In an ideal world people would respect intellectual property and pay the dues to the rightful inventors. Since that not the case we have Patents to protect them…
We know, all to well, that patent, while in principle are a good thing, they really are implemented in a antiquated way. It is hard enough to work on your ideas, then just to find out that someone has patented the binary system, so you cannot distribute your cool innovative software as binaries! That is how ridiculous the whole intellectual property protection laws have become. They have just become tools to hinder innovation more than abet it.
Among all the patents the one I dislike the most is Software patents. Amazon’s “One Click”, what was that about? Why does’t Google patent “AJAX” or the GeoCoder (no comments).
While the idea of Patents is good, the implementation and enforcement is just a business of making lawyers rich, which is energy spend doing counter productive things.
So we need to fix this system, which is an easy conclusion. The tough question is how?
Any time any place – cheap, quick and reliable – Yes that is the consumer’s version of the holy grail of network research. This week as I was traveling around the Washington DC area, I had none of this on my Treo 650. I wanted information and love KMaps, for its better than a browser tie into Google Maps. But none of that matters if you cannot connect to the internet. I pay a lot more for my GPRS connection with Cingular than for my broadband cable, and the only thing I can say is – it is unreliable, slow and over priced.
I wanted to call up and complaint to Cingular, but really what can the Support team do? There are some fundamental limitation when you try to hack a connection oriented wireless network to play well with a packet switched data network. Even the best overlays don’t work that well. They can’t drop their previous investment and simple start from scrach. But they need to make the transition. To a more on demand data oriented network.
So what do I think R&D should achieve – Over 5mbps links at any place and I mean “any”. Not a easy task, given the challenges of the wireless medium. I am happy I am doing investigating this area.
When one thinks of search, one thinks of – Google, Yahoo and MSN and in that order. We know the crazy price of the Google stock. So what is their most valuable asset? If we ignore the market perception at the core of it are two things – Their Index and the PageRank algorithm. And the many seemingly adhoc heuristics that aid the PageRank algorithm to deliver better and more accurate search results.
Now the the Index is expensive to maintain and keep updated and I think has the biggest est value. So what happens when Amazon, opens its A9s search engine indexes to anyone who cares? They have taken Google’s most valuable asset and made it a have just commodity, thus making it possible for anyone to try to improvise on the search algorithms that only big players had the privilege to play with.
So what are the implications? There are many in the ever changing dynamics of on line business, but one side effect is the impact on Data Mining research. Think every School’s CS department having access to a large dataset that they can apply their algorithms and theories on. Hope it aids in accelerating research.
Being so close to academia, why didn’t Google think of this? Probably the same reason Yahoo and MSN did not think of it.
One of the most challenging problems in data retrieval – search movies and extract object information to help me fine what I have asked for – “Get me all the movie scenes that have Brad Pitt on a horse”. While we are at it, make it a “brown horse”.
I had the opportunity to attend a colloquium this month, where Dr. Avi Silberschatz, Professor and Chair of the Computer Science department at Yale University gave a very entertaining and interesting talk on some research issues in computer science. The question I pose here was what he asked while giving the talk. But this is one of the most interesting and unsolved problem in data retrieval. I am sure Google among other is working on this problem.
Let us itemize these issue and see how we could solve them. I am not researching in this area so some of it may be naive or already tried.
The challenges of course are:
- Shortlising the movies: This is challenging as the size of the movies are so large and there are so many movies. For starters, if we say “Brad Pitt”, then we can look up the Meta (like IMDB) and shortlist the movies that he acted in, this is easy.
- Then comes the question of how to scan the movies and identify Brad Patt. I think one way is to create and index of the key frame of the movie, and use some AI to do image recognition on each frame (expensive and very difficult). We can use a social software, that can provide the data set to train the AI program that analyzes the frame.
- Some of the analysis can be done offline, i.e. we can analyse a the key frames and extract known objects (car, horse, cat, man, woman, etc) and index them. Further analysis of each object can associate addtional attributes to these know object like (white car, brown horse, etc).
Well really, there are many issues and as Dr. Avi said, if you do not want to graduate, this is a good problem to solve. How can I do it any justice in a small blog post! But it is a very interesting question. An really fun to work on..
The best technology is the one that solves a problem. The focus is on “one”. Often when I write code or think of an idea that can save the world. What happens? The solution, be it technology or otherwise, will not do anything too well. Word Press is a good example of solving one problem – Making Blogging easy and it does it well.
On the other hand a simple networking protocol like TCP/IP and an even simpler concept like hyperlinking change the way we look for work, communicate and digest and create information. Well if you look at the fundamental paper, they were trying to solve a specific problem. Like TCP was trying to build end to end reliability into an unreliable IP protocol. Narrow problem, focused and elegant solution, amazing concequences.
I believe there are still many problems to be solved and great technology to be created, that will change the way we live. No Web 2.0 gimic, but it is more than that. We need to go back in literature and read the Memex paper by Vannevar Bush and you understand what I am trying to get at.
It is old news, but I have been very frustrated for the lack of a simple way to refactor in VS.Net, well the new express edtion of C# does a decent job.
I was working on a mesh simulation and wanted the convenience of an IDE (I like them more than vi). I had been wanting to use kdevelop. Well my server had the older version (2.1) so I decided to work on my laptop. Well kdevelop by itself is pretty good. Lots of templates and decent intellisense. An overkill for what I wanted but that did not stop me.
Since, I need some visualization or paths and routes, I though I would give Qt a try. Not an expert at UI, but I get the general idea. But behold, my laptop has no network connectivity – I remembered having trouble with the wireless drivers (ipw2200) with FC4. But I had got it to works …at least once! After much trying, I finally decided to use SuSe 10 as it seemed to have the necessary support. After a lot of wasted hours, it turns out that did not help either. I could not get it to talk to my NetGear wireless router , neither wireless not ethernet worked.
Since I was running short on time, I decided to give Visual C# Express and .NET 2.0 a try. Got the whole thing downloaded and running in under an hour. And actually got to what I was trying to do in less the 3 after that. While we can argue about Linux vs Windows and how much more powerful c++ is, I always think of the saying…”for the want of a nail, the horse shoe was lost, for the want of a horse shoe the horse was lost…and so on.”.
I love Linux and many aspects of open source, but there is a long way to go.
There is nothing standard about innovation. It usually comes with a need, a need to solve a problem. I have always wondered does standardization cripple innovation or does it abet it? On one hand, to introduce new network technologies is a very expensive affair and marred with patches that need to inter op with legacy systems. But at the same time standardization of wireless protocols like 802.11, has bought so many new products to the market as product developers can abs tact the wireless communication. Same applies for Web Services, they are not most efficient but the are standard compliant and that makes them easier to implement as the “reuse” factor is high and tools can be made available for things that are standard.
While I may change my stance , I strongly believe that standards aid innovation. There are some trade off, like with everything else, but if one had to choose between standards and a hooch pooch of proprietary (but more efficient) options, what would you choose?
I had been to the SQL server 2005 launch event this morning. Bad weather, but I was keen to know what they had done in terms of avalibility. And to be honest while some of it was techno marketing, there where three things that I reallly thing were good:
High Avalability, and concurrent recovery.
Security, to the database and feature to encrypt data in the database (like CC no etc).
Improved user interface to the way one can interact with SQL, no more coding in MMC
Thanks to the hacker, they have really paid a lot of attention to security.
For all your money need, you have to go through the bank. Right? Well I wish the answer was Wrong, but for most parts it is very true. When you have money, banks are your friends; when you don’t they could care less. If you want it for a business the interest rate are criminal.
In comes Zopa a startup from the UK for a change! A simple concept, towards which the Internet lends itself, very well in fact.
Connect “consumer” with “producer” in the most efficient and economical way.
We have seen this with eBay to say the very least. Now Zopa is doing it with money! the best there is. Let people give to other people, while it can manage the risk and manage the platform. Neat.
Innovations in computer science and the ability of entrepreneurs to make business sense to connect the dots will really change the world. Imagine life without computers and worse yet with out network connectivity!