ASIMOがとんでもないことにｗｗｗ

ASIMO fun!

Artificial Artificial Intelligence for complex-dud questions

No, that subject line is not a typo - though I tend to repeat repeat myself, I'm not repeating now. Way back in 1770, a Hungarian baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built a mechanical chess-playing device that defeated everyone from Napoleon to Franklin - only that it wasn't a mechanical chess-playing device - it was a human sitting behind a mechanical chess playing device - in other words, a mechanical turk. You can read more about it here.

Roll forward to 2006, amazing Amazon.com has started a mechanical turk that has humans sitting behind their computers to figure out answers to questions that bother programmers - from the mundane to the complex - that their machines are unable to easily solve - for example, questions like where is the pinkish-yellow flower in this photograph? is an absurd question for a complex computer and a fairly dud question even for a dud human being. So Amazon.com does what Amazon.com does best. Web Services. It lets you (others) post your (their) complex-dud question online and lets others (you) solve them for dirt cheap prices like $0.01. And that for the uninitiated is not artificial intelligence but artificial artificial intelligence. Go and post your own HITs (or Human Intelligence Tasks - huh?) here and get your life's complex-dud questions answered.

Prologue: If I sounded cynical, may be I just wanted to but I'm pretty kicked about it!

The Sum Total of Outcomes

Sipping on coffee and re-reading emails, the corner of my right-eye glanced a Times of India heading..."Zakir 's Album, Recorded in Just 3 Hours, Nominated for a Grammy." Of course, I always muse over how excited the rest of the world gets on American nominations than any other including their own and it's never the other way round but I'll let those thoughts out another time. For now...let's focus on the just 3 hours. Ustad Zakir Hussain, the son of Ustad Alla Rakha (also an accomplished tabla maestro) is the most famous contemporary tabla player in India. Ustad Hussain is a handsome man with instantly recognizable curly flock of hair and a facial expression that's always lost in the distance and he's mostly garbed in a kurta - everything about his stylish demeanor announces him as an artist.

But it's about the just 3 hours that I want to talk about. It's not just 3 hours. Every little enjoyable outcome or expression in life from tasting deliciously gooey gulab jamoons to receiving a global award to a peaceful calm while watching a sunset in a noisy city can be summed up to last just a few seconds...a few minutes at the most...after which, the feeling quickly drops back to normal or below. Often the just a few...-stuff is the culmination of a sum total of a lot of experiences, a lot of hours and even more years. We intuitively know this but are almost never seem to be aware of it. Zakir Hussain did not learn to play the table at the age of 12...he was already touring the world by then and he's 55 now. He does 150 concerts every year - so you can do the math. With every concert, he would push a little more and his internal barometer got a little better - may be a wee-bit but better nevertheless - while his peers would satisfy themselves with lesser number of concerts and lesser practice. The net-net is this: the more potent an outcome and the more simple it is on the outside...the more complicated is on the inside.

Horrors of Air Deccan

As I stepped into a transit bus that was filled with end-of-day armpits, I noticed one of Air Deccan's employees hopping in - in an almost matter-of-fact manner, he announced a delayed departure owing to a "technical snag". The words were rehearsed - in the same monotonous tone spiked with abrupt pauses and practiced enthusiasm that flight crew members use to demonstrate how oxygen masks would plop and seats would become boats when a plane ride is doomed. "Tum log Air Dakkan ho not Air Deccan!!", shouted a disgruntled passenger who traveled with a wife who constantly adjusted her saree or wiped mucus off her screaming kid. You guys are not Air Deccan but Air Dakkan (loosely empty head).

A few months ago, the newspapers heralded India's low cost airline as the second largest flier in India. And a few months before, the airline IPO-ed in the Indian stock market amidst much fanfare (the usual) and angst (of journalists who had been passengers). Having avoided flying the airline for a whole year, I was more curious than penny-wise when I booked a Chennai-Mumbai ticket last week. On more than one...nah...four occasions, I've noticed a mob outside the Air Deccan gate at the terminal - passengers thronging over each other, screaming and threatening the company's employee(s) with the choicest abuses. Usually, a singled and sweating employee defended the supposed snag to the angry crowd that also fought amongst itself. I've seen similar sights in India - mostly in train/bus stations or just when an accident occurred. Viewing the depressing scene of Air Deccan's counter with fiery passengers and fear-filled staff, I always waggled my head (silently - the Indian way) in disbelief and empathy for the entrepreneur, Capt. Gopinath who built the company from zero and ran an entity that today seemed to value neither its passengers nor its employees - at least on the face of it.

I chatted up a staff member on what a technical snag really meant because it seemed to occur more often than not only for Air Deccan by some devilish interference. Wiping his sweat with his discolored hand kerchief, he told me that most of their planes had problems, their operations were ill-managed and he was forced to report whatever was told to him. Reflecting on my life's misdeeds, I looked on at the snag-riddled plane that seemed like Yama's tube to infinity. As the delay trotted from 45 minutes to 75 minutes to 125 minutes to 180 minutes...a guard at the security check whispered in what might well have been a gleeful but subdued cheer, "Yeh flight tho cancel ho ne wala hai!" This flight is going to be canceled. Trusting his wisdom-filled analysis more than Air Deccan's own, I canceled my tickets quickly and booked myself as the last passenger on the grand-daddy of Indian aviation, Indian Airlines. Within five minutes, it was Deja Vu - the passengers mobbed the Air Deccan staff member who was assigned the brave task of canceling passenger tickets - a thin, petite girl whose eyes were a combination of frustration, disgust and fear. Rolling her shoulders underneath her well-used white shirt with the embroidered company logo, she appealed in her quivering voice, "Sir, please sir...please bear with us...our website is also slow."

Headbanging (literally) with d3o

It's not very often that a CNN article catches my attention. I do the cursory read to satiate my appetite for stuff like where it's snowing and who killed whom. And today, there was d3o. The product concept is amazing and futuristic. It's made of intelligent molecules that move with the body when it moves but come together upon impact and unlock soon after. Simple. Superb. As part of easily wearable preventive clothing, it helps prevent damage to elbows to knees and any other movable body part that one might want to protect particularly from sports injuries.

The founder Richard Palmer and his team worked on the technology for five years to make it demonstrable. Here's what is interesting - d3o culminates his entire diverse background - his background as a mechanical engineer with Dupont, his more recent education in design from the Royal School of Art and his dabbling in design consulting. A bruise from a snowboarding accident (to the seed the idea) and slamming a coffee table to demonstrate his product (for finance) had the d3o balls rolling.