Category: Information economy

Open source digital assistant

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Crowdsourcing, Information economy, Mobile computing, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary leadershp

I’ve come by and purchased a number of digital assistants over the last couple of years from both Google and Amazon but not Apple. At first their novelty drove me to take advantage of them to do a number of things. But over time I started to only use them for music playing or jokes. But then I started to hear about some other concerns with the technology.

The problems with today’s vendor based, digital assistants

My and others main concern was their ability to listen into conversations in the home and workplace without being queried. Yes, there are controls on some of them to turn off the mic and thus any recordings. But these are not hardwired switches and as software may or may not work depending on the implementation. As such, there is no guarantee that they won’t still be recording audio feeds even with their mic (supposedly) turned off.

At one point I saw a news article where police had subpoenaed recordings of a digital assistant to use in a criminal case. Now I’m ok with use of this for specific, court approved, criminal cases but what’s to limit its use to such. And not all courts, or governments for that matter, are as protective of personal privacy as some.

Open source digital assistant on the way

But with an open source version of a digital assistant, one where the user had complete programmatical control over its recording and use of audio data is another matter. I suppose this doesn’t necessarily help the technically challenged among us that can’t program our way out of a paper bag but even for those individuals, the fact that an open source version exists to protect privacy, could be construed as something much more secure than a company or vendor’s product.

All that made it very interesting when I saw an article recently about a project put together at Standford on an Open source challenger to popular virtual assistants”.

How to create a open source digital assistant

The main problem facing an open source digital assistant is the need for massive amounts of annotated training request data. This is one of the main reasons that commercial digital assistants often record conversations when not specifically requested.

But Stanford University who is responsible for creating the open source digital assistant above has managed to design and create a “rules based” system to help generate all the training data needed for a virtual assistant.

With all this automatically generated training data they can use it to train a digital assistant’s natural language processing neural network to understand what’s being asked and drive whatever action is being requested.

At the moment the digital assistant (and its conversation generator) has somewhat limited skills, or rather only works in a restricted set of domains such as restaurants, people, movies, books and music. For example, “identify a restaurant near me that has deep dish pizza and is rated greater than 4 on a 5 point scale”, “find me an mystery novel talking that is about magic”, or “who was the 22nd president of the USA”.

But as the digital assistant and its annotated, rules based conversation generator are both open source, anyone can contribute more skills code or add more conversational capabilities. Over time, if there’s enough participation, perhaps even someday perform all of the skills or capabilities of commercial digital assistants.

Introducing Almond and Stanford’s OVAL

Stanford work on this project is out of their OVAL (Open Virtual Assistant Lab). Their open source virtual assistant is called Almond.

Almond’s verbal generator is called Genie and uses compositional technology to generate conversations that are used to train their linguistic user interface (LUInet). Almond also uses ThingTalk a new declaritive program language to process responses to queries and requests. Finally, Almond makes use of Thingpedia, a repository of information about internet services and IoT devices to tell it how to interact with these systems.

Stanford Genie technology

The technology behind Genie is based on using source text statements to create templates that can generate sentences for any domain you wish to have Almond work in. If one is interested in expanding the Almond domains, they can create their own templates using the Genie toolkit.

One essentially provides a small set of input sentences that are converted into templates and used by Genie to understand how to parse all similar sentences. This enables Almond to “understand” what’s being requested of it

The set of input sentences can start small and be augmented or added to over time to handle more diverse or complex queries or requests. Their GitHub toolkit and Genie technology is described more fully in a paper Genie: A generator of natural language symantec parsers for virtual assistant commands

Stanford ThingTalk declarative language

ThingTalk is the programming language used to control what Almond can do for requests and queries. Essentially it’s a multi-part statement about what to do when a request comes along. The main parts in a ThingTalk statement include:

  1. When a particular action is supposed to be triggered.
  2. What service does the request need in order to perform its action.
  3. What action is requested

The “what service does a request need” are based on Open API calls (See ThingPedia below). The “what action is requested” can either be standard Almond actions or invoke other ThingPedia open source API calls, such as create a tweet, post on FB, send email etc.

For example, a ThingTalk statement looks like:

monitor @com.foxnews.get() => @com.slack.send();

Which monitors Fox news for any new news articles and sends them (the link) to your Slack channel.

Stanford Thingpedia

Thingpedia is an open source repository of structured information available on the Web and of API services available on the web. Structured information or data is the information behind calendars, contact databases, article repositories, etc. Any of which can be queried for information and some of which can be updated or have actions performed on them. API services are the way that those queries and actions are performed.

One page of the Thingpedia multi-page summary of services that are offered

The Thingpedia web page shows a number of services that already have Open source APIs defined and registered. For example, things like twitter, facebook, bing search, BBC news, gmail and a host of other services. More are being added all the time and these represent the domains that Almond can be used to act upon.

Some of these domains are more defined that others. But in any case any service that takes the form of an web based API can be added to Thingpedia.

Thingpedia as a standalone open source repository is valuable in and of itself regardless of its use by Almond. But Almond would be impossible without Thingpedia. Thingpedia wants to be the wikipedia of APIs.

Almond, putting it all together

Almond consists of mainly the Almond Agent, Engine and Thingpedia. The Agent is used by the various Almond implementions to parse and understand the request and access the ThinkTalk program statement. Almond Agent uses its LUInet natural language interpreter, interpret that request and to select the ThingTalk program for the request. Once the ThinkTalk program is identified, it uses the various Thingpedia APIs requested by the ThinkTalk statement to generate the proper API calls to the service being requested and generate any output that is requested.

Where can you run Almond

Almond is available currently as a web app, an Android App, a Gnome (Linux) desktop/laptop App, a CLI application or can be run on your Mac or Windows computers. You could of course create your own smart speaker to run Almond or perhaps hack a current smart speaker to do so.

One important consideration is that with the Android app, all your data and credentials are only stored on the phone. And will not go out into the cloud or elsewhere. I didn’t see similar statements about privacy protections for the web app or any of the other deployments. But as Almond is open source, you potentially have much greater control over where your data resides.

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What I would really like is a smart speaker app running on a RPi with a microphones and a decent speaker attached, all in the package of a cube or cylinder.

I thought their videos on Almond were pretty cheesy but the technology is very interesting and could potentially make for an interesting competitor of today’s smar

Photo Credit(s):

All photos and graphics from Stanford Almond and OVAL Lab websites.

Software defined power grid

Posted on by Ray in Data availability, Energy efficiency, Information economy, IoT, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

Read an article this past week in IEEE Spectrum (The Software Defined Power Grid is here) about a company that has been implementing software defined power grids throughout USA and the world to better integrate and utilize renewable energy alongside conventional power generation equipment.

Moreover, within the last year or so, Tesla has installed a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) using residential solar and grid scale batteries to better manage the electrical grid of South Australia (see Tesla’s Australian VPP propped up grid during coal outage). VPP use to offset power outages would necessitate something like a software defined power grid.

Software defined power grid

Not sure if there’s a real definition somewhere but from our perspective, a software defined power grid is one where power generation and control is all done through the use of programatic automation. The human operator still exists to monitor and override when something goes wrong but they are not involved in the moment to moment control of which power is saved vs. fed into the grid.

About a decade ago, we wrote a post about smart power meters (Smart metering’s data storage appetite) discussing the implementation of smart meters for home owners that had some capabilities to help monitor and control power use. But although that technology still exists, the software defined power grid has moved on.

The IEEE Spectrum article talks about a phasor measurement units (PMUs) that are already installed throughout most power grids. It turns out that most PMUs are capable of transmitting phasor power status at 60 times a second granularity and each status report is time stamped with high accuracy, GPS synchronized time.

On the other hand, most power grids today use SCADAs (supervisory control and data acquisition) to monitor and manage the power grid. But SCADAs only send data every 2-4 seconds. PMU’s are also installed in most power grids, but their information is not as important as SCADA to the monitoring, management and control of most (non-software defined) power grids.

One software defined power grid

PXiSE, the company in the IEEE Spectrum article, implemented their first demonstration project in Hawaii. That power grid had reached the limit of wind and solar power that it could support with human management. The company took their time and implemented a digital simulation of the power grid. But with the simulation in hand, battery storage and a off the shelf PC, the company was able to manage the grids power generation mix in real time with complete automation.

After that success, the company next turned to a micro-grid (building level power) with electronic vehicles, battery and solar power. Their software defined power grid reduced peak electricity demand within the building, saving significant money. With that success the company took their software defined power grid on the road to South Korea, Chile, Mexico and a number of other locations the world.

Tesla’s VPP

The Tesla VPP in South Australia, is planned to consists of up to 50K houses with solar PV panels and 13.5Kwh of batteries, able to deliver up to 250Mw of power generation and 650Mwh of power storage.

At the present time, the system has ~1000 house systems installed but even with that limited generation and storage capability it has already been called upon at least twice to compensate for coal generation power outage. To manage each and every household, they’d need something akin to the smart meters mentioned above in conjunction with a plethora of PMUs.

Puerto Rico’s power grid problems and solutions

There was an article not so long ago about the disruption to Puerto Rico’s power grid caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in IEEE Spectrum (Rebuilding Puerto Rico’s Power Grid: The Inside Story) and a subsequent article on making Puerto Rico’s power grid more resilient to hurricanes and other natural disasters (How to harden Puerto Rico’s power grid). The later article talked about creating micro grids, community PV and battery storage that could be disconnected from the main grid in times of disaster but also used to distribute power generation throughout the island.

Although the researchers didn’t call for the software defined power grid, it is our understanding that something similar would be an outstanding addition to their work there.

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As the use of renewables goes up and the price of batteries decreases while their capabilities go up over time, more and more power grids will need to become software defined. In the end, more software defined power grids with increasing renewables power generation and storage will make any power grid, more resilient and more fault tolerant.

Photo Credit(s):

Thoughts on my first virtual conference

Posted on by Ray in Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality, Visionary organizations

I attended a virtual event this week. It was scheduled to last 3 hours. But I only stayed for 2.5 Hours. Below I describe the event from my perspective and after that some notes on how it could be made better.

The virtual event experience

The event home page had a welcome video that you could start when you got there. I didn’t have any idea what to expect so this was nice. It could have spent time discussing the mechanics of the site and how to attend the event but it just was a welcome video, welcoming me to the event and letting me know they appreciated me being able to attend.

Navigation on the site wasn’t that easy to figure out at first. It was at the bottom of the page not at the top or the side. And the navigation home button brought up a list of videos that you could watch (or attend). And that page was in front of the conference page.

I launched the 1st (actually 2nd after the welcome video) which was the CEO keynote session. I thought this was good and the occasional interruption by executives ringing the CEO’s doorbell asking for toilet paper was entertaining. Again he welcomed us to the event and discussed how the pandemic has changed their world and ours. He thanked the customers in attendance and made brief mention of the video (tracks) that one could follow. I don’t recall but the CEO keynote didn’t seem to have any (or many) slides during his session it was just like an informal talk (but) scripted.

It took me a while to figure out how to get back to the main agenda page but once there I proceeded on my chosen track to watch the next video. When I was finished with that I watched the other 3 track videos. The video tracks were not as good as the CEO keynote session and some of them had many more slides than they needed.

They also had a customer interview with an exec which was great and well done. Especially given it seemed to have been recorded over the prior 48 hours.

Somewhere in all of this, I happened to reach the Expo floor. It had a series of technical break out sessions and then the exhibitor buttons which had their own videos, reports, webinars that one could watch/read.

I watched most of the technical breakouts (at least part way through). The tech breakouts were ok, but also had mixed quality as I remember it. That is some having more or less slides and more or less webinar like.

I also watched a few of the exhibitor videos. Some of these auto started when you clicked on their expo buttons, some did not. Some videos were very loud while others were fine.

I’d say the mixed quality of the exhibits were similar to what one might see at any conference with bigger vendors having more polished content while smaller vendors had less polished content.

The conference had a public chat channel but there was one channel for the whole conference and it didn’t appear until much later (maybe when I entered the first breakout sessions or expo “hall”)

How to make our next virtual conference better

Below are my thoughts on ways to improve the virtual conference experience.

• Have real scheduled times to watch the videos/webinars/tech sessions. Yes there all online and can truly be watched at any time you want. But I expected a scheduled agenda with breaks between sessions and to have to pick which one I wanted to go to, meaning that some would have to be unattended. I would suggest that the videos only be available during the event at scheduled time slots and that the event organizers build in breaks between each session. They could always be made available at a later date under a conference media page for further viewing but having them scheduled to run in a conference room would make it more conference like. The tracks could be scheduled in other side rooms of the conference.

• Also, would it be too much to ask that they have some sort of video roll call of participants with headshots and maybe a title. Something akin to a conference badge. Perhaps they could show this during the breaks between sessions. Even if you rolled through the virtual badge shots quickly, during breaks, it would act as sort of an analog of walking from one session to another.

• I don’t know whether there was any interest in social media, but having a twitter, facebook, other social media event hash tag prominently displayed on the bottom 1/3rd or on some early slide deck would have been useful. To generate some social buz

• Also, at conferences, one can typically see a screen which tracks the social media hash tag. I saw none of this at the event. Having some small panel running social media activity might have led to more social media interaction. It could be along the side of the main page, viewable during all videos, breaks and other sessions.

• As for the public chat. I think it would have been better to have a separate chat channels for each video, breakout, exhibit, etc. rather than having a single chat room for the whole conference. It would have been great if the separate chat window popped up when you started viewing a video, breakout or entered an exhibit.

• Have lots more technical breakouts. didn’t see a great quantity of these maybe 5-7 tech breakouts and the 4 original tech track videos. Again separate chat channels so one could ask questions pertaining to the session would have been great.

• The exhibits were all other vendors (sponsors) showing there stuff. I didn’t see any show and tell for the conference event organizers that one would see in any conference if you walked out on the show floor. Would it have been to much to ask to have a virtual walk through tour of each of the conference organizers products and a couple of demos of their products/services. Just like one could see at any conference.

• The expo floor exhibitor sessions could be left available to view anytime the event was “open” but the tech breakout sessions would be available multiple times a day but scheduled just like any other event sessions. And it would be nice to have a separate chat channel for each expo exhibitor and tech break out sessions., so we could ask questions of their staff.

• Another thing available at most conference events is a social media booth where bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers could sit around and talk about the event and their products and whatever else came to mind. I didn’t see anything like this and having a separate chat window for these booths would be useful.

• Also, it would be nice if one could obtain vendor certifications or a detailed tutorials on some product/service.

• On a personal note, I am an industry analyst it would be nice to have a separate analyst track. I come to these events to have face time with execs and get a download on what their upcoming strategy is and how they did over the last year or so. Yes these could all be done offline but they could also be accomplished during the event with its own secure chat channel

• I’m also an influencer. So having a separate press track would have been great as well. Often the analyst and press track overlap for a couple of sessions and then go there separate (NDA) ways.

• For both the analysts and the Press/influencers having a live Q&A session with the execs, technical team, and select customers would have been great. But alas there was nothing like this. But with a separate secure chat room this could have also been done.

• I can’t stress enough that the conference event navigation needs to be better and more intuitive.

I know that there’s a lot here and there’s probably a whole bunch more that could be done better. Other people will no doubt have their own opinions. But these are mine.

It was the first virtual conference (I attended) and the vendor sort of played iit by ear and designing it almost in real time. Given all that, they did a great job. Now it’s time to do better.

I’m a conference geek. I go to an average of 10 or more vendor conferences a year so this is a major part of what I do.

IMHO, nothing besides ubiquitous, true virtual reality will ever replace the effectiveness of in real life conferences. That being said, there are ways to make current virtual events come closer to real conferences.

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I thought about sending this to the conference organizers but their conference is over, and hopefully next year it will be back IRL. But there’s plenty more virtual conferences left on my schedule for this year.

I would prefer all of them to be done better, for me, analysts, press/influencers and ultimately customers.

Were all in this together.

Comments.

Societal growth depends on IT

Posted on by Ray in Data banks, Data growth, Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points

Read an interesting article the other day in SciencDaily (IT played a key role in growth of ancient civilizations) and a Phys.Org article (Information drove development of early states) both of which were reporting on a Nature article (Scale and information processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution) which discussed how the growth of society during ancient times was directly correlated to the information processing capabilities they possessed. In these articles IT meant writing, accounting, currency, etc., relatively primitive forms of IT but IT nonetheless.

Seshat: Global History Databank

What the researchers were able to do was to use the Seshat: Global History Databank which “systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time” and use the data to analyze the use of IT by societies.

We have talked about Seschat before (See our Data Analysis of History post)

The Seshat databank holds information on 30 (natural) geographical areas (NGA), ~400 societies and, their history from 4000 BCE to 1900CE.

Seschat has a ~100 page Code Book that identifies what kinds of information to collect on each society, how it is to be estimated, identified, listed, etc. to normalize the data in their databank. Their Code Book provides essential guidelines on how to gather the ~1500 variables collected on societies.

IT drives society growth

The researchers used the Seshat DB and ran a statistical principal component analysis (PCA) of the data to try to ascertain what drove society’s growth.

PCA (see wikipedia Principal Component Analysis article) essentially produces a list of variables and their inter-relationships. Their combined inter-relationships is essentially a percentage (%Var) of explanatory power in how much those variables explains the variance of all variables. PCA can be one, two, three or N-dimensional.

The researchers took Seshat 51 society variables and combined them into 9 (societal) complexity characteristics (CC)s and did a PCA of those variables across all the (285) society’s information available at the time.

Fig, 2 says that the average PC1 component of all societies is driven by the changes (increases and decreases) in PC2 components. Decreases of PC2 depend on those elements of PC2 which are negative and increases in PC2 depend on those elements of PC2 which are negative.

The elements in PC2 that provide the largest positive impacts are writing (.31), texts (.24), money (.28), infrastructure (.12) and gvrnmnt (.06). The elements in PC2 that provide the largest negative impacts are PolTerr (polity area, -0.35), CapPop (capital population, -0.27), PolPop (polity population, -0.25) and levels (?, -0.15). Below is another way to look at this data.

The positive PC2 CC’s are tracked with the red line and the negative PC2 CC’s are tracked with the blue line. The black line is the summation of the blue and red lines and is effectively equal to the blue line in Fig 2 above.

The researchers suggest that the inflection points in Fig 2 and the black line in Fig 3),represent societal information processing thresholds. Once these IT thresholds have passed they change the direction that PC2 takes on after that point

In Fig4 they have disaggregated the information averaged in Fig. 2 & 3 and show PC2 and PC1 trajectories for all 285 societies tracked in the Seshat DB. Over time as PC1 goes more positive, societie, start to converge on effectively the same level of PC2 . At earlier times, societies tend to be more heterogeneous with varying PC2 (and PC1) values.

Essentially, societies IT processing characteristics tend to start out highly differentiated but over time as societies grow, IT processing capabilities tend to converge and lead to the same levels of societal growth

Classifying societies by I

The Kadashev scale (see wikipedia Kardashev scale article) identifes levels or types of civilizations using their energy consumption. For example, The Kardashev scale lists the types of civilizations as follows:

  • Type I Civilization can use and control all the energy available on its planet,
  • Type II Civilization can use and control all the energy available in its planetary system (its star and all the planets/other objects in orbit around it).
  • Type III Civilization can use and control all the energy available in its galaxy

I can’t help but think that a more accurate scale for civilization, society or a polity’s level would a scale based on its information processing power.

We could call this the Shin scale (named after the primary author of the Nature paper or the Shin-Price-Wolpert-Shimao-Tracy-Kohler scale). The Shin scale would list societies based on their IT levels.

  • Type A Societies have non-existant IT (writing, money, texts, money & infrastructure) which severely limits their population and territorial size
  • Type B Societies have primitive forms of IT (writing, money, texts, money & infrastructure, ~MB (10**6) of data) which allows these societies to expand to their natural boundaries (with a pop of ~10M).
  • Type C Societies have normal (2020) levels of IT (world wide Internet with billions of connected smart phones, millions of servers, ZB (10**21) of data, etc.) which allows societies to expand beyond their natural boundaries across the whole planet (pop of ~10B).
  • Type D Societies have high levels of IT (speculation here but quintillion connected smart dust devices, trillion (10**12) servers, 10**36 bytes of data) which allows societies to expand beyond their home planet (pop of ~10T).
  • Type E Societies have high levels of IT (more speculation here, 10**36 smart molecules, quintillion (10**18) servers, 10**51 bytes of data ) which allows societies to expand beyond their home planetary system (pop of ~10Q).

I’d list Type F societies here but a can’t think of anything smaller than a molecule that could potentially be smart — perhaps this signifies a lack of imagination on my part.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s):

OFA DNNs, cutting the carbon out of AI

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Data density, Deep Learning, Distributed computing, Energy efficiency, Information economy, Machine Learning, Processing performance, System effectiveness

Read an article (Reducing the carbon footprint of AI… in Science Daily) the other day about a new approach to reducing the energy demands for AI deep neural net (DNN) training and inferencing. The article was reporting on a similar piece in MIT News but both were discussing a technique original outlined in a ICLR 2020 (Int. Conf. on Learning Representations) paper, Once-for-all: Train one network & specialize it for efficient deployment.

The problem stems from the amount of energy it takes to train a DNN and use it for inferencing. In most cases, training and (more importantly) inferencing can take place on many different computational environments, from IOT devices, to cars, to HPC super clusters and everything in between. In order to create DNN inferencing algorithms for use in all these environments, one would have to train a different DNN for each. Moreover, if you’re doing image recognition applications, resolution levels matter. Resolution levels would represent a whole set of more required DNNs that would need to be trained.

The authors of the paper suggest there’s a better approach. Train one large OFA (once-for-all) DNN, that covers the finest resolution and largest neural net required in such a way that smaller, sub-nets could be extracted and deployed for less weighty computational and lower resolution deployments.

The authors contend the OFA approach takes less overall computation (and energy) to create and deploy than training multiple times for each possible resolution and deployment environment. It does take more energy to train than training a few (4-7 judging by the chart) DNNs, but that can be amortized over a vastly larger set of deployments.

OFA DNN explained

Essentially the approach is to train one large (OFA) DNN, with sub-nets that can be used by themselves. The OFA DNN sub-nets have been optimized for different deployment dimensions such as DNN model width, depth and kernel size as well as resolution levels.

While DNN width is purely the number of numeric weights in each layer, and DNN depth is the number of layers, Kernel size is not as well known. Kernels were introduced in convolutional neural networks (CovNets) to identify the number of features that are to be recognized. For example, in human faces these could be mouths, noses, eyes, etc. All these dimensions + resolution levels are used to identify all possible deployment options for an OFA DNN.

OFA secrets

One key to the OFA success is that any model (sub-network) selected actually shares the weights of all of its larger brethren. That way all the (sub-network) models can be represented by the same DNN and just selecting the dimensions of interest for your application. If you were to create each and every DNN, the number would be on the order of 10**19 DNNs for the example cited in the paper with depth using {2,3,4) layers, width using {3,4,6} and kernel sizes over 25 different resolution levels.

In order to do something like OFA, one would need to train for different objectives (once for each different resolution, depth, width and kernel size). But rather than doing that, OFA uses an approach which attempts to shrink all dimensions at the same time and then fine tunes that subsets NN weights for accuracy. They call this approach progressive shrinking.

Progressive shrinking, training for different dimensions

Essentially they train first with the largest value for each dimension (the complete DNN) and then in subsequent training epochs reduce one or more dimensions required for the various deployments and just train that subset. But these subsequent training passes always use the pre-trained larger DNN weights. As they gradually pick off and train for every possible deployment dimension, the process modifies just those weights in that configuration. This way the weights of the largest DNN are optimized for all the smaller dimensions required. And as a result, one can extract a (defined) subnet with the dimensions needed for your inferencing deployments.

They use a couple of tricks when training the subsets. For example, when training for smaller kernel sizes, they use the center most kernels and transform their weights using a transformation matrix to improve accuracy with less kernels. When training for smaller depths, they use the first layers in the DNN and ignore any layers lower in the model. Training for smaller widths, they sort each layer for the highest weights, thus ensuring they retain those parameters that provide the most sensitivity.

It’s sort of like multiple video encodings in a single file. Rather than having a separate file for every video encoding format (Mpeg 2, Mpeg 4, HVEC, etc.), you have one file, with all encoding formats embedded within it. If for example you needed Mpeg-4, one could just extract those elements of the video file representing that encoding level

OFA DNN results

In order to do OFA, one must identify, ahead of time, all the potential inferencing deployments (depth, width, kernel sizes) and resolution levels to support. But in the end, you have a one size fits all trained DNN whose sub-nets can be selected and deployed for any of the pre-specified deployments.

The authors have shown (see table and figure above) that OFA beats (in energy consumed and accuracy level) other State of the Art (SOTA) and Neural (network) Architectural Search (NAS) approaches to training multiple DNNs.

The report goes on to discuss how OFA could be optimized to support different latency (inferencing response time) requirements as well as diverse hardware architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, etc.).

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When I first heard of OFA DNN, I thought we were on the road to artificial general intelligence but this is much more specialized than that. It’s unclear to me how many AI DNNs have enough different deployment environments to warrant the use of OFA but with the proliferation of AI DNNs for IoT, automobiles, robots, etc. their will come a time soon where OFA DNNs and its competition will become much more important.

Comments

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Anti-Gresham’s Law: Good information drives out bad

Posted on by Ray in Decision making, Information economy, Internet of Things, Market dynamics, Networking
(Good information is in blue, bad information is in Red)

Read an article the other day in ScienceDaily (Faster way to replace bad info in networks) which discusses research published in a recent IEEE/ACM Transactions on Network journal (behind paywall). Luckily there was a pre-print available (Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon).

The article discusses information epidemics using the analogy of a virus and its antidote. This is where bad information (the virus) and good information (the antidote) circulate within a network of individuals (systems, friend networks, IOT networks, etc). Such bad information could be malware and its good information counterpart could be a system patch to fix the vulnerability. Another example would be an outright lie about some event and it’s counterpart could be the truth about the event.

The analysis in the paper makes some simplifying assumptions. That in a any single individual (network node), both the virus and the antidote cannot co-exist. That is either an individual (node) is infected by the virus or is cured by the antidote or is yet to be infected or cured.

The network is fully connected and complex. That is once an individual in a network is infected, unless an antidote is developed the infection proceeds to infect all individuals in the network. And once an antidote is created it will cure all individuals in a network over time. Some individuals in the network have more connections to other nodes in the network while different individuals have less connections to other nodes in the network.

The network functions in a bi-directional manner. That is any node, lets say RAY, can infect/cure any node it is connected to and conversely any node it is connected to can infect/cure the RAY node.

Gresham’s law, (see Wikipedia article) is a monetary principle which states bad money in circulation drives out good. Where bad money is money that is worth less than the commodity it is backed with and good money is money that’s worth more than the commodity it is backed with. In essence, good money is hoarded and people will preferentially use bad money.

My anti-Gresham’s law is that good information drives out bad. Where good information is the truth about an event, security patches, antidotes to infections, etc. and bad infrormation is falsehoods, malware, biological viruses., etc

The Susceptible Infected-Cured (SIC) model

The paper describes a SIC model that simulates the (virus and antidote) epidemic propagation process or the process whereby virus and its antidote propagates throughout a network. This assumes that once a network node is infected (at time0), during the next interval (time0+1) it infects it’s nearest neighbors (nodes that are directly connected to it) and they in turn infect their nearest neighbors during the following interval (time0+2), etc, until all nodes are infected. Similarly, once a network node is cured it will cure all it’s neighbor nodes during the next interval and these nodes will cure all of their neighbor nodes during the following interval, etc, until all nodes are cured.

What can the SIC model tell us

The model provides calculations to generate a number of statistics, such as half-life time of bad information and extinction time of bad-information. The paper discusses the SIC model across complex (irregular) network topologies as well as completely connected and star topologies and derives formulas for each type of network

In the discussion portion of the paper, the authors indicate that if you are interested in curing a population with bad information it’s best to map out the networks’ topology and focus your curation efforts on those node(s) that lie along the (most) shortest path(s) within a network.

I wrongly thought that the best way to cure a population of nodes would be to cure the nodes with the highest connectivity. While this may work and such nodes, are no doubt along at least one if not all, shortest paths, it may not be the optimum solution to reduce extinction time, especially If there are other nodes on more shortest paths in a network, target these nodes with a cure.

Applying the SIC model to COVID-19

It seems to me that if we were to model the physical social connectivity of individuals in a population (city, town, state, etc.). And we wanted to infect the highest portion of people in the shortest time we would target shortest path individuals to be infected first.

Conversely, if we wanted to slow down the infection rate of COVID-19, it would be extremely important to reduce the physical connectivity of indivduals on the shortest path in a population. Which is why social distancing, at least when broadly applied, works. It’s also why, when infected, self quarantining is the best policy. But if you wished to not apply social distancing in a broad way, perhaps targeting those individuals on the shortest path to practice social distancing could suffice.

However, there are at least two other approaches to using the SIC model to eradicate (extinguish the disease) the fastest:

  1. Now if we were able to produce an antidote, say a vaccine but one which had the property of being infectious (say a less potent strain of the COVID-19 virus). Then targeting this vaccine to those people on the shortest paths in a network would extinguish the pandemic in the shortest time. Please note, that to my knowledge, any vaccine (course), if successful, will eliminate a disease and provide antibodies for any future infections of that disease. So the time when a person is infected with a vaccine strain, is limited and would likely be much shorter than the time soemone is infected with the original disease. And most vaccines are likely to be a weakened version of an original disease may not be as infectious. So in the wild the vaccine and the original disease would compete to infect people.
  2. Another approach to using the SIC model and is to produce a normal (non-transmissible) vaccine and target vaccination to individuals on the shortest paths in a population network. As once vaccinated, these people would no longer be able to infect others and would block any infections to other individuals down network from them. One problem with this approach is if everyone is already infected. Vaccinating anyone will not slow down future infection rates.

There may be other approaches to using SIC to combat COVID-19 than the above but these seem most reasonable to me.

So, health organizations of the world, figure out your populations physical-social connectivity network (perhaps using mobile phone GPS information) and target any cure/vaccination to those individuals on the highest number of shortest paths through your network.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s):

  1. Figure 2 from the Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon article pre-print
  2. Figure 3 from the Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon article pre-print
  3. COVID-19 virus micrograph, from USA CDC.

Internet of Tires

Posted on by Ray in 5G cellular networks, Cloud services, data services, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality, Visionary leadershp

Read an article a couple of weeks back (An internet of tires?… IEEE Spectrum) and can’t seem to get it out of my head. Pirelli, a European tire manufacturer was demonstrating a smart tire or as they call it, their new Cyber Tyre.

The Cyber Tyre includes accelerometer(s) in its rubber, that can be used to sense the pavement/road surface conditions. Cyber Tyre can communicate surface conditions to the car and using the car’s 5G, to other cars (of same make) to tell them of problems with surface adhesion (hydroplaning, ice, other traction issues).

Presumably the accelerometers in the Cyber Tyre measure acceleration changes of individual tires as they rotate. Any rapid acceleration change, could potentially be used to determine whether the car has lost traction due and why.

They tested the new tires out at a (1/3rd mile) test track on top of a Fiat factory, using Audi A8 automobiles and 5G. Unclear why this had to wait for 5G but it’s possible that using 5G, the Cyber Tyre and the car could possibly log and transmit such information back to the manufacturer of the car or tire.

Accelerometers have become dirt cheap over the last decade as smart phones have taken off. So, it was only a matter of time before they found use in new and interesting applications and the Cyber Tyre is just the latest.

Internet of Vehicles

Presumably the car, with Cyber Tyres on it, communicates road hazard information to other cars using 5G and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication protocols or perhaps to municipal or state authorities. This way highway signage could display hazardous conditions ahead.

Audi has a website devoted to Car to X communications which has embedded certain Audi vehicles (A4, A5 & Q7), with cellular communications, cameras and other sensors used to identify (recognize) signage, hazards, and other information and communicate this data to other Audi vehicles. This way owning an Audi, would plug you into this information flow.

Pirelli’s Cyber Car Concept

Prior to the Cyber Tyre, Pirelli introduced a Cyber Car concept that is supposedly rolling out this year. This version has tyres with real time pressure, temperature, (static) vertical load and a Tyre ID. Pirelli has been working with car manufacturers to roll out Cyber Car functionality.

The Tyre ID seems to be a file that can include anything that the tyre or automobile manufacturer wants. It sort of reminds me of a blockchain data blocks that could be used to validate tyre manufacturing provenance.

The vertical load sensor seems more important to car and tire manufacturers than consumers. But for electrical car owners, knowing car weight could help determine current battery load and thereby more precisely know how much charge is left in a battery.

Pirelli uses a proprietary algorithm to determine tread wear. This makes use of the other tyre sensors to predict wear and perhaps uses an AI DL algorithm to do this.

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ABS has been around for decades now and tire pressure sensors for over 10 years or so. My latest car has enough sensors to pretty much drive itself on the highway but not quite park itself as of yet. So it was only a matter of time before something like smart tires would show up.

But given their integration with car electronics systems, it would seem that this would only make sense for new cars that included a full set of Cyber Tyres. That is until all tire AND car manufacturers agreed to come up with a standard protocol to communicate such information. When that happens, consumers could chose any tire manufacturer and obtain have similar if not the same functionality from them.

I suppose someone had to be first to identify just what could be done with the electronics available today. Pirelli just happens to be it for now in the tire industry.

I just don’t want to have to upgrade tires every 24 months. And, if I have to wait a long time for my car to boot up and establish communications with my tires, I may just take a (dumb) bike.

Photo Credit(s):

Cambrian Explosion of AI DL app’s in industry and the world

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Brain emulation, Cognitive computing, Data science, Deep Learning, Information economy, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points

I was at the NetApp Insight conference last week and recorded a podcast (see: GreyBeards Podcast) on what NetApp is doing in the AI DL (Deep Learning) space. On the podcast, we talked about a number of verticals that were deploying AI DL right now and using it to improve outcomes.

It was only is 2012 that AI DL broke out and pretty much conquered the speech recognition contest by improving recognition accuracy by leaps and bounds. Prior to that improvements had been very small and incremental at best. Here we are, just 7 years later and AI DL models are proliferating across industry and every other sector of the world economy.

DL applications in the real world

At the show. we talked about AI DL models being used in healthcare (radiological image analysis, cell counts for infection assessments), automotive (self driving cars), financial services (fraud detection), and retail (predicting how make up would look on someone).

And early this year, at HPE Discover, they discussed a new technique to share training data but still keep it private. In this case, they use block chain technology to publish and share a DL neural network model weights and other hyper parameters trained for some real world purpose.

Customers download and use the model in their day to day activities but record the data that their model analyzes and its predictions. They use this data to update (re-train) their DL neural net. They then publish their new neural net model weights and other parameters to all the other customers. Each customer of the model do the same, updating (re-training) their DL neural net.

At some point an owner or global model arbitrator takes all these individual model updates and aggregates the neural net weights, into a new neural net model and publishes the new model. And then the process starts over again. In this way, training data is never revealed, kept secure and private but DL model updates that result from re-training the model with secured private data would be available to any customer.

Recently, there’s been a slew of articles across many different organizations that show how AI DL is being adopted to work in different areas:

And that’s just a sample of the last few weeks of papers of AI DL activity.

Next Steps

All it takes is data, that can be quantified and classified. With data and classifications in hand, anyone can train a DL model that performs that classification. It doesn’t require GPU farms, decent CPUs are up to the task for TB of data.

But if you want better prediction/classificatoin accuracy, you will need more data which means longer AI DL training runs. So at some point, maybe at >100TB of data, or use AI DL training a lot, you may want that GPU farm.

The Deep Learning with Python book (my favorite) has a number of examples such as, sentiment analysis of text, median real estate pricing predictions, generating text that looks like an authors work, with maybe a dozen more that one can use to understand AI DL technology. But it’s not rocket science, I believe any qualified programmer could do it, with some serious study.

So the real question is what are you doing with your data to make use of AI DLmodels now?

I suppose the other question ought to be, how can you collect more data and classification information, to train more AI DL models?

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It’s great to be in the storage business.

Photo Credit(s):