.

Another article is dedicated to Google. It managed to build a translation system using machine learning over a training set of 2 trillions words obtained through its book scanning technology. In early 1900s IBM tried to build a French-English program but their system did not work. The reason was that IBM had only millions documents, not billions. Therefore, big data generates big improvements. The magazine also mentions the Data Liberation Front – an attitude Google is taking towards users’ data.

Next article is describing open government. On his first day in the office, Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum ordering federal agencies to make available as much information as possible. The article mentions several books on open government such as Full Disclosure and Wiki Government.

Visualizing massive amounts of information is an important and challenging task. Pat Hanrahan of Stanford University founded Tableau Software which facilitates information manipulation. Valdis Krebs, a specialist in social interactions was once asked to help speed up a delayed project. He mapped the e-mail conversations between various teams and found out that they all communicated through a single manager. Connecting the teams directly was the key to saving the troubled project.

But large amount of information demand lots of energy. This is why big companies such as Google and Microsoft are building their data centers near hydro generating plants.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, said Herbert Simon in 1971.

I have been reading mostly Communications of ACM recently. However, I also like Wired magazine and Technology Review but it so happens that if I don’t have a print edition in front of me then I am not going to read it.

In the local supermarket there is a wide selection of magazines. While waiting for the cashier to process your stuff one can choose something interesting. Even though I never intended to read those magazines but this is exactly how I bought TIME magazine and Economist. Btw., there is Newsweek available as well but I thought it was basically the same as the other two magazines.

Because I bought both magazines near New Year they were summarizing the year 2009 and of course their main concern was the global financial crisis. However, the magazines dealt with the issue in two different ways.

Time magazine has traditionally selected the Person of the Year which is Ben Bernanke. Then the magazine explained how US Federal Reserve works and interviewed Ben Bernanke. To do this Time magazine gathered its best writers and editors. Quite traditionally, the magazine attributes each article to a particular author or a number of them.

I bought The Economist magazine because earlier I learned that it is one of the favorite publications of George W. Bush. The articles in this magazine have no authors. The articles themselves are quite short which is more typical for a newspaper. However, their difference is that they do not deal with just one event but rather describe a trend or a development of a news story over the period that the magazine spans or even longer. The coverage of the topics is also quite wide – from Europe to the US to China but surprisingly no mentioning of Russia whatsoever. The Economist explained that the excess of cash that the Fed generated makes another bubble possible. But there are no immediate signs yet.

Thus, both magazines are examples of analytical reading but Time is more into people and organizations, the big players which define what is going on in the world. The Economist describes how people live in various parts of the world thus it is more like a long tail magazine. It is an open question who defines the world history, either the few top guys or ordinary people.