The Snowy Owl Invades

If you are looking for a good example of the growing intersection of sustainability science and computer science I suggest taking a look at this fascinating description of the yearly winter invasion of Snowy Owl sitings. This year seems to be a big year but it is also undoubtedly the best documented year ever due to a project called eBird (ebird.org). The eBird project gathers information from professionals and thousands of amateur borders. The observations are compiled and analyzed in near real time to build an observation map. This kind of citizen science is becoming more and more possible using the Internet, wireless access to websites from the field and advanced machine learning techniques to analyze huge amounts or data. Exciting times for many fields of science ahead.

Turing Centennial Year

For my Science Sunday post this week I’d like to point out that June 23, 2012 marks 100 years since the birth of one of the most important scientists or mathematicians of the last or any other century. Alan Turing is the father of Computer Science, was pivotal to the defeat of the Nazis in WWII and was tragically persecuted and punished for his homosexuality. This year has been declared Alan Turing year in commemoration and Computer Science conferences and around the world will be running special sessions to honour Turing and Computer Science departments everywhere will also be holding events. The museum at Bletchley Park where Turing worked in WWII to break Nazi codes has received special funding from software companies and others to build up the museum and run events.

Some of the core ideas that Turing considered were: What does it mean to compute something? Can computation ever be used to mimic or reproduce intelligence, and would be able to tell the difference?

You can find out about all the events on at http://www.turingcentenary.eu/

If you want to go one step further and learn more about what CS is about and how Turing’s ideas changed the world you may still be able to sign up for one of the courses being offered free and online by Stanford University.  The Computer Science 101 course is a good way to start understanding how the computers that make our modern world possible function, a world Alan Turing contributed so pivotally to making possible. For a bit more of a challenge the course on cryptography should address the same issues Turing and his team at Bletchley Park worried about trying break Nazi codes. Turing’s other popularly known contribution was about the relation between computation and intelligence. This would have been best addressed by the course on AI offerred last term which thousands of people registered for. That course is not offered this term, but some related courses this term are offered on machine learning and graphical models which are at the forefront of modern research into artificial intelligence.

Happy  ScienceSunday

In Defence of Algorithms

(I seriously never imagined I’d have to write that title.)

Today I came across an odd analysis of several legitimate problems by Barry Devlin.
(via Marshall Kirkpatrick’s google+ feed)

I’m sure the analysis is well intentioned and perhaps I have misread some of his claims but he appears to be blaming three major, societal problems on one thing they all seem to have in common … the use of algorithms.

The three problems he lists are:

• Insurance Companies overanalysing patient data to deny them coverage
• Automated Stock Trading software playing time delays to beat any poor human traders
• Movie Studios analysing data to determine what movies people like to get the biggest bang for their buck

These are legitimate and worrying problems, but placing blame on overuse of algorithms per se is kinda strange.

Algorithms are simply systems which solve problems. They can be as simple as a recipe for baking a cake or as subtle and complex as Google’s search algorithm. Trying to encourage people to use less algorithms in the modern world is like encouraging people “to use less hammers” and beat the nails in with their hands. “We’re just throwing up buildings at an unnatural rate because of all these fancy hammers.” The problems he points out stem from other choices that are implicitly being made, the intensive use of algorithms does not cause them.

The problem of insurance companies over analysing their clients and denying coverage is inevitable when you have an unregulated, profit driven insurance industry. Regulate the industry so that they can’t use certain information, or so they cannot deny coverage in certain circumstances. Or if this is the US you are worried about, switch to a single payer health care system and take most of that power away from insurance companies altogether. Obviously they are going to do everything they can to make money. Either take away their incentive or restrict what they can do, complaining that they should not try so hard by analysing any data they are allowed to use doesn’t make sense.

High speed, automated trading is a very important issue which needs to be addressed. But again, this isn’t about not allowing people to do as much analysis as they want, it is about levelling the playing field. Why should large trading companies get an advantage because they can afford larger servers or can rent the rooms beside the NY Stock exchange computers to reduce their lag time? Implement a regulation saying that there must be a fixed minimum delay between all trades. Or alter the trading software in the markets to only accept trades every x microseconds. Again, saying algorithms are the problem is saying that are playing the game too well when you are only giving them incentives to play that game.

As for movies and how collaborative filtering will help studios understand exactly what kinds of movies people are willing to pay the most for, he answers the question himself. Any studio that only tries to make movies that are like last year’s hits is going to lose out to a more creative studio that actually makes popular movies no one was expecting. That’s not the algorithm’s fault, that’s just bad marketing strategy.

So I just don’t see where he’s coming from. Algorithms completely permeate our lives, they always have.
Computers just make it more obvious.

AAAI 2011 Wrap-Up

So I didn’t post an update about the AAAI 2011 conference every day, but really, this is more posts than I would have predicted with my prior model of my behaviour so it’s pretty good. I also wrote a separate post talking about the Computational Sustainability track.

This is just a few quick few notes about the events at AAAI this year and my own biased view of what was hot. But keep in mind there is  such a broad set of papers, presentations, posters and demos from a huge number of brilliant people that its impossible for one person to give you a full view of what went on.  I encourage you to look over the program here, and read the papers that interest you.

From the conference talks I attended and the people I talked to people were most excited about:

• Learning Relationships from Social Networks – lots of fascinating work here including one of the invited talks.  Kind of ironic though that so few AAAI11 attendees seem to use social media like twitter during the conference. You can take a look at #aaa11 (and even #aaai and #aaai2011) for the limited chatter there was.
• Planning with UCT and bandit problems
• Microtext (I don’t know what that is but it’s apparently fascinating)
• Computational Social Choice – a Borda manipulation proof won outstanding paper in this track.
• Multiagent Systems applied to everything
• Computational Sustainability
• Natural Language Processing – especially from blogs and social media
• and everyone I talked to seems to agree that Watson was pretty awesome

The poster session was very full and lots of great discussion ensued. Note for future attendees, best food of the conference was at the posters, by far, go for the food, stay for the Artificial Intelligence.

There were a number of robot demos as well, the fantastic PR2 platform was being demonstrated with an algorithm where users could train it to identify and manipulate household items like dishes and cups.  There were also a number of chess playing robots playing in competition, designed to be played against a human using vision to detect moves and locate pieces.

There was also a lot else going on I didn’t get to: The AI in Education track, a poker playing competition, IAAI the applied AI conference held in parrallel with AAAI and probably lots more.

To top it off, on Thursday morning those of us staying in the hotel were awakened to bull horns and shouted slogans. I had almost hoped that someone had arranged a protest spawned by the frightening advance of Artificial Intelligence and they had come to demand we stop our research immediately to avoid the inevitable enslavement/destruction/unemployment/ingestion of humanity by the machines. Not that this would be a valid concern or that I want to stop researching, but it would have provided some kind of strange vindication that the public thinks we are advancing.

Unfortunately it was actually a labour dispute between the Hyatt and some of its staff, they marched in front of the main entrance from 7am-7pm the entire final day of the conference.

Best overheard quote:

You care about AI more than our jobs!

I’m pretty sure most attendees didn’t have a predefined utility for comparing those two entities. Hopefully they work it out.

All in all, a great conference in a great city.

CompSust11 – Computational Sustainability at AAAI11

This year the annual AAAI conference held a special track for the field of Computational Sustainability.  I attended the AAAI conference and presented a paper in the CompSust track but I also ended up spending most of my time listening to other talks from this track.  This was partly because each of the talks was interesting in itself but also because it turned out to be a great way to see a range of work going on in AI without changing rooms as often.

There was a huge diversity of problem domains and AI methods brought to bear on them. This was an interesting way to attend AAAI actually since each session had a variety of approaches, exposing a lot of the variety of approaches there is at a large general conference like AAAI. Most of my most vigourous discussions were with people in very different fields from me since we both needed to translate each other’s language and discover our own assumptions. I think this is something that happens less often at more focussed conferences.

One of papers chosen as outstanding paper (one of only two as far as I could tell) came from the CompSust track (Dynamic Resource Allocation in Conservation Planning by Daniel Golovin, Andreas Krause, Beth Gardner, Sarah J. Converse, Steve Morey). This was a very impressive project on reserve management for nature reserves to protect wildlife which was the result of wide collaboration between universities, government and industry.

Just some of the domains and methods used in the papers in this track to give you an idea of the variety the topics:

Domains
- smart energy grid design
- distributed energy storage
- nature reserve planning
- wildlife migration corridors
- building energy efficiency, comparing and improving efficiency
- water conservation in residental landscapes
- bird species tracking

Methods
- market simulation of energy tariffs with Qlearning
- multiagent planning – an agent buying and selling power from the grid from your local batteries
in order to lower your energy bill and maintain the necessary power needed no demand
- steiner multigraph optimization
- modelling interactions between plants as agents and optimize their placement and watering
- graphical probabilisitc models
- boosted regression trees