Occasional Musings

Microsoft research is well established and does some quite good work in many areas of computing technologies. Couple of early memos have surfaced which show how such a research group came to be. The memos and the slide-deck are an interesting read for anyone interested in research. The memo layout the plan for its activities, how it is structured, what processes need to be in place for successful adoption of the research outputs and indeed what useful research outputs should be (not just publications)..

Here are the links:

• [Microsoft Research Plan]
• [Analysis of the memo]
• [Slide deck of memo]

A question of introspection  often asked, at various times, whether things are going well or not. Now, what seems to be a world in recovery from the recent economic crisis, it is no wonder that this question is being asked and discussed. Interesting thoughts and discussion from both pessimists and optimists… I’d like to think I am one of the optimists.

Few links discussing this question:

• Has the ideas machines broken? [Economist.com]
• Is growth over? [P. Krugman @nytimes]
• Effect of stagnation in silicon valley [P. Theil video by Techcrunch]
• The great stagnation by T. Cowen [amazon.com]

An interesting article from Scientific American about state of competition among scientists for grants, positions and in general to resources needed for scientific endeavors. Especially when most of the credit is assigned to groups who publish first (priority criteria)….

Interesting excerpt from the article:

“The importance of teamwork in science has never been greater. Studies of publications over the past 50 years show that teams increasingly dominate science and are contributing the highest-impact research. Collaborators, consortia and networks are essential for tackling interdisciplinary problems and massive undertakings, such as the Human Genome Project. The priority rule may be undermining this process.

The appropriateness of the priority rule for science has never been seriously questioned. Is it best suited to the modern scientific age, in which scientists operate in large teams that put a premium on cooperation? An alternative system that celebrates team effort toward solving problems may work better. Industry, which favors collective goals over individual achievement, and the NIH Intramural Research Program, which encourages risk taking and collaborative partnerships with industry and academia, provide contrasting but instructional examples. Perhaps scientists would gladly trade the benefits of the priority rule (individual reward) for a system that offers greater stability of support and collegiality, freer sharing of information, more fairness, and improved scientific rigor and cooperation. This would be a discovery of enormous benefit to the scientific enterprise and the society it serves.”

More of this here: [The Link]

Here is an interesting interview with Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica, WolframAlpha from theeuropean-magazine. Couple questions that I found interesting in the interview.

The European: The New York Times Magazine recently published a profile of Craig Venter, who led the team that decoded the human genome. Two things about it struck me as very interesting: One, he argued that the main challenge for innovation is not to do more, but to spread the benefits of innovation around the globe. Two, the best way to do that is through private enterprises and not through academic research. What’s your take on that?
Wolfram: I was an academic for a while, but I really like energetically doing projects. What I tried to do is build a very efficient mechanism to turn ideas into things. Right now, entrepreneurial companies seem to be the best way to do that. I look at my friends in academia and think: “Wow, things moved so slowly there in the last 25 years!” When we hire academics to work on WolframAlpha or Mathematica, the biggest shock for them is always how quick everything moves. We sit down, and an hour later we have decided what we are going to do and moved on. We can do crazy projects! If you want an immediate impact on the world, that’s what you need.

The European: So there are limits to the intrusiveness of data searches that violate personal privacy. Is there a similar limit where we might say: Even if it were technologically possible to automate most everyday processes, we should not do so for the sake of intuition or creativity.
Wolfram: It’s interesting that you mention creativity. We did an experiment a few years ago where we randomly plucked music from the universe of possible musical arrangements, and it actually sounded quite decent. I have been hearing from composers that they use that website for inspiration, which is the exact opposite of what I had expected. But the question remains what we humans should do if everything became automated. The answer, I think, is that we figure out what we should do. Let’s assume that everything is automated and wonderful. What do you choose to do in that case? As humans and as individuals, we have certain purposes that we are trying to achieve and which cannot be automated. Highly advanced artificial intelligence can be programmed to have a particular purpose but it cannot answer the question of what’s the right purpose to have. I find it highly interesting to figure out how human purposes evolved and how technology might affect them. At different times in history, we have said that our purpose is religion, or maximizing pleasure, or maximizing money. Some of the purposes we have today would seem rather bizarre from a historical perspective. Imagine a paleolithic ancestor trying to figure out why someone would walk on a treadmill indoors! So when lots of things are automated and possible, what purposes will we value? My personal and rather bizarre answer is that future generations will return to the wisdom of the ancients. The times we live in right now mark the first time in human history that data is permanently recorded on a large scale, so future generations can study us and say: “These people lived finite lives and had to make tough choices. So maybe those choices can tell us something about what it means to be human, and about what endpoints our idea of progress should aspire to.”

More of this here: [The Link]

Medgadget

via Synthetic Biology Accelerator Program Debuts.

“The best examples of disruptive technologies that could change our future are in the new fields of synthetic biology, synthetic genomics, and genome engineering,” explained famed genomicist Craig Venter in BBC’s 2007 Richard Dimbleby Lecture. It’s not hard to see why the man who helped sequence the first human genome would be enthusiastic about the prospects of synthetic genomics. But just imagine the possibility of using synthetic DNA to create custom microorganisms that could produce essentially any compound possible. This futuristic scenario might not be as far removed from the present as we think, according to Venter, who was the subject of a recent profile in The New York Times titled “Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World.”

To advance the nascent field of synthetic biology, Singularity University (Mountain View, CA) has hooked up with Triple Ring Technologies (Newark, CA) to launch the incubator known as SynBio Startup Launchpad. The organization, which is modeled in part after Y Combinator (Mountain View, CA) seed accelerator, has chosen three startups to be incubated: Evolutionary Solutions, Soil Gene, and Modern Meadow.

An interesting piece of story from NPR about current state of affairs in the patent world – patent trolling. Something from the article that brings out the essence of the issue in the buzz created by various tech companies suing one another.

“…All the big tech companies have started amassing troves of software patents — not to build anything, but to defend themselves. If a company’s patent horde is big enough, it can essentially say to the world, “If you try to sue me with your patents, I’ll sue you with mine.”

It’s mutually assured destruction. But instead of arsenals of nuclear weapons, it’s arsenals of patents….”

More of the article here: [The Link]

Audio podcast from thisamericanlife.org: [Audio Podcast]