Category: Visionary organizations

Deepmind does sort

Posted on by Ray in Cognitive computing, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp, Visionary organizations

Saw an article today on TNW on DeepMind’s new AI taps games to enhance fundamental algorithms which was discussing a recent Nature paper Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning and website, which described AlphaDev.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaDev is a derivative of AlphaZero (follow on from AlphaMu and AlphaGo, the conquerer of Go and other strategy games). AlphaDev uses Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to come up with new computer science algorithms. In the first incarnation, a way to sort (2,3,4 or 5 integers) using X86 instructions.

Sorting has been well explored over the years in computer science (CS, e.g. see Donald E. Knuth’s Volume 3 in The Art of Computer Programming, Sorting and Searching), so when a new more efficient/faster sort algorithm comes out it’s a big deal. Google used to ask job applicants how they would code sort algorithms for specific problems. Successful candidates would intrinsically know all the basic CS sorting algorithms and which one would work best in different circumstances.

Deepmind’s approach to sort

Reading the TNW news article, I couldn’t conceive of the action space involved in the reinforcement learning let alone what the state space would look like. However, as I read the Nature article, DeepMind researchers did a decent job of explaining their DRL approach to developing new basic CS algorithms like sorting.

AlphaDev uses a transformer-like framework and a very limited set of x86 (sort of, encapsulated) instructions with memory/register files and limited it to sorting 2, 3, 4, or 5 integer. Such functionality is at the heart of any sort algorithm and as such, is used a gazillion times over and over again in any sorting task involving a long string of items. I think Alphadev used a form of on-policy RL but can’t be sure.

Looking at the X86 basic instruction cheat sheet, there’s over 30 basic forms for X86 instructions which are then multiplied by type of data (registers, memory, constants, etc. and length of operands) being manipulated.

AlphaDev only used 4 (ok, 9 if you include the conditionals for conditional move and conditional jump) X86 instructions. The instructions were mov<A,B>, cmovX<A,B>, cmp<A,B> and jX<A,B> (where X identify the condition under which a conditional move [cmovX] or jump [jX] would take place). And they only used (full, 64 bit) integers in registers and memory locations.

AlphaDev actions

The types of actions that AlphaDev could take included the following:

  • Add transformation – which added an instruction to the end of the current program
  • Swap transformation – which swapped two instructions in the current program
  • Opcode transformation – which changed the opcode (e.g., instruction such as mov to cmp) of a step in the current program
  • Operand transformation – which changed the operand(s) for an instruction in the current program
  • Instruction transformation – which changed the opcode and operand(s) for some instruction in the current program.

They list in their paper a correctness cost function which at each transformation provides value function (I think) for the RL policy. They experimented with 3 different functions which were: 1) the %correctly placed items; 2) square_root(%correctly placed); and 3)the square_root(number of items – number correctly placed). They discovered that the last worked best.

They also placed some constraints on the code generated (called action pruning rules):

  • Memory locations are always read in incremental order
  • Registers are allocated in incremental order
  • Program cannot compare or conditionally move to memory location
  • Program can only read and write to each memory location once (it seems this would tell the RL algorithm when to end the program)
  • Program can not perform two consecutive compare instructions

AlphaDev states

How they determined the state of the program during each transformation was also different. They used one hot encodings (essentially a bit in a bit map is assigned to every instruction-operand pair) for opcode-operand steps in the current program and appended each encoded step into a single program string. Ditto for the state of the memory and registers (at each instruction presumably?). Both the instruction list and memory-register embeddings thenn fed into a state representation encoder.

This state “representation network” (DNN) generated a “latent representation of the State(t)” (maybe it classified the state into one of N classes). For each latent state (classification), there is another “prediction network” (DNN) that predicts the expected return value (presumably trained on correctness cost function above) for each state action. And between the state and expected return values AlphaDev created a (RL) policy to select the next action to perform.

Presumably they started with current basic CS sort algorithms, and 2-5 random integers in memory and fed this (properly encoded and embedded) in as a starting point. Then the AlphaDev algorithm went to work to improve it.

Do this enough times, with an intelligent approach between exploration (more randomly at first) and policy following (more use of policy later) selection of actions and you too can generate new sorting algorithms.

DeepMind also spent time creating a stochastic solution to sorting that they used to compare agains their AlphaDev DRL approach to see which did better. In the end they found the AlphaDev DRL approach worked faster and better than the stochastic solutions they tried.

DeepMind having conquered sorting did the same for hashing.

Why I think DeepMind’s AlphaDev is better

AlphaDev’s approach could just as easily be applied to any of Donald E. Knuth’s, 4 volume series on The Art of Computer Programming book algorithms.

I believe DeepMind’s approach is much more valuable to programmers (and humanity) than CoPilot, ChatGPT code, AlphaCode (DeepMind’s other code generator) or any other code generation transformers.

IMHO AlphaDev goes to the essence of computer science as it’s been practiced over the last 70 years. Here’s what we know and now let’s try to discover a better way do the work we all have to do. Once, we have discovered a new and better way, report and document them as widely as possible so that any programmers can stand on our shoulders, use our work to do what they need to get done.

If I’m going to apply AI to coding, having it generate better basic CS algorithms is much more fruitful for the programming industry (and I may add, humanity as a whole) than having it generate yet another IOS app code or web site from scratch.

Comments?

Picture 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.

New science used to combat COVID-19 disease

Posted on by Ray in Crowdsourcing, data access, Data banks, Data deposits, R&D measures, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary organizations

Read an article last week in Science Magazine (A completely new culture on doing research… ) on how the way science is done to combat disease has changed the last few years.

In the olden days (~3-5 years ago), disease outbreaks would generate a slew of research papers to be written, submitted for publication and there they would sit, until peer-reviewed, after which they might get published for the world to see for the first time. Estimates I’ve seen say that the scientific research publishing process takes anywhere from one month (very fast) to 4-8 months, assuming no major revisions are required.

With the emergence of the Zika virus and recent Ebola outbreaks, more and more biological research papers have become available through pre-print servers. These are web-sites which accept any research before publication (pre-print), posting the research for all to see, comment and understand.

Open science via pre-print

Most of these pre-print servers focus on specific areas of science. For example bioRxiv is a pre-print server focused on Biology and medRxiv is for health sciences. On the other hand, arXiv is a pre-print server for “physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.” These are just a sampling of what’s available today.

In the past, scientific journals would not accept research that had been published before. But this slowly change as well. Now most scientific journals have policies gol pre-print publication and will also publish them if they deem it worthwhile, (see wikipedia article List of academic journals by pre-print policies).

As of today (9 March 2020) ,on biorXiv there are 423 papers with keyword=”coronavirus” and 52 papers with the keyword COVID-19, some of these may be the same. The newest (Substrate specificity profiling of SARS-CoV-2 Mpro protease provides basis for anti-COVID-19 drug design) was published on 3/7/2020. The last sentence in their abstract says “The results of our work provide a structural framework for the design of inhibitors as antiviral agents or diagnostic tests.” The oldest on bioRxiv is dated 23 January 2020. Similarly, there are 326 papers on medRxiv with the keyword “coronavirus”, the newest published 5 March 2020.

Pre-print research is getting out in the open much sooner than ever before. But the downside, is that pre-print papers may have serious mistakes or omissions in them as they are not peer-reviewed. So the cost of rapid openness is the possibility that some research may be outright wrong, badly done, or lead researchers down blind alleys.

However, the upside is any bad research can be vetted sooner, if it’s open to the world. We see similar problems with open source software, some of it can be buggy or outright failure prone. But having it be open, and if it’s popular, many people will see the problems (or bugs) and fixes will be rapidly created to solve them. With pre-print research, the comment list associated with a pre-print can be long and often will identify problems in the research.

Open science through open journals

In addition to pre-print servers , we are also starting to see the increasing use of open scientific journals such as PLOS to publish formal research.

PLOS has a number of open journals focused on specific arenas of research, such as PLOS Biology, PLOS Pathogyns, PLOS Medicine, etc.

Researchers or their institutions have to pay a nominal fee to publish in PLOS. But all PLOS publications are fully expert, peer-reviewed. But unlike research from say Nature, IEEE or other scientific journals, PLOS papers are free to anyone, and are widely available. (However, I just saw that SpringerNature is making all their coronavirus research free).

Open science via open data(sets)

Another aspect of scientific research that has undergone change of late is the sharing and publication of data used in the research.

Nature has a list of recommended data repositories. All these data repositories seem to be hosted by FAIRsharing at the University of Oxford and run by their Data Readiness Group. They list 1349 databases of which the vast majority (1250) are for the natural sciences with over 1380 standards used for data to be registered with FAIRsharing.

We’ve discussed similar data repositories in the past (please see Data banks, data deposits and data withdrawals, UK BioBank, Big open data leads to citizen science, etc). Having a place to store data used in research papers makes it easier to understand and replicate science.

Collaboration software

The other change to research activities is the use of collaborative software such as Slack. Researchers at UW Madison were already using Slack to collaborate on research but when Coronavirus went public, they Slack could help here too. So they created a group (or channel) under their Slack site called “Wu-han Clan” and invited 69 researchers from around the world. The day after they created it they held their first teleconference.

Other collaboration software exists today but Slack seems most popular. We use Slack for communications in our robotics club, blogging group, a couple of companies we work with, etc. Each has a number of invite-only channels, where channel members can post text, (data) files, links and just about anything else of interest to the channel.

Although I have not been invited to participate in Wu-han Clan (yet), I assume they usee Slack to discuss and vet (pre-print) research, discuss research needs, and other ways to avert the pandemic.

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So there you have it. Coronavirus scientific research is happening at warp speed compared to diseases of yore. Technologies to support this sped up research have all emerged over the last five to 10 years but are now being put to use more than ever before. Such technological advancement should lead to faster diagnosis, lower worldwide infection/mortality rates and a quicker medical solution.

Photo Credit(s):

Smart proteins, the dawn of new intra-cell therapeutics

Posted on by Ray in Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary organizations

Saw an article the other day about Smart Cells (Incredible artificial proteins opens up potential for smart cells). There’s another paper that goes into a bit more depth than the original article (‘Limitless potential’ of artificial proteins ushers in new era of ‘smart’ cell therapies).

The two freely available articles talk about two papers in Nature (De novo design of bioactive protein switches & Modular and tunable biological feedback using a de novo protein switch, behind a paywall) that explain the technology in more detail.

Smart proteins act as switches

What the researchers have created is an artificial protein that builds a cage around some bioactive (protein based) mechanism that can be unlocked by another protein while residing in a cell. This new protein is called LOCKR (Latcheable Orthogonal Cage-Key pRotein). LOCKR proteins act as switch activated therapeutics within a cell.

In the picture above the blue coils are the cage proteins and the yellow coil is the bioactive device (protein). Bioactive devices can be designed that degrade other proteins, can modify biological processes within the cell, initiate the cells self-destruct mechanism, etc, just about anything a protein can do within a cell.

In the second Nature paper, they discuss one example of a LOCKR protein, called degron-LOCKR which once inside a cell is used to degrade (destroy) a specific protein. The degron-LOCKR protein only activates when the other protein is active (found) within the cell and it operates only as long as that protein is in sufficient concentration.

The nice thing about the degron-LOCKR protein is that is completely self-regulating. It only operates when the protein to be degraded exists in the cell. That protein acts as the switch in this LOCKR. Until then it remains benign, waiting for a time when the targeted protein starts to be present in the cell.

How LOCKR works

In the picture above the cage is in shown by the grey structure, the bio-active therapy is shown by the yellow structure, and the protein key is shown by the black structure. When the key is introduced into the LOCKR protein, the yellow structure is unfolded (enabled) and can then impact whatever intra-cellular process/protein, it’s been designed to impact.

One key attribute to LOCKR is that the bioactive device within the cage, can be just about anything that works inside the cell. It could be used to create more proteins, less proteins, disable proteins, and perhaps enhance the activity of other proteins.

And, both the LOCKR and the bioactive device can be designed from scratch and fabricated outside or inside the cell. Of course the protein key is the other aspect of the LOCKR mechanism that is fully determined by the designer of the LOCKR protein.

Sort of reminds me of the transistor. Both are essentially switches. For transistors, as long as voltage is applied, it will allow current to flow across the switch. LOCKR does something very similar, but uses a key protein and a bioactive protein that only allows the bioactive protein to activate when the key protein is present.

We’ve talked extensively in the past about using DNA/cells as rudimentary computers and storage, but this takes that technology to a whole other level, (please see our DNA computing series here & here as well as our posts on DNA as storage here & here ). And all that work was done without LOCKR. With LOCKR much of these systems would be even easier to construct and design.

The articles go on to say that LOCKR unleashes the dawn of a new age of intra-cell therapeutics with fine grained control over when and where a particular bio-active therapy is activated within the cell

Some questions

Some of these may be answered in the Nature papers (behind paywall), so sorry in advance, if you have access to those.

How the LOCKR protein(s) are introduced into cells, was not discussed in the freely available articles. We presume that DNA designed to create the LOCKR protein could be injected into cells via a virus, added to the cells DNA via CRISPR, or the LOCKR protein could just be injected into the cell.

Moreover, how LOCKR proteins are scaled up within the cell to be more or less active and scaled up throughout an organ to “fix” multiple cells is yet another question.

Adding artificial DNA or LOCKR proteins to cells may be easy in the lab, but putting such therapy into medical practice will take much time and effort. And any side effects of introducing artificial DNA or LOCKR proteins (not found in nature) to cells will need to be investigated. And finally how such protein technology impacts germ lines would need to be fully understood.

But the fact that the therapeutic process is only active when unlocked by another key protein makes for an intriguing possibility. You would need both the LOCKR protein and the key (unlock-er) protein to be present in a cell for the therapy to be active.

But they present one example, the degron-LOCKR, where the key seems to be a naturally active protein in a cell that needs to be degraded, not a different, artificial protein introduced into the cell. So the key doesn’t have to be an artificial protein and probably would not be for most LOCKR designed proteins.

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Not a bad start for a new therapy. It has much potential, especially if it can be scaled easily and targeted specifically. Both of which seem doable (given our limited understanding of biological processes).

Comments?

Picture Credit(s): From De novo design of bioactive protein switches article

From Limitless potential… article

Clouds an existential threat – part 2

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Decision making, Distributed computing, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, Visionary organizations

Recall that in part 1, we discussed most of the threats posed by clouds to both hardware and software IT vendors. In that post we talked about some of the more common ways that vendors are trying to head off this threat (for now).

In this post we want to talk about some uncommon ways to deal with the coming cloud apocalypse.

But first just to put the cloud threat in perspective, the IT TAM is estimated, by one major consulting firm, to be a ~$3.8T in 2019 with a growth rate of 3.7% Y/Y. The same number for public cloud spending, is ~$214B in 2019, growing by 17.5% Y/Y. If both growth rates continue (a BIG if), public cloud services spend will constitute all (~98.7%) of IT TAM in ~24 years from now. No nobody would predict those growth rates will continue but it’s pretty evident the growth trends are going the wrong way for (non-public cloud) IT vendors.

There are probably an infinite number of ways to deal with the cloud. But outside of the common ones we discussed in part 1, only a dozen or so seem feasible to me and even less are fairly viable for present IT vendors.

  • Move to the edge and IoT.
  • Make data center as easy and cheap to use as the cloud
  • Focus on low-latency, high data throughput, and high performing work and applications
  • Move 100% into services
  • Move into robotics

The edge has legs

Probably the first one we should point out would be to start selling hardware and software to support the edge. Speaking in financial terms, the IoT/Edge market is estimated to be $754B in 2019, and growing by over a 15.4% CAGR ).

So we are talking about serious money. At the moment the edge is a very diverse environment from cameras, sensors and moveable devices. And everybody seems to be in the act, big industrial firms, small startups and everyone in between. Given this diversity it’s hard to see that IT vendors could make a decent return here. But given its great diversity, one could say it’s ripe for consolidation.

And the edge could use some reference architectures where there are devices at the extreme edge, concentrators at the edge, more higher concentrators at nodes and more at the core, etc. So there’s a look and feel to it that seems like Ro/Bo – central core hub and spoke architectures, only on steroids with leaf proliferation that can’t be stopped. And all that data coming in has to be classified, acted upon and understood.

There are plenty of other big industrial suppliers in this IoT/edge field but none seem to have the IT end of the market that Hitachi Vantara can claim to. Some sort of combination of a large IT vendor and a large industrial firm could potentially do the same

However, Hitachi Vantara seems to be focusing on the software side of the edge. This may be an artifact of Hitachi family of companies dynamics. But it seems to be leaving some potential sales on the table.

Hitachi Vantara has the advantage of being into industrial technology in a big way so the products they create operate in factories, rail yards, ship yards and other industrial sites around the world already. So, adding IoT and edge capabilities to their portfolio is a natural extension of this expertise.

There are a few vendors going into the Edge/IoT in a small way, but no one vendor personifies this approach more than Hitachi Vantara. The Hitachi family of companies has a long and varied history in OT (operational technology) or industrial technology. And over the last many years, HDS and now Hitachi Vantara, have been pivoting their organization to focus more on IoT and edge solutions and seem to have made IOT, OT and the edge, a central part of their overall strategy.

So there’s plenty of money to be made with IoT/Edge hardware and software, one just has to go after it in a big way and there’s lots of competition. But all the competition seems to be on the same playing field (unlike the public cloud playing field).

Getting to “data center as a cloud”

There are a number of reasons why customers migrate work to the cloud, ease of use, ease of storage, ease of scale, access to myriad applications, access to multi-regional data centers, CAPex financial model, to name just a few.

There’s nothing that says much of this couldn’t be provided at the data center. It’s mostly just a lot of open source software and a lot of common hardware. IT vendors can do this sort of work if they put their vast resources to go after it.

From the pure software side, there are a couple of companies trying to do this namely VMware and Nutanix but (IBM) RedHat, (Dell) Pivotal, HPE Simplivity and others are also going after this approach.

Hardware wise CI and HCI, seem to be rudimentary steps towards common hardware that’s easy to deploy, operate and support. But these baby steps aren’t enough. And delivery to deployment in weeks is never going to get them there. If Amazon can deliver books, mattresses, bicycles, etc in a couple of days. IT vendors should be able to do the same with some select set of common hardware and have it automatically deployable in seconds to minutes once powered on.

And operating these systems has to be drastically simplified. On any public cloud there’s really no tuning required, almost minimal configuration, and then it’s just load your data and go. Yes there’s a market place to select, (virtual) hardware, (virtual) storage hardware, (virtual) networking hardware, (virtual server) O/S and (virtual?) open source applications.

Yes there’s a lots of software behind all that virtualization. And it’s fundamentally different than today’s virtualized systems. It’s made to operate only on commodity hardware and only with open source software.

The CAPex financial model is less of a problem. Today. I find many vendors are offering their hardware (and some software) on a CAPex, pay as you go model. More of this needs to be made available but the IT vendors see this, and are already aggressively moving in this direction.

The clouds are not standing still what with Azure Stack, AWS and GCP all starting to provideversions of their stack on prem in the enterprise. This looks to be a strategic battleground between the clouds and IT vendors.

Making everything IT can do in the cloud available in the data center, with common hardware and software and with the speed and ease of deployment, operations and support (maintenance) should be on every IT vendors to do list.

Unfortunately, this is not going to stop the public cloud completely, but it has the potential to slow the growth rate. But time is short, momentum has moved to the public cloud and I don’t (yet) see the urgency of the IT vendors to make this transition happen today.

Focus on low-latency, high data throughput and high performance work

This is somewhat unfair as all the IT vendors are already involved in these markets in a big way. But, there are some trends here, that indicate this low-latency market will be even more important over time.

For example, more and more of commercial IT is starting to take advantage of big data and AI to profit from all their data. And big science is starting to migrate to IT, where massive data flows and data analysis tools are becoming important to the data center. If anything, the emergence of IoT and the edge will increase data flows that need to be analyzed, understood, and ultimately dealt with.

DNA genomics may be relegated to big pharma/medical but 3D visualization is becoming so mainstream that I can do it on my desktop. These sorts of things were relegated to HPC/big science just a decade or so ago. What tools exist in HPC today that the IT data center of the future will deam a necessary part of their application workload.

Is this a sizable TAM, probably not today. In all honesty it’s buried somewhere in the IT TAM above. But it can be a growing niche, where IT vendors can stake a defensive position and the cloud may have a tough time dislodging.

I say the cloud “may have trouble dislodging” because nothing says that the entire data flow/work flow couldn’t migrate to the cloud, if the responsiveness was available there. But, if anything (guaranteed) responsiveness is one of the few achilles heels of the public cloud. Security may be the other one.

We see IBM, Intel, and a few others taking this space seriously. But all IT vendors need to see where they can do better here.

Focus on services

This not really out-of-box thinking. Some (old) IT vendors have been moving into services for over 50 years now others are just seeing there’s money to be made here. Just about every IT vendor has deployment & support services. most hardware have break-fix services.

But standalone IT services are more specialized and in the coming cloud apocalypse, services will revolve around implementing cloud applications and functionality or migrating work from the cloud or (rarely in the future) back to on prem.

TAM for services is buried in the total IT spend but industry analysts estimate that in 2019 total worldwide TAM for IT services will be about $1.0 in 2019 and growing by 2.6% CAGR.

So services are already a significant portion of IT spend today. And will probably not be impacted by the move to the cloud. I’d say that because implementing applications and services will still exist as long as the cloud exists. Yes it may get simpler (better frameworks, containerization, systemization), but it won’t ever go away completely.

Robots, the endgame

Ok laugh now. I understand this is a big ask to think that Robot spending could supplement and maybe someday surpass IT spending. But we all have to think long term. What is a self driving car but a robotic data center on wheels, generating TB of data every day it’s driven.

Robots over the next century will invade every space, become ever present and ever necessary to modern world functioning . They will have sophisticated onboard computing, motors, servos, sensors and on board and backend processing requirements. The real low-latency workload of the future will be in the (computing) minds of robots.

Even if the data center moves entirely to the cloud, all robotic computation will never reside there because A) it’s too real time and B) it needs to operate well even disconnected from the Internet.

Is all this going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, maybe not but 30 to 50 years out this world will have a multitude of robots operating within it. .

Who’s going to develop, manufacture, support and sustain these mobile computing data centers on wheels, legs, slithering and flying bodies?

I would say IT vendors of today are uniquely positioned to dominate this market. Here to the industry is very fragmented today. There are a few industrial robotic companies and just about every major auto manufacturer is going after self driving cars. And there are many bit players today. So it’s ripe for disruption and consolidation. .

Yet, none of the major IT vendors seem to be going after this. Ok Amazon (hardware & software) and Microsoft (software) have done work in this arena. If anything this should tell IT vendors that they need to start working here as well.

But alas, none have taken up the mantle. In the mean time robot startups are biting the dust left and right, trying to gain market traction.

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That seems to be about it for the major viable out of the box approaches to the public cloud threat. I have a few other ideas but none seem as useful as the above.

Let me know what you think.

Picture credit(s):

IT in space

Posted on by Ray in Cloud storage, Data availability, Data security, Disaster Recovery, Information economy, Optical networking, Scenario planning, Storage, Storage availability, Storage resiliency, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary organizations

Read an article last week about all the startup activity that’s taking place in space systems and infrastructure (see: As rocket companies proliferate … new tech emerges leading to a new space race). This is a consequence of cheap(er) launch systems from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and others.

SpaceBelt, storage in space

One startup that caught my eye was SpaceBelt from Cloud Constellation Corporation, that’s planning to put PB (4X library of congress) of data storage in a constellation of LEO satellites.

The LEO storage pool will be populated by multiple nodes (satellites) with a set of geo-synchronous access points to the LEO storage pool. Customers use ground based secure terminals to talk with geosynchronous access satellites which communicate to the LEO storage nodes to access data.

Their main selling points appear to be data security and availability. The only way to access the data is through secured satellite downlinks/uplinks and then you only get to the geo-synchronous satellites. From there, those satellites access the LEO storage cloud directly. Customers can’t access the storage cloud without going through the geo-synchronous layer first and the secured terminals.

The problem with terrestrial data is that it is prone to security threats as well as natural disasters which take out a data center or a region. But with all your data residing in a space cloud, such concerns shouldn’t be a problem. (However, gaining access to your ground stations is a whole different story.

AWS and Lockheed-Martin supply new ground station service

The other company of interest is not a startup but a link up between Amazon and Lockheed Martin (see: Amazon-Lockheed Martin …) that supplies a new cloud based, satellite ground station as a service offering. The new service will use Lockheed Martin ground stations.

Currently, the service is limited to S-Band and attennas located in Denver, but plans are to expand to X-Band and locations throughout the world. The plan is to have ground stations located close to AWS data centers, so data center customers can have high speed, access to satellite data.

There are other startups in the ground station as a service space, but none with the resources of Amazon-Lockheed. All of this competition is just getting off the ground, but a few have been leasing idle ground station resources to customers. The AWS service already has a few big customers, like DigitalGlobe.

One thing we have learned, is that the appeal of cloud services is as much about the ecosystem that surrounds it, as the service offering itself. So having satellite ground stations as a service is good, but having these services, tied directly into other public cloud computing infrastructure, is much much better. Google, Microsoft, IBM are you listening?

Data centers in space

Why stop at storage? Wouldn’t it be better to support both storage and computation in space. That way access latencies wouldn’t be a concern. When terrestrial disasters occur, it’s not just data at risk. Ditto, for security threats.

Having whole data centers, would represent a whole new stratum of cloud computing. Also, now IT could implement space native applications.

If Microsoft can run a data center under the oceans, I see no reason they couldn’t do so in orbit. Especially when human flight returns to NASA/SpaceX. Just imagine admins and service techs as astronauts.

And yet, security and availability aren’t the only threats one has to deal with. What happens to the space cloud when war breaks out and satellite killers are set loose.

Yes, space infrastructure is not subject to terrestrial disasters or internet based security risks, but there are other problems besides those and war that exist such as solar storms and space debris clouds. .

In the end, it’s important to have multiple, non-overlapping risk profiles for your IT infrastructure. That is each IT deployment, may be subject to one set of risks but those sets are disjoint with another IT deployment option. IT in space, that is subject to solar storms, space debris, and satellite killers is a nice complement to terrestrial cloud data centers, subject to natural disasters, internet security risks, and other earth-based, man made disasters.

On the other hand, a large, solar storm like the 1859 one, could knock every data system on the world or in orbit, out. As for under the sea, it probably depends on how deep it was submerged!!

Photo Credit(s): Screen shots from SpaceBelt youtube video (c) SpaceBelt

Screens shot from AWS Ground Station as a Service sign up page (c) Amazon-Lockheed

Screen shots from Microsoft’s Under the sea news feature (c) Microsoft

Scratch 3.0 is out

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

I’ve written on Scratch before (see my 10 years of Scratch and still counting post). It’s essentially an object oriented, visual programming language for kids. Nontheless, it is pretty sophisticated. The team at MIT just released Scratch 3.0, with a number of new extensions and updates to make it easier to work with.

Google also has a visual object oriented programming tool, called Blockly. I’ve used a variant of Blockly to program an Android phone based robot controller. It’s ok, but Blocky lacks a good collaboration mode and editing large Blockly code modules is not as easy as it should be.

On the other hand Scratch is made for collaboration. They have a web page with 1000s of collaborations listed. Seems like there’s a bit for everyone on the collaboration list.  And they have a a number of starter Scratch projects that anyone can tackle to earn coding cards that will gentling introduce you to scratch and coding.

Using Scratch

When I first ran across Scratch I used it to create sounds based on key combinations. Then I moved to animating sprites (drawn characters, which you can draw yourself or use one of many they have). Then I moved to animating planes, then groups of planes, then created a game where one plane would be followed by others. And then added a way where one plane could shoot another and so on.

It didn’t take me very long to get to a point where I had fleets of planes moving around the screen fighting each other. I haven’t done anything big with Scratch before but I’ve done a number of mini games/animations with my kids and it was fun to toy with.

Used to be you had to download and run Scratch locally on your PC/Mac. With later versions, they have Scratch Desktops that one can download for Windows and MacOS.

Alternatively, one could also use the web based version. In this way you can easily run it in any web browser.

The new desktop is more like a visual IDE than the old one I’m used to and looks exactly like the one on the web. The first Scratch I used presented itself in a table top screen with various Scratch tools surrounding this table top. I’m sure it makes things easier for beginning coders not to be presented with a Scratch world of tools right off the bat and just to have a sprite to play with. I suspect that all these tools are now buried in Scratch Tutorials

Scratch 3.0 comes with a number of extensions

One of the extensions allows you to program LEGO Robotics, another provides a way to interact with a blue tooth micro:bit controller, and another allows you to interact with your web cam to animate objects based on vision detection. There are plenty more and I’m sure this isn’t the end of them. (NB. Scratch team you need one for FIRST robotics) .

I just added a few for sounds and the text to speech extension. And it’s really easy to have Scratch 3.0 read out a text string for you. I suppose there would be a way for one to input a text file and have Scratch read it for you. But didn’t get that far with it.

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I am a strong supporter of everyone learning how to code and solutions like MIT’s Scratch (and Google’s Blockly) are a great way to understand coding without having to deal with the pain/semantics of compilers, APIs or function libraries etc.

Just start coding and having fun. it’s amazing what one can accomplish. That’s what Scratch was made to do, enjoy.

Learning machine learning – part 1

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive computing, Information economy, Machine Learning, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary organizations

Saw an article this past week from AWS Re:Invent that they just released their Machine Learning curriculum and materials  free to the public. Google (Cloud Platform and elsewhere) TensorFlow,  (Facebook’s) PyTorch, and Microsoft Azure CNTK frameworks  education is also available and has been for awhile now.

But first please take our new poll:

My money is on PyTorch and Tensorflow as being the two frameworks most likely to succeed. However all the above use many open source facilities and there seems to be a lot of cross breeding across them. Both AWS ML solutions and Microsoft CNTK offer PyTorch and TensorFlow frameworks/APIs as one option among many others.  

AWS Machine Learning

I spent about an hour plus looking over the AWS SageMaker tutorial videos in the developer section of AWS machine learning curriculum. Signing up was fairly easy but I already had an AWS login. You also had to enroll/register for the course on your AWS login  but once that was through, you could access courses.

In the comments on the AWS blog post there were a number of entries indicating broken links and other problems but I didn’t have any issues. Then again, I didn’t start at the beginning, only looked at over one series of courses, and was using the websites one week after they were announced at Re:Invent.

Amazon SageMaker is an overarching framework that can be used to perform machine learning on AWS, all the way from gathering, analyzing and modifying the dataset(s), to training the model, to creating a inference engine available as an endpoint that can be used to perform the inferencing.

Amazon also has special purpose API based tools that allow customers to embed intelligence (inferencing) directly into their application, without needing to perform the ML training. These include:

  • Amazon Recognition which provides image (facial and other tagging) recognition services
  • Amazon Polly which provides text to speech services in multilple languages, and
  • Amazon Lex which provides speech recognition technology (used by Alexa) and together with Polly helps embed conversational interfaces into customer applications.

TensorFlow Machine Learning

In the past I looked over the TensorFlow tutorials and recently rechecked them out. I found them much easier to follow this time.

The Google IO 2018 video on TensorFlow, Getting Started With TensorFlow High Level APIs, takes you through a brief introduction to the Colab(oratory),  a GCP solution that uses TensorFlow and how to use Tensorflow Keras, tf.data and TensorFlow Eager Execution to create machine learning models and perform machine learning.

 Keras on TensorFlow seems to be the easiest approach to  use machine learning technologies. The video spends most of the time discussing a Colab Keras code element,  ~9 lines, that loads a image classification dataset, defines a 1 level (one standard layer and one output layer), trains it, validates it and uses it to perform  inferencing.

The video also touches a bit on tf.data and TensorFlow Eager Execution but the main portion discusses the 9 line TensorFlow Keras machine learning example.

Both Colab and AWS Sagemaker use and discuss Jupyter Notebooks. These appear to be an open source approach to documenting and creating a workflow and executing Python code automatically.

GCP Colab is essentially a GCP-Google Drive based Jupyter notebook execution engine. With Colab you create a Jupyter notebook on google drive and interactively execute it under Colab. You can download your Juyiter notebook files and essentially execute them anywhere else that supports TensorFlow (that supports TensorFlow v1.7 or above, with Keras API support).

In the video, the Google IO   instructors (Josh Gordon and Lawrence Moroney) walk you through building a model to recognize handwritten digits and outputs a classification (0..9) of what the handwritten digit represents.

It uses a standard labeled handwriting to digits labeled data set, called the MNIST database of handwritten digits that’s already been broken up into a training set and a validation set. Josh calls this the “Hello World” of machine learning.

The instructor in the video walks you through the (Jupyter Notebook – Eager Execution-Keras) code that inputs the data set (line 2), builds a 1 level (really two layer, one neural net layer and one output layer) neural network model (lines 3-6), trains the model (line 7), tests/validates the model (line 8) and then uses it to perform an inference (line 9).

Josh spends a little time discussing neural networks and model optimizations and some of the other parameters used in the code above. He has a few visualizations of what this all means but for the most part, the code uses a simple way to build a neural net model and some standard optimization techniques for the network.

He then goes on to discuss tf.data which is an API that can be used to create machine learning datasets and provide this data to the neural net for training or inferencing.  Apparently tf.data has a number of nifty features that allow you to take raw data and transform it into something that can be used to feed neural nets. For example, separating the data into batches, shuffling (randomizing) the batches of data, pre-fetching it so as to not starve the GPU matrix multipliers, etc.

Then it goes into how machine learning is different than regular coding. And show how TensorFlow Eager Execution is really just like Python execution. They go through another example (larger) of machine learning, this one distinguishes between cats and dogs. While they use an open source Python IDE ,  PyCharm, to test and walk through their TF Eager Execution code, setting breakpoints and examining data along the way.

At the end of the video they show a link to a Google crash course on TensorFlow machine learning and they refer to a book Deep Learning with Python by Francois Chollet. They also mention a browser version of TensorFlow which uses Java Script and  your browser to develop, train and perform inferences using TensorFlow Keras machine learning.

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Never got around to Microsoft’s Azure training other than previewing some websites but plan to look over that soon.

I would have to say that the Google IO session on using TensorFlow high level APIs was a lot more enjoyable (~40 minutes) than the AWS multiple tutorial videos (>>40 minutes) that I watched to learn about SageMaker.

Not a fair comparison as one was a Google IO intro session on TensorFlow high level APIs and the other was a series of actual training videos on Amazon SageMaker and the AWS services you can use to take advantage of it.

But the GCP session left me thinking I can handle learning more and using machine learning (via TensorFlow, Keras, Eager Execution, & tf.data) to actually do something while the SageMaker sessions left me thinking, how much AWS facilities and AWS infrastructure services,  I would need to understand and use to ever get to actually developing a machine learning model.

I suppose one was more of an (AWS SageMaker) infrastructure tutorial  and the other was more of an intro into machine learning using TensorFlow wherever you wanted to execute it.

I think I’m almost ready to start creating and feeding a TensorFlow model with my handwriting and seeing if it can properly interpret it into searchable text. If it can do that, I would be a happy camper

Comments…

Photo credits: 

Screenshos from AWS Sagemaker series of tutorial video 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5, you may need a signin to view them

Screenshots from the Getting Started with TensorFlow High Level APIs YouTube video