MarketWatch: Google-funded school preps for “disruption”

Some more media coverage of SU.

Singularity U — First Week (Peter Diamandis’ summary)

“Dear SU Associate Founders, Faculty, Students and Friends - We’ve just completed our first week of Singularity University and I have to say that I’m extremely pleased and proud of what we have created.  It is real, off and running, and here to stay.”  (continued on the SU blog)

Singularity University Public Panel July 09: “Humanity’s Grandest Challenges”

If anyone’s in the Bay Area this Thursday, this will be the event to be at:

“Join some of the world’s leading experts in public health, climate change, energy, and others as they discuss the “grand challenges” in water, health, the environment, and energy, and identify some of the technical and political issues associated with making significant progress in finding immediate and long-term sustainable solutions that can positively affect at least one billion people in the next 10 years.”

RSVP here.

Singularity University — First Week (Photos)

Someone uploaded a batch of photos of the first week of Singularity University.  I mostly stopped taking photos after the first couple of days because everywhere you look you seem to be looking down the lens barrel of a Canon 5D Mark II either videoing or snapping high-res still photos.  (All of SU is being meticulously documented and will be turned into a documentary.)  Most of the photos cover the team-building exercises we have engaged in, unfortunately the video of the core lectures (the cool stuff) is not up yet.

From the photoset — me shaking Ray Kurzweil’s hand at the pinning ceremony:

What is Singularity University?

I have struggled to explain what Singularity University actually is whenever people have asked me what I’m doing this summer, and have always struggled to put it into words.  Today the genius of SU finally coalesced within my mind into frameable language.

SU is about convergence. It is about converging technologies, accelerating technologies, for sure — but it is much bigger than that.  The genius of SU is that it matches problems (through the group project, 10^9+) with solutions (through the core lectures); it networks those who have ideas but no money with those who have money but are looking for ideas; and it creates a bridge from future scenarios and vision to present realities and issues.

This is the most amazing group of people I have ever had the chance to meet or work with.  Great things will come from this.

Proposed measurement of personal influence

I propose as a quick benchmark of one’s personal global influence the “Wikipedia degree count”: the number of people in one’s circle of closest contacts who have (non-vanity / non-autobiographical) pages about them on Wikipedia.

(My Wikipedia degree count is shooting through the roof through attending Singularity University…)

Coolest companies / projects

One SU homework assigment: “What are the top 5 (min) – 10 (max) companies or projects conducting cutting edge work that demonstrates exponentially growing technologies in your field?” — hard to pick, so the selection below is somewhat random…

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Google is pushing forward the acceleration of information technologies like no other company:

• Google is aggressively blurring the line between online and offline worlds, through products like Google Street View, integration of Local Search / Panoramio / Wikipedia localization into Google Maps, and the release of a global, always-online, geo-localized, personalized, multi-modal sensor network in the form of the free Android platform.

• Google singlehandedly brought Ajax/Web2.0 into the mainstream consciousness, stunning the world through the release of Gmail and then Google Maps, and more recently forcing all major browser vendors to achieve an order of magnitude better Javascript and DOM performance with the release of the Chrome browser. Google’s efforts in these domains has singlehandedly opened the world’s eyes and minds to what is possible with the Web.

• Google is pushing forward a new age of open collaboration, interoperability and service federation through efforts like OpenSocial and Google Friend Connect.

• Google has begun to leverage the base of human knowledge captured in the Web to perform intelligent analysis and inference, for example accomplishing automatic corpus-based unsupervised translation between new language pairs. This can be seen as a way of employing the passive component of human intelligence (i.e. knowledge captured in the representational form of language) to at least symptomatically achieve machine intelligence. Other useful emergent patterns in human knowledge are captured and visualized by Google in projects such as Google News, Trendalyzer, Google Set and Wonder Wheel, contributing to human understanding of macro-scale behavior and allowing us to increase the signal-to-noise ratio on the Web.

• Google operates what is in all possibility the largest distributed computing system in the world, giving them collective processing power that is beginning to approximate that of the human brain (at least in terms of raw computation, not capability), and petabytes or more likely exabytes of total storage space. Google has unleashed the power of their infrastructure to the public through the Google App Engine framework, which will allow the wisdom of crowds to proliferate a parallel exploration of diverse new uses for such a powerful computing framework.

• By releasing APIs for every major web service, Google has thrown down the gauntlet for other vendors to follow, and ushered in a new age of openness and interoperability between web services.

• Google has created powerful network effects for accelerating social change by creating numerous new enabling communications frameworks (Gmail, Gchat, PicasaWeb, OpenSocial, Wave)

Free Software / Open Source Software

“Free software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction . . . Free software is available gratis (free of charge) in most cases.” [Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Free Software”]

The Free Software movement was conceived by Richard Stallman (RSM) at MIT in 1983 after he began to perceive that the software industry had begun an alarming trend towards taking away a user’s freedoms to view, modify and redistribute software in order to increase profit and “protect IP”. RSM created the GNU General Public License (GPL) in an effort to guarantee a software user’s freedoms to view, modify and redistribute the source code of programs they use. This license became the foundation of the GNU operating system, which combined with a Linux kernel has collectively come to be known as “GNU/Linux” or, more often in the common vernacular, simply “Linux”. Many other software projects adopted the GPL license, and in response to commercial demands and differences in individual opinion, a large number of other “open source” software licenses arose embodying varying degrees and types of freedoms.

The sudden fast expansion in the number and diversity of Free and open source software licenses is completely dwarfed however by the Cambrian explosion in the number of software projects that have adopted those licenses:

“In this paper, we analyze the combined growth of open source software in terms of lines of source code as well as number of projects. Our database contains more than 5000 active and popular open source projects. The database provides fine granular data of developer actions over the last 17 years from 1990 to 2006. We analyze the average amount of source code added per month for the time frame of January 1995 to December 2006 as well as the number of projects added over time. We find that both the growth rate as well as the absolute amount of source code is best explained using an exponential model.” — Deshpande and Riehle 2008 (emphasis added)

More recently the open source license concept has been extended to creative content through the Creative Commons license system.

Free and open source licensing is an enabler for crowdsourcing.

Some notable, influential, significant and dynamic Free / open source projects include:

• The Linux kernel

• The Apache Project

• Eclipse

• Wikipedia

• Android

• Firefox; Chromium

• OpenOffice.org

• The GNOME Desktop Project

• The GIMP (Photoshop replacement); Inkscape (Illustrator replacement); Gnumeric (Excel replacement)

• The Weka project for machine learning

Through the encouragement of unorthodox thinking and a focus on interdisciplinary research, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has in some way influenced or played a pivotal role in the development of a huge number of important modern technologies and has turned out a large number of alumni who have played important roles in the furthering of science and technology. MIT has actively encouraged an environment conducive to attempting challenging engineering tasks. MIT is in the forefront of its field in computer science, robotics, mathematics, materials science, mechanical engineering, biology, economics and brain and cognitive sciences, a very interesting mix from the point of view of the application of accelerating technologies to the improvement of human life.

Particularly poignant is the recent construction of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard for Genome Research, the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the McGovern Institute of Brain Research and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research all within one block of MIT’s Stata Center, the home of EECS (the Electrical Engineering department and the CSAIL, the Computer Science and AI Lab). All of the aforementioned labs are being positioned as the world’s leading research center in each of these respective fields. The juxtaposition of these labs with EECS is no accident, and will without doubt lead to many incredible new discoveries and innovations.

After founding Palm and Handspring, Jeff Hawkins left the gadget world and switched to focusing on neuroscience fulltime. He founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and published the book On Intelligence, which describes Hierarchical Temporal Memory, a novel biologically-motivated system for humanlike reasoning. This system notably incorporates as axiomatic principles hierarchical reasoning, feedback, and temporal prediction. Hawkins went on to found a company, Numenta, to produce a working commercializable implementation of these principles.

Numenta claims:

HTM technology has the potential to solve many difficult problems in machine learning, inference, and prediction. Some of the application areas we are exploring with our customers include recognizing objects in images, recognizing behaviors in videos, identifying the gender of a speaker, predicting traffic patterns, doing optical character recognition on messy text, evaluating medical images, and predicting click through patterns on the web. The world is becoming awash with data of all types, whether numeric, video, text, images or audio, making it challenging for humans to sort through it and find what’s important. HTM technology offers the promise of making sense of all that data.

Initial working versions of the first implementation of HTM, NuPIC (the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) are available and demonstrate workable image recognition on real-world data.

HTM is a controversial departure from traditional machine learning, but an interesting one, particularly in the light of the fact that for all intents and purposes, all machine learning algorithms today are approximately reducible to one another. This stems from the fact that most of ML research is centered around improving classification and prediction accuracy, meaning that most ML algorithms are at the most fundamental level arbitrary feed-forward function approximators. Numenta believes that the unusual and unique structure of HTM may yield a system that is inherently more capable than systems that pursue the traditional ML targets of classification and prediction.

Boston Dynamics, a robotics company spun off from MIT in 1992, is a small robotics and engineering company on the forefront of the design and construction of agile all-terrain robots. They are best known for the BigDog quadrupedal robot that has inspired a lot of innovation in the robotics world.

News tracker for Singularity University

Here’s a news aggregator for Singularity University…

Movie Screenings: Transcendent Man — and World Premiere, “The Singularity Is Near” The Movie

We were shown the full version of Transcendent Man tonight by Ray Kurzweil and the movie producer, and were also the first in the world to see 15 minutes of footage of Ray’s own movie, The Singularity is Near.

Transcendent Man (previously only shown at the Tribeca Film Festival) is a very well-made movie.  I have more understanding of Ray after watching the movie, and feel like I was for the first time able to see his human side.  Ray personally feels that this documentary captures his ideas better than most media coverage has previously been able to achieve (though he had nothing to do with its production, the film crews just followed him around for two years).  Some of the comments from proponents and opponents of his ideas are fascinating.

“The Singularity is Near” movie is in post-production and may be fully edited by the end of the 9 weeks.  If so we will end up watching the first ever screening of it before SU finishes.  All I can say of the 15 minute trailer we saw is, WOW.  It is *phenomenally* well-made and far surpassed my expectations.  The special effects and cinematography are up there with Hollywood quality, and the dialogs demonstrate some interesting thinking around the issues of the personhood of artificial intelligences.  Some of the Ramona stuff, yes, is pretty weird, but it looks like it will make sense as it unfolds in the story.  The storyline surrounds Ramona (an AI creation of Ray’s) trying to achieve legal personhood status by submitting to the Turing Test (amid a huge threat to civilization from grey goo).  Anyway, watch for it…

Trip to SETI

SU just took a field trip to the SETI Institute, and were given an impropmptu talk on SETI by Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI (who missed his first chance to hear Ray Kurzweil live to talk to us, as we had all already heard Ray several times).  Fascinating talk, and seriously hilarious.  I hope they publish the video of this talk on the SU network soon!  I developed a greater respect for what they are doing and why they are doing it.

They only had four fridge magnet letters.  I took the liberty of rearranging them on the way out.