Archive for technology
July 18, 2010 at 6:52 am · Filed under design, technology
While en route to Finland from Sounds Like Graffiti art project launch in Bradford, UK (I will write about this interesting art experiment later), Supreet and I decided to stop on the way two weeks of leisurely workshops in Estonia and Latvia. The workshops – titled New Media and Innovation Management: Workshop in Creative Industries – professes ambitiously to take a deeper look at how the creative industries can act as drivers for economic growth.
Dr. Benedikt von Walter - head of MTV's digital research team for Northern Europe
So as expected: there has been quite a lot of the usual hooblah and blaahblaah about innovation and digital technology and other such buzzwords that everybody seems to spit out these days (what do these words even mean anymore?). I guess when you have worked in this area as long as I have, the intellectual output of such workshops is seldom the main point any more. Rather, such workshops provide us with the best way to experience the different kinds of creative energies and experiments that are going on in regions such as the Baltic States. So despite some of the usual recycling of American cliches of digital openness, participation and digital revolution plus a few good speakers, the best part of the week so far has been the guided visits to the local incubators, art collectives and cultural centres such as the Culture Factory Polymer where probably the most interesting art/technology/business synergies are happening today.
The first week in Estonia is now done. Now looking forward to seeing a few more of such places in the lovely town of Riga.
July 1, 2010 at 3:47 am · Filed under technology
I recently attended the Conversation: The Internet Of Things & Augmented Reality – Convergence Conversation discussion / brain-storm meeting on the implications of ‘Internet of Things‘.
There are several companies and groups that are now focussing on this – one of the best examples of it being Pachube. There is no doubt that there are massive gains to opening up communication channels between various ‘active’ objects. Applications lie in several domains: energy, environment, SCM, reactive systems, so on and so forth.
Personally, I expect two primary variations of this:
Closed Systems: where organizations control their own silo of communication channels and devices. Example: yellow cab state and position monitored by a central monitoring system in the yellow cab company. Encrypted channels, and everything that comes with closed environments. This is already happening, btw.
Open Systems: this is the interesting bit – imagine being able to predict earthquakes (through resources like LISS, for instance) and tweeting it out. Or collision detection in traffic. Or reactive rooms, environments.
Post the meetup, I decided to chalk out the underlying architectural implications for an open web of highly communicative systems, with the goal of opening up thinking around some issues that are bound to come about:
- Unifying the communication language: we know about microformats and how long they have been in the pipeline. Especially for open systems that provide data feed, this is essential.
- Handling data explosion that comes with Real Time systems – take the case of twitter, for instance. The scalability challenges they have faced are widely known. And this is when they aren’t doing any semantics yet.
- Creating Relevance: as data explodes in volume, applications need to figure out a way to crunch and filter out the noise. There is a google right there in the making.
- Smart usable applications: while you could create an application that makes your ‘car keys’ searchable by the public, you wouldn’t do that now, would you? Technology is not the biggest problem, creativity is.
- Data presentation: interface is the king. With the volume of data, it becomes imperative that the interface / application is able to understand the deeper chaotic nuances of a ’state-based’ system, and make intelligent interfaces out of it.
One of the key idea that Kit Macgillivray of Real Time Project discussed was the concept of gazillion agents do one simple task, and yet, as a collaborative system, appears very smart.
I will be posting more on this later.
October 12, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under design, technology
For a while, I have been pondering on this: can I create a bunch of extremely stupid automatons (actually, a tweak on Finite State Machines), that co-exist independently and making self-contained selfish decisions, and yet create an ecosystem that seems to be making smart decisions?
The idea is simple: I create a set of microprograms (I fondly call them ‘brats’!), each of which have their own selfish agendas, decision processes, survival rules, and their own I/O probes that constantly monitor the surroundings for resources they need (and perish soon if they don’t find them)… and then I spawn each variety of agent multiple times and see an overall behavior emerge.
The first set of such agents are already sweating their necks, making highly stupid decisions… and yet surviving, but my goal is to now take it a step further.
I now I want to go in two directions:
- train a GA or reinforcement learning based system to figure out the initial configurations.
- spread the agents across multiple computers on the web, thus creating a virtual cluster, an ecosystem that would be very interesting to study.
You may ask, why is this any different than Cellular Automata, the system that Stephen Wolfram brought back into fad through his book ‘New Kind of Science’? The fact is, though similarities may exist on the surface, a deeper inspection would reveal that my agents are far more inspired by ant colony / multi-agent based emergent behavior systems than CA — the only difference being, I am trying to far more flexible about the toolkit, instead of sticking with just pheromones!. Also, at the end of the day, I am just trying to learn my tools!
[Tools used: Ruby, RubyGems, MySQL, a lot of caffeine, and box dvd set of The Wire]
April 28, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under technology
We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.
If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.
The deal you get:
Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
Lifetime bragging rights, “I helped create this cool site you so love to use”
Learn and utilize highly marketable Open Source and technology skills like Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Memcache, nginx, flex etc.
We get:
Self motivated force multipliers
Potential employee pool from which to hire after we get funded.
What are we looking for :-
Hardcore geeks into Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java or with willingness to rapidly learn Ruby on Rails framework.
Creative folks who create publicity material with Adobe Photoshop/Pagemaker/Gimp etc. including websites/brochures/copy during college technical fests and would like to try their hand at Human Computer Interaction workflows for a Web 2.0 site and learn in depth XHTML+CSS+Javascript, AJAX, Jquery, YUI etc.
Who should apply :-
These are telecommute positions.
This is not a training we are looking for fairly self-motivated individuals who can learn on their own without any hand holding. It doesn’t matter if you have no industry experience.
You should have access to a broadband connection with no download limits and either your own personal PC where you can use Linux environment (or a Virtual Machine with Linux). Or a University/College infrastructure where you have private diskspace (for storing the code) associated with your login account on a secure file server.
You shouldn’t be encumbered by any Intellectual property, Proprietary rights and Non-disclosure agreements to work in your own time on any project and be able to assign the moral rights of the same to us in lieu of equity into a startup company. We may at our discretion release parts of the projects executed under Open Source Licenses.
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Soum is a new media technology architect, ex-mixercast founding member, filmmaker, photographer, and a general wanderer who lives partly in London and rest of the time in Mumbai. He builds scalable web sites, dabbles in emerging technologies, and spends rest of his time in various film and photography projects.
Matti is a researcher, designer and visual artist working with emerging digital technologies globally. He is currently dayjobbing as a Teaching Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spends time shuttling between London, Helsinki and the rest of the world.
Supreet Sethi is a technology dabbler and an artist with diverse experience from enterprise computing to installation art. He has keen interest in software architecture and in-depth knowledge of mobile computing.