Will Samsung write you a prescription and deliver your medicine?

At CES 2016 Samsung showed a number of wellness-related products, including the WELT:

The WELT communicates with your phone to tell you how many steps you've taken, how long you've been sitting, eating habits and your waistline size. It then sends the data to a specially-designed app for analysis, to tell you things like -- if you keep eating like you did today, you're going to gain 2 pounds this month. Samsung expects the WELT to go on sale this year.

If the product becomes a commercial success, it's easy to imagine how much historical data the company is going to collect across a broad range of demographic categories. Even if this particular product flops in the market, similar ones, e.g. made by FitBit or Apple, will emerge over time. The key difference between Samsung and others is that Samsung is now getting into pharmaceuticals. Here's a quote from a 2014 Bloomberg article:

South Korea’s biggest company is investing at least $2 billion in biopharmaceuticals, including the growing segment of biosimilars, which are cheaper versions of brand-name biotechnology drugs that have lost patent protection.

“We are in an infancy still,” Christopher Hansung Ko, chief executive officer at the Samsung Bioepis unit, said in an interview. “We are a Samsung company. Our mandate is to become No. 1 in everything we enter into, so our long-term goal is to become a leading pharmaceutical company in the world.”

Remarkably, Samsung has a chance to become the only company in the world capable of gathering real-time biological data, diagnosing diseases and delivering appropriate treatments to an individual at the right time, in the right place and at the right price.

tags: innovation, samsung, health, detection, tool, mobile

Facebook gets a patent for tracking user daily routines

This week the US PTO awarded Facebook US 9,094,795, titled "Routine estimation". The patent covers a technology for clustering user locations, e.g. using mobile device data, and deriving daily routine patterns related to the locations.

The technology also enables Facebook and third parties to connect location and social graph data with user activities, "likes", music played, and other personal or group information.

One can easily imagine a real-time map that shows swarms of users chugging along their daily routines and, once in a while, reminding them to do something different. Shop, for example...



In system model terms, Facebook solves a Detection problem, which is typically a precursor to solutions for Control problems, e.g. directing user activities based on detected patterns.

tags: facebook, patent, invention, distribution, control, detection

Want to understand your own personality? Ask Facebook!

Stanford researchers have found that computers can judge personality traits more accurately than one's friends and colleagues.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject's own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, "This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

The original idea of using Thumbs UP and Thumbs DOWN buttons in the digital world belongs to TiVo. Facebook took this idea — knowingly or unknowingly — and scaled it across the entire range of digital content, making every piece of communication "likeable."

In System Model terms, Like helps solve Detection and Control problems. We discuss it briefly in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 22, Seeing the Invisible. "Like" represents the Aboutness of an element. Once the Aboutness detected, the Control sub-system uses it to compose and channel content streams according to its policies.

Solving Detection problems with the System Model

Since the publication of Scalable Innovation, I've had many discussions about the System Model with readers and students. Intuitively, they think that the left-to-right dimension corresponds to Space-Time. That is, the Packaged Payload moves from the Source to the Tool via the Distribution.
Although this intuition is correct, it's not the only one we can use in the system model. Importantly, we can think about the second Time axis — the vertical one — that applies to a particular system element. In this case, the element becomes dynamic, e.g. changes over the time or moves in space.

In other words, the system model covers processes that involve repeated transactions and/or evolution of a particular physical element over time. For example, the Sources in the picture above represent the same physical Source at different points of time. This approach works really well for solving Detection problems because it allows us to identify an element based on its behavior. That is, we can extract Aboutness by controlling and/or interacting with the element.

Since this is not intuitively clear, I probably need to develop examples that explain this use of the System Model.

tags: model, system, detection, book

Facebook anticipates user engagement - a new US patent

On January 6, 2015 US PTO awarded Facebook patent 8,929,615 "Feature-extraction-based image scoring" (inventors David Harry Garcia and Justin Mitchell).

The new patent covers a technology that extracts features from a photo and makes clever decisions how to use it on a social networking; the decisions are based on predicted user engagement. For example, if you like drinking women  smiling babies the system will be able to include more baby pictures (and ads) into your news feed.

To put the matter in perspective: few months ago a lot of media hoopla was generated about Amazon being able to anticipate where to ship user packages.  The new Facebook technology is much more interesting than that of Amazon because
a) it addresses the growing world of digital social media;
b) it enables anticipatory content distribution;
c) while Amazon can anticipate shipping to the right zipcode within a certain time interval, Facebook can "ship" the right content to the right user at the right time.

In short, Facebook anticipates more and with a greater precision.

Also relevant to this discussions are recent Facebook patents US 8,930,837 "Graphical user interface for map search" (inventors Brandon Marshall Walkin and  Zhen Fang) and US 8,930,243 "System, process and software arrangement for providing multidimensional recommendations/suggestions" (inventors Alexander Tuzhilin and Gediminas Adomavicius). The latter patent goes back to a 2001 invention!

From our system model perspective, the patents describe novel Control systems that take advantage of the Aboutness, extracted from the Packaged Payload.

tags: control, aboutness, detection, model, 

Invention of the Day: Electrocardiography (EKG)

Today we take medical sensors for granted. Most recently Digital Health, a combination of sensing and wireless networking technologies, has become one of the fastest growing areas for innovation. For example, electronic hand bands from FitBit can track your sleep patterns, continuously collect your physical activity levels, calculate calories burned during exercises, and transmit the data to your smartphone, which relays the information further to the cloud. Ultimately, Digital Health should help us improve our lifestyles, prevent cardiovascular diseases, and reduce healthcare costs.

CardioMEMS wireless heart sensor compared to a dime. (Photo credit: IntelFreePress).

A large portion of the modern sensing technology is based on detecting weak electric signals from the heart and other organs. Medical researchers became aware of the hearts electric activity during the second half of the 19th century. Nevertheless, it was hard for them to come up with a practical application for their knowledge.

As late as 1911, Augustus Waller, who was the pioneer of electrocardiography, said, “I do not imagine that electrocardiography is likely to find any very extensive use in the hospital. It can at most be of rare and occasional use to afford a record of some rare anomaly of cardiac action.”

While Waller struggled with his imagination, a Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven developed the first practical EKG device that was based on his newly invented string galvanometer.

In 1906, unknown to Waller, Einthoven demonstrated clinical usefulness of the electrocardiograph (EKG). In 1924 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his invention.

Over the last 100 years EKG has become one of the most common techniques for heart monitoring and diagnostics. Since then, many generations of inventors improved upon the original idea, with micro-electronics, networking, and cloud computing being the latest additions to Einthhoven's breakthrough. Most likely, innovation in this area will continue well into the 21st century.

tags: invention, innovation, detection, healthcare, medicine, control

Lunch Talk: Inventions that shook the world (1980s)

DNA profiling is one of the inventions.

tags: invention, innovation, internet, detection

Lab Notebook: Strange connections between baseball and Netflix

I discovered another repeating pattern for problem solving in baseball scouting and ... movie classification. In baseball, scouts and managers have to process a lot of vague information about many prospects. Nate Silver writes how Billy Beane ("a phenom in baseball management" and the main character in Moneyball, one of my favorite movies about sports) addressed the problem:

...when we have trouble categorizing something, we’ll often overlook it or misjudge it. This is one of the reasons that Beane avoids what he calls “gut-feel” decisions. (The Signal and the Noise. 2013.)

In short, Beane developed an elaborate system and a large number of explicit categories that his brain could rationally handle instead of relying on subconscious, gut-feel decisions. Using lots of  categories enabled him to pick the right player among many candidates.

Where do people experience a similar problem? In "scouting" movies on Netflix! To help users solve the problem, Netflix engineers developed a detailed content categorization system with thousands of fine distinctions, so that people can select the right movie among lots of candidates. Here's an example of their movie subjects:

Source: Alexis C. Madrigal. How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood. The Atlantic. Jan 2, 2014.

A couple of learning points:
- In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 5), we talk about the concept of "Aboutness" - an element that facilitates decision making in systems. The Netflix chart above would be a great way to show how generating movie aboutness helps solve detection problems for the users.
- "Gut-feel" decisions are a poor substitute for systematic thinking about the problem. Fundamentally, they are limited by our working memory and don't scale to handle complex choice situations.

tags: aboutness, problem, solution, detection, control, pattern

MOOCs: what can we learn from baseball scouts?

It turns out that one of the biggest problems with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is low completion rate. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, decided to "pivot" away from MOOCs because on average only 4 percent of participants completed courses offered by his company. Although the courses reach hundreds of thousands of people, the end result is nowhere near inflated expectations about a revolution in education.

Motivation to learn seems to be the key to succeed online. I think MOOCs will become an effective tool for finding talented and motivated individuals, rather than educating masses around the world. Ideally, MOOCs should replace rote tests like SATs because to a prospective educator and/or employer a successfully completed online course provides a strong indicator of the student's intellectual and social skills, especially when creativity and entrepreneurship are required.

From this perspective, I find Nate Silver's chapter (The Signal and the Noise. 2013) about baseball scouting particularly insightful. Here's a list of five abilities that predict success at the major-league level:

1. Preparedness and Work Ethic. Baseball is unlike almost all other professional sports in that games are played six or seven times a week. A baseball player has to be ready to perform at a professional level every day.
2. Concentration and Focus. this category specifically concerns the manner in which a player conducts himself during the course of the game.
3. Competitiveness and Self-Confidence. “Is there a desire to succeed to the degree that there’s a failure mechanism kicking in? Is there a fear of failure? Is the desire to succeed significant enough to overcome the fear of failure?”
4. Stress Management and Humility. In baseball even the best hitters fail a majority of the time. The ability to cope with this failure requires a short memory and a certain sense of humor.
5. Adaptiveness and Learning Ability. How successfully is the player able to process new information during a game? Listen to advice from his coaches? How does he adapt when his life situation changes?

I wonder if we can create scouting reports on entrepreneurs, e.g. by using Angel List or other new social media tools. Like major league baseball, innovation and entrepreneurship is a high-stake game played every day. Creating a winning team is one of the most important tasks for a startup CEO and people who fund his/her company.


tags: innovation, education, detection, control, synthesis, system

Lab Notebook: NSA, Google, cookies

In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 5. System Control Points: Where to Aim the Silver Bullets), we introduce the concept of aboutness and use the example of web cookies to explain how it helps solve detection problems. In the second edition of the book, we should illustrate the concept with the recent revelation that NSA uses Google cookies to identify targets for hacking. This is exactly the use our system model predicts.

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations. (Source: Washington Post, December 10, 2013).

tags: detection, control, system, model, example

A solution to the terrorism problem would be to make everybody wear Google Glass devices. If one sees or smells a bomb-making material, the device reports the incident to the authorities. With this setup everybody becomes a self-policing drone, with Google AI algorithms functioning as a giant external brain.

 Figure from: Intelligence: the eye, the brain, and the computer, by Fischler and Firschein. 1987. p. 18.

tags: problem, solution, detection, control, brain, mind

Google Glass is the ultimate surveillance machine.

Google Glass has the potential to turn everybody into a surveillance camera. By capturing and analyzing video streams coming from multiple sources, Google would be able to cross-reference its image recognition algorithms with GPS data gathered by the target's Android or iOS device.

For example, when Bob's Google Glass device captures Alice on University Street in Palo Alto, Alice's mobile sends its location data to a Google Maps server. Although the two devices work independently, the information can be easily matched by timestamps and location data. Moreover, if Charlie sees Alice from a different angle, his Google Glass stream can be used to complement data received from Bob's and Alice's devices. If David — independently — tags Alice in his G+ post, the process of verification is complete. Unknowingly, Bob, Charlie, and David form a Google Glass spy network capable of tracking Alice's every move.

Although this scenario sounds a bit far fetched, Google has already implemented it in its web search engine. Because Google strives to download and index every available web page in the world, it knows which pages contain links to a particular page. Knowing the relationship helps Google assign high rank to pages that have a greater number of "incoming" links — the algorithm was Page's and Brin's research topic at Stanford. In short, if Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David are web pages, Google knows who sees whom. Similarly, Google has the ability to implement this logic for video streams, location data, and other bits and pieces of information collected from mobile devices.

tags: control, detection, social, network, packaged payload, google

A potential technology for ultra hi-res MRI machines.

MTR reports on an early stage research in nanoscale magnetic field detectors.

(MIT Tech Review. Feb 1, 2013) Currently, researchers have limited tools to study the molecular structure of proteins. X-ray diffraction can give them an atomic-level view of some proteins, but many copies of the protein must be crystallized into a rigid lattice, a process that does not work for all proteins and results in an averaging of protein shape. Conventional MRI, which can be used by doctors to peek inside the body, doesn’t let researchers see anything smaller than a few micrometers in size because the detectors aren’t sensitive enough to pick up magnetic field signals from very small structures.

Two reports published online in Science on Thursday open up the possibility that researchers may be able to determine the structure of individual proteins in living cells. ...the researchers show how specially modified diamond flakes can be used as nanoscale magnetic field detectors.
These tiny sensors can elucidate the structure of single organic molecules. With nanoscale MRI, researchers may one day be able to directly image proteins and other molecules at the atomic scale.

It would be amazing to trace individual proteins in live cells. For example, we could see how specific medicines work in real time, or how DNA decoding results in signalling, etc.

tags: health, biology, detection, packaged payload, control, science, research

Online tracking: social networking vs analytics

Hi-tech websites seem to use a lot more social networking tracking than business sites (figs below). For example, wired, VBeat, Cnet and other tech-oriented content services are more geared toward generating "buzz", while biz sites use good old spying techniques to sell ads.

 

Tracking on wired.com

(all four major social networks present)

 Tracking on bloomberg.com

(no social tracking but extensive analytic  data collected)

tags: technology, media, control, detection, social, networking, business, model

Invention of the Day: Klystron.

Klystron was one of the first inventions that put Stanford University on the world's map of high technology.

 

On the picture above: The 40-cm. klystron used for the U.S. Army blind landing system before World War II, Stanford University, 1939. In foreground, kneeling, Russell Varian adjusts the tube. Observing, left to right, are Sig Varian, David W. Webster, head of the Physics department, William W. Hansen, and John R. Woodyard, who was responsible for building the model shown. (Sperry Gyroscope Co. Photo)

In the second half of the 1930s, motivated by the growing danger presented by German air force, Russel Varian invented a device that could generate microwaves necessary to detect a plane flying above the clouds.

At the time, Russell knew nothing about the research on pulsed radar then being carried on in secrecy by the military. He began to visualize a system that amounted to an outline of what was later known as Doppler radar. Such a system would need a practical source of short waves. He knew that the generation of short waves by conventional means was limited by the difficulty of building suitable resonant circuits attached to conventional tubes and that at the shorter wavelengths the efficiency of the resonant circuits was very low. He concluded that if practical requirements for generating microwave power were to be met, a new type of resonator would be needed. (IEEE wiki)

According to the 1937 technology licensing agreement  with Stanford, the university got half of the financial returns derived from the original klystron work.

In 1948, two years after the end of the WWII, Varian Associates - one of the first successful Silicon Valley's high-tech firms - was formed. In addition to radar applications, microwave technology was used in TV broadcasts systems,  radio, and long-distance telephone communications.

Remarkably, invention of the klystron was due to what we would call today business model, rather than technological research

In his article, "The $100 Idea," in the February 1976 issue of Spectrum, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Dr. Edward L. Ginzton described the genesis of the klystron invention as "practically a text book demonstration of the validity of 'management of technology.' It demonstrates the wisdom of being 'coupled to the market place' and of identifying societal or market needs rather than merely advancing technology for its own sake."

tags: invention, innovation, patent, detection, packaged payload, history, 4q diagram

Animated picture of the Day.

tags: picture, detection

Quote of the Day: Fish in the water.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"  - David Foster Wallace (source).

 tags: quote, detection

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Medical diagnostics over the phone.

Parkinson’s disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide, causing weakness and tremors, but there's no objective way to detect it early on. Yet. Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little is testing a simple, cheap tool that in trials is able to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy -- in a 30-second phone call.

tags: health, detection, lunchtalk

Predicting people's future locations with mobile data.

MIT Tech Review reports on an algorithm that allows mobile tracking systems to predict our future locations:

Beyond merely tracking where you've been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do.

Researchers in the U.K. have come up with an algorithm that follows your own mobility patterns and adjusts for anomalies by factoring in the patterns of people in your social group (defined as people who are mutual contacts on each other's smartphones).

The method is remarkably accurate. In a study on 200 people willing to be tracked, the system was, on average, less than 20 meters off when it predicted where any given person would be 24 hours later. The average error was 1,000 meters when the same system tried to predict a person's direction using only that person's past movements and not also those of his friends, says Mirco Musolesi, a computer scientist at the University of Birmingham who led the study.

 From a philosophical point of view, in a dense social network one's freedom of the will seems to be quite limited.

tags: social, networking, mobile, detection, control, aboutness

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes.

How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.

Link

tags: history, lunchtalk, detection