Quantum Computing: Who Sent the Memo? Who Read It?
May 12, 2022
I read “America Is Losing the Quantum Race with China.” Interesting because Google claimed “quantum supremacy” in 2019. NASA helped out the Google, and I wonder if the author of the Newsweek article got the memo. Then, as I recall, an IBM blog took a positive view of Google’s PR play, but in 2021 fired up its marketing system and announced it had achieved quantum supremacy (whatever this term means).
Okay, what’s the story? Is it IBM, Google, or the mysterious and semi-questionable Chinese?
The Newsweek story designed to strike fear into the hearts of those who care about keeping encrypted messaging encrypted learned:
Quantum computing, a form of high-speed calculation at the subatomic level conducted at extraordinarily cold temperatures, will bring computers to speeds barely imaginable today. Atoms, photons and electrons that operate beyond the classical laws of physics and in the realm of “quantum” can be harnessed for extraordinary computing power. Complex problems that once took years to solve could take seconds. And that means everything we know about cybersecurity—every lock secured by current encryption methods—could get blown wide open.
Yikes.
What’s the solution? Teaching American students to make change, avoid the plague of innumeracy as one expert called being sort of stupid, and reading books, not TikTok hashtags?
Here’s the fix:
President Biden’s recent moves will better coordinate our government’s efforts to prevent this nightmare scenario, by bringing federal agencies and critical infrastructure companies together to address quantum threats. It also brings the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee under White House control.
Sounds like a plan. However, with US firms already quantumly supreme is a committee necessary? And if the US methods fall short of the mark, there’s always PR. TikTok videos are much more important than wrestling with a differential equation.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2022
Kyndi: Advanced Search Technology with Quanton Methods. Yes, Quonton
April 29, 2022
One of my newsfeeds spit out this story: “Kyndi Unveils the Kyndi Natural Language Search Solution – Enables Enterprises to Discover and Deliver the Most Relevant and Precise Contextual Business Information at Unprecedented Speed.” The Kyndi founders appear to be business oriented, not engineering focused. The use of jargon like natural language understanding, contextual information, artificial intelligence, software robots, explainable artificial intelligence, and others is now almost automatic as if generated by smart software, not people who have struggled to make content processing and information retrieval work for users.
The firm’s Web site does not provide much detail about the technical pl8umbing for the company’s search and retrieval system. I took a quick look at the firm’s patents and noted these. I have added bold face to highlight some of the interesting words in these documents.
- A method using Birkhoff polytopes and Landau numbers. See US11205135 “Quanton [sic] Representation for Emulating Quantum-lie Computation on Classical Processors,” granted December 21, 2021. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
- A method employing combinatorial hyper maps. See US10985775 “System and Method of Combinatorial Hypermap Based Data Representations and Operations,” Granted April 20, 2021. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia. (As a point of interest the document Includes the word bijectively.)
- A method making use of Q-Medoids and Q-Hashing. See US10747740 “Cognitive Memory Graph Indexing, Storage and Retrieval,” granted August 18, 2020. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in San Mateo, California.
- A method using Semantic Boundary Indices and a variant of the VivoMind* Analogy Engine. See US10387784 “Technical and Semantic Signal Processing in Large, Unstructured Data Fields,” granted August 20, 2019. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia. *VivoMind was a company started my Arun Majumdar prior to his relationship with Kyndi.
- A method using rvachev functions and transfinite interpolations. See US10372724 “Relativistic Concept Measuring System for Data Clustering,” granted August 6, 2019. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
- A method using Clifford algebra. See US10120933 “Weighted Subsymbolic Data Encoding,” granted November 6, 2018. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
The inventor is not listed on the firm’s Web site. Mr. Majumdar’s contributions are significant. The chief technology officer is Dan Gartung, who is a programmer and entrepreneur. However, there does not seem to be an observable link among the founders, the current CTO, and Mr. Majumdar.
The company will have to work hard to capture mindshare from companies like Algolia (now working to reinvent enterprise search), Mindbreeze, Yext, and X1 (morphing into an eDiscovery system it seems), among others. Kyndi has absorbed more than $20 million plus in venture funding, but a competitor like Lucidworks has captured in the neighborhood of $200 million.
It is worth noting that one facet of the firm’s marketing is to hire the whiz kids from a couple of mid tier consulting firms to explain the firm’s approach to search. It might be a good idea for the analysts from these firms to read the Kyndi patents and determine how the Vivomind methods have been updated and applied to the Kyndi product. A bit of benchmarking might be helpful. For example, my team uses a collection of Google patents and indexes them, runs tests queries, and analyzes the result sets. Almost incomprehensible specialist terminology is one thing, but solid, methodical analysis of a system’s real life performance is another. Precision and recall scores remain helpful, particularly for certain content; for example, pharma research, engineered materials, and nuclear physics.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2022
System Glitches: A Glimpse of Our Future?
April 4, 2022
I read “Nearly All Businesses Hit by IT Downtime Last Year – Here’s What’s to Blame.” The write up reports:
More than three-quarters (75%) of businesses experienced downtime in 2021, up 25% compared to the previous year, new research has claimed. Cybersecurity firm Acronis polled more than 6,200 IT users and IT managers from small businesses and enterprises in 22 countries, finding that downtime stemmed from multiple sources, with system crashes (52%) being the most prevalent cause. Human error (42%) was also a major issue, followed by cyber attacks (36%) and insider attacks (20%).
Interesting. A cyber security company reports these data. The cyber security industry sector should know. Many of the smart systems have demonstrated that those systems are somewhat slow when it comes to safeguarding licensees.
What’s the cause of the issue?
There are “crashes.” But what’s a crash. Human error. Humans make mistakes and most of the software systems with which I am familiar are dumb: Blackmagic ATEM software which “forgets” that users drag and drop. Users don’t intuitively know to put an image one place and then put that image another so that the original image is summarily replaced. Windows Defender lights up when we test software from an outfit named Chris. Excel happily exports to PowerPoint but loses the format of the table when it is pasted. There are USB keys and Secure Digital cards which just stop working. Go figure. There are enterprise search systems which cannot display a document saved by a colleague before lunch. Where is it? Yeah, good question. In the indexing queue maybe? Oh, well, perhaps tomorrow the colleague will get the requested feedback?
My takeaway from the write up is that the wild and crazy, helter skelter approach to software and some hardware has created weaknesses, flaws, and dependencies no one knows about. When something goes south, the Easter egg hunt begins. A dead Android device elicits button pushing and the hope that the gizmo shows some signs of life. Mostly not in my experience.
Let’s assume the research is correct. The increase noted in the write up means that software and systems will continue to degrade. What’s the fix? Like many things — from making a government bureaucracy more effective to having an airline depart on time — seem headed on a downward path.
My take is that we are getting a glimpse of the future. Reality is very different from the perfectly functioning demo and the slick assertions in a PowerPoint deck.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2022
Nudge, Nudge: Internet of Things Leads to the Internet of Behavior
March 23, 2022
By now most of us are aware that our search and social-media histories are used to fine-tune the targeted marketing that comes our way. But did you know the Internet of Things also contributes marketing intel? ReadWrite examines “The Developing Internet of Behavior Technology and its Applications.” Yes, the IoT has led to the IoB because of course it did. Writer Dronacharya Dave reports:
“A device such as a smartphone can easily track and note a user’s movements and obtain their real-time geographical positions. With the help of advanced technologies, companies can connect smartphones to devices like cameras, laptops, and voice assistants. Today, smartphones can even record the text and voice of the users. In addition, brands can get information about the users with the help of IoB, such as likes, dislikes, and interests. … Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Behavior (IoB) together can provide a lot of important information to the companies for making better decisions related to their marketing and branding efforts.”
One might be surprised by the data that can be garnered from connected gadgets. Naturally there is personal data, like name, gender, IP address, and browser cookies. Engagement data answers whether a user favors communication through texting, email, mobile apps, or social media. Behavioral data includes purchase history, product usage information, and qualitative data like mouse movements. Finally, attitudinal data reports factors like consumer satisfaction, product desirability, and purchase criteria. This seems like a lot of information to surrender for the ability to count steps or preheat one’s oven on the ride home. The write-up tells us how companies get their hands on this data:
“The data and information from the consumers are collected from different websites, sensors, telematics, beacons, social media platforms, health monitors (like Fitbit), and others. Each of these collects additional data from consumers while indulging in doing online activities. Everything is captured by the IoB technology, from the time spent online to all that a user searches for. For example, with the application of IoB, websites can capture the information on the amount of time spent by the customers while searching the website. This data can be highly profitable for the marketing and advertising activities if analyzed accurately.”
The post examines ways marketing departments can make the most of this data and supplies a couple of examples. It also gives an obligatory nod to the risk involved—that bad actors could get their hands on this trove of user data if companies’ security measures are at all lacking. But surely every company is on top of cybersecurity best practices, right?
Cynthia Murrell, March 23, 2022
Software Bloat: Why Popular Now?
March 8, 2022
I think I spotted four references to a January 2022 write up called “Why (Enterprise) Software Is Bloated.” The write up states:
People are often baffled why enterprise software is slow, uses lots of memory, and is generally a pain to work with.
Those characteristics did in a number of outfits whose marketing assertions were essentially science fiction. Examples? Delphes, Entopia, and Fast Search & Transfer. There are other examples as well, but the companies share a common human failing: Describing the future instead of building a product that delivers the future.
Overall, the article highlights some answers to the big Why?
Among the reasons I remember are:
- It is easier to build and just wait until the low code or no code “revolution” upends one’s organic coffee
- Companies want to start selling, presumably to keep funding sources happy and to get cash to hire people who can write what the art history major in marketing put in a slide deck
- Companies want to sell maintenance contracts which are an attempt to shift to a subscription service for some activities
- Companies have specific needs. With each sale the “enterprise software” becomes a suit tailored for someone with class (maybe Prince Andrew?)
- Partners get the job of making the enterprise software work. That can be exciting.
- Software development as it is practiced today in inherently complex and its DNA includes unexpected issues.
I have a different take on the subject. Let’s be contrarian.
REASON 1: No one cares about the product. The focus is on telling a story, getting cash (either from a funding source or from a customer).
REASON 2: Staff are unable to make the product work in a way that solves a customer problem the customer expected the system to solve.
REASON 3: Shifting responsibility and blame. Yep, integrators, certified partners, college pals looking for something new to sell, and so on.
REASON 4: The short cut technologies (open source, the cloud, and no or low code methods) are too time consuming and costly to make work like that slide deck said they would.
REASON 5: Demand for services may be slowing. See “Service Side of US Economy Grew in February at Alowest Pace in a Year, ISM Shows.”
Is there a way out of this quagmire of enterprise software? Sure, just hire a wizard, attend conferences, and update the slide deck. Alternatively demand more and look for lower cost options.
Now the Why? Enterprise software customers are finally making a feeble attempt to get vendors to do better because money… Will it work? The answer is in the next enterprise software vendor’s slide deck.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2022
How to Be Happy the Microsoft Way: Endorsed by the Harvard Business Review?
February 25, 2022
I read a fascinating article about being happy. “A Microsoft Exec Says Tech, Not People, Makes Employees Really Happy” recycles an article from the estimable Harvard Business Review published an article titled “In a Hybrid World, Your Tech Defines Employee Experience.” I want to be upfront. I find most of the information in the HBR focused on authors hawking some type of consulting expertise. The outputs in the HBR acted like a magnet on blue chip consulting firms. Getting an article in the HBR was the equivalent of getting Elvis Presley to throw a perspiration tinged scarf to an adoring fan.
According to the source recycling the HRB information about being happy, I noted these statements of Delphic grade insight minus the blood of a dove, a goat, and possibly a misbehaving acolyte.
- Employee experiences are defined by technology.
- Technology and workplace tools are the new workplace. [HBR apparently likes this type of repetition]
- “Technology is “becoming central in attracting and retaining new talent, fostering workplace culture, creating productivity, and more.”
I want to offer some of my personal happy experiences with Microsoft technology:
- Updates which kill functions; for example, a system cannot print. This makes me happy for sure.
- Posturing about security when the vulnerabilities spawned by Microsoft software thrill bad actors each and every day.
- Microsoft Word’s remarkable ability to move images in delightful ways.
- The shallow spidering of the just so wonderful Bing content processing system.
- Rumors and allegations about Bill Gates and his interesting interactions with other Microsoft professionals
- A foldable phone with weird performance characteristics for two-screeners with good eyes
- Microsoft WiFi hardware which a Softie told me, “Doesn’t work.”
- Meaningless features in a screen capture utility
- Did I mention Exchange Server vulnerabilities? Yeah.
- And Teams for those using a Mac without a Microsoft 365 subscription. That’s a thrill.
I recall one meeting at which a senior Softie took an iPhone from an employee in a meeting with lots of people in the audience. I recall the baffled looks on the faces of Microsoft Research experts when I asked for a show of hands for those who were familiar with Kolmogorov’s approach to probability. No hands went up. Bummer. I recall a mobile meeting in which I was told, “Mobiles will never have multiple radios.”
Ah, memories.
But the HBR write up explains that my experiences would make me happier via technology.
Yeah, right. Thoughts from the Microsoft person who pointed the finger at a 1,000 engineers directed by a nation state to compromise Citadel Windows. Yep, that person.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2022
New York Times May Be Embracing the High School Science Club Management Method
February 10, 2022
I read “New York Times Opposes Tech Staff Push to Organize.” The write up from the always-objective outfit owned by the esteemed information kingpin Rupert Murdoch reports:
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, said the company didn’t voluntarily recognize a technology union because it would be ‘an unproven experiment with lasting implications.’”
The Guardian reported in “Leaked Messages Reveal New York Times’ Aggressive Anti-Union Strategy” stated on February 1, 2022:
Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of the New York Times Company, wrote a memo on 19 January circulated to staff titled “Why a Tech Union Isn’t Right for Us” on the tech workers’ union election at XFun, the group within the New York Times responsible for product development operations. “In short, we don’t believe unionizing in XFun is the right move. But that’s not because I’m anti-union,” said Kopit Levien. In the memo, Kopit Levien cited the origin of the XFun group and its growth, and attributed any disconnect workers might be feeling to working apart during the pandemic. She also cited Wirecutter’s union as a warning sign for unionization.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, the Manhattan centric dust up is amusing. We have the Gray Lady, who wants to expand its online subscription business, reduce costs via adoption of smart software, and a staff of professional who are quite sharp. One might say really woke.
My hypothesis is:
- Workers are divided into classes; that is, the “real” journalists and the others.
- The others sense that they are like Google marketing and legal professionals: Down the management crafted totem pole.
- The union effort is one way to try and put up a Chinese wall so that jobs can be defended. (If the wall is like the nifty one in China, it will demonstrate the skills of those who built it. You have to respect that Chinese wall even though it is tough to ride a horse from Point A to Point B on the top of the wall.)
The result is that the traditional publishing wants its class structure. It wants to be digitally hip as the XFun vivifies. However, the others are not in the game plan.
So far New York Times’ management team have taken decisions which remind me of the moves employed by Facebook- and Google-like outfits in Silicon Valley. The shallowness of the approach creates drama.
Drama makes news. News is good. The publicity may not be so beneficial. The lasting implications, however, may be great for the not-real-journalists. Despite snappy podcasts, “real” journalists may not be able to select, optimize, and maintain the smart systems the Gray Lady wants and needs. Talking about technology is not the same as doing technology in my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2022
What Speed Brings
February 7, 2022
People, especially senior citizens, love to proclaim that the Internet is ruining personal relationships, eroding communication and participation, and destroying society. While society will continue to stand, the old fogies might be right about the ruination of participation and communication. The Guardian has an interesting and startling article titled: “Faster Internet Speeds Linked To Lower Civic Engagement In UK.”
Faster internet might be a detriment to society, because a recent study from Cardiff University and Sapienza University discovered that when people had faster Internet they engaged less with political parties, trade unions, and volunteering. Ironically faster Internet did not impact interactions with family or friends. The joint university study found that faster Internet speeds reduced civic engagement among 450,000 people. That is more than double of Great Britain’s Conservative party.
While one cannot trust the polarization of media and the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet does bring attention to civic-centered actions whether that be positive or negative. With that in mind, one would think that people would engage more in civic duties. Faster Internet speeds, however, mean faster access to entertainment and increase the instant gratification syndrome.
Faster Internet might decrease social engagement according to this study, but others found the opposite:
“The study’s authors have also speculated that the phenomenon may have helped fuel populism as people’s involvement with initiatives for “the common good”, which they say are effectively “schools of democracy” where people learn the benefit of cooperation, has declined.
Other studies have shown that social media engagement has strengthened other kinds of civic engagement, for example by helping to organize protests and fuelling an interest in politics, even if it does not manifest in traditional forms of participation.However, politics conducted online has been found to be more susceptible to “filter bubbles”, which limit participants’ exposure to opposing views and so foster polarization.”
The study did take the Covid-19 pandemic into consideration, because it limited civic involvement. Bonding with family and friends grows with faster Internet speeds and current communication trends, but people’s understanding of the importance of civic duties. Economic activity and how democratic institutions function suffer. What is the solution to repair that?
Whitney Grace, February 5, 2022
Machine Learning: Compare and Contrast
February 2, 2022
For machine learning pros looking to choose a framework, Analytics India Magazine examines one of the most prominent options alongside a new contender in, “TensorFlow Vs PyCaret: A Comparison of Machine Learning Frameworks.” The article takes us through an informative juxtaposition of the two open source frameworks, but it looks like neither option overwhelmingly comes out on top. Writer Sreejani Bhattacharyya begins:
“As companies are deploying more and more machine learning models into their systems, a variety of frameworks (some open-source, some not) have come up over the years to make this deployment faster and more efficient. Some of the popular frameworks include TensorFlow, Amazon SageMaker, IBM Watson Studio, Google Cloud AutoML, and Azure Machine Learning Studio, among others. Tensorflow, by far, takes one of the top spots when it comes to machine learning frameworks that technologists depend on. Recently, PyCaret, a low-code machine learning library in Python, has also become increasingly popular among ML practitioners. Let us take a look at how both of them work and what makes them different from each other.”
Bhattacharyya reminds us Google-developed TensorFlow recently celebrated its sixth birthday. At first it was designed for internal Googler use, but was later released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Since then, a wealth of tools and libraries have grown up around the framework. TensorFlow works with several programming languages, including Python, C++, JavaScript, and Java and can be run on multiple CPUs and GPUs running macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, or 64-bit Linux. The most recent version 2.7.0 improved several features, like debugging, public convolution, and data service auto-sharding.
So why even consider a newcomer like PyCaret, which launched just last November? Code efficiency. We learn:
“Also open source in nature, PyCaret is a low-code machine learning library in Python. It helps data scientists perform end-to-end experiments efficiently. It allows them to move from preparing data to deploying their model within minutes. … Pycaret is rising in popularity in comparison to other ML libraries, as it provides an alternate low-code library that can perform complex machine learning tasks with only a few lines of code. It is built around several machine learning libraries and frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, Microsoft LightGBM, and spaCy, among others.”
The write-up goes on to describe the working areas of each framework and concludes with a summary of the advantages of each. In a nutshell, TensorFlow excels in performance, scalability, and library management. PyCaret has the edge in productivity and being business-ready. Bhattacharyya found both easy to deploy. Both of these ML frameworks are good options—the choice really comes down to one’s needs and preferences.
Cynthia Murrell, February 2, 2022
Opinion Shaping Shifts into High Gear
January 25, 2022
Two interesting opinion shaping initiatives caught my attention. Both are based on digital constructions but will make use of fuddy duddy print and television as warranted. Let’s look at each quickly and then step back and figure out what’s the context of the two activities.
The first is explained in two write ups. The first is “The UK Government Is Reportedly Preparing a PR Blitz against End-to-End Encryption.” The idea is that making it more difficult to access a British citizen’s messages is not a good idea. There are nuances, of course. Certain government agencies want ASCII, easy access, and real time content pipes. A related story is “UK Government Readies Anti-Encryption Publicity Campaign to ‘Keep Children Safe’ Online.” One cannot argue with the keep children safe angle. Who doesn’t want that? In order to achieve “safe,” it is necessary to have access to user content; for example, actors messages sent via Threema, the Swiss messaging system.
The second initiative is explained in “Big Tech Foes Launch Campaign Style Initiative to Push for Antitrust Legislation.” The idea here is that some wealthy people are concerned about big tech. Did big tech make these concerned individuals wealthy? Well, that’s another issue. The push is designed to build support for clipping the wings of outfits which are not doing what the big tech foes find acceptable. The idea is to use the Fancy Dan methods of political campaigns, ad agencies, and big tech to get this antitrust breakup thing done.
Here’s my take on these two initiatives:
- Both are very upfront propaganda initiatives. Each is designed to result in changes to technology. Technology has been the lead dog for too long. Now the humans are going to use technology to put the lead dogs in the kennel.
- The pivot for each is the elimination of negative capabilities like social media or encryption. Tech is bad; change is needed.
- The initiatives are likely to further fractionalize discussions of the issues sucked into these quite visible programs. There’s nothing like starting a discussion with one side asking, “Are you in favor of child abuse?”
Net net: These are externalizing activities and make clear that methods once kept under wraps are now on public display. Good or bad? It depends on how one answers those tough questions?
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2022
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