Category: Technology

Facebook/Orkut are Tribal Societies

This NYT article argues that the use of social networks like facebook or orkut is similar to social customs that existed among humans during tribal times. Excerpt:

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

Read full article. Quite interesting.

Get a degree via mobile phone

Now a university in Japan is offering courses over cell phones:

The lectures are shown as a streaming video on the handset, with text and images appearing on the screen. The professor’s voice can be heard in the background. In a demonstration Wednesday, an image on the pyramids popped up on the screen and changed to a text image as a voice played from the handset speakers. Ancient Egyptians would be mystified and willing to trade any pyramid for such wondrous technology.

See full article.

Komli offers Rs. 2,00,000 for your algorithm

Pune based startup Komli (which recently introduced the very intriguing service PubMatic) has just announced an algorithm contest, with 2 Lakh Rupees as the prize. It’s certainly a very innovative way to get a solution to your business problems, and potential recruits too.

Details:

Komli lives in the world of online advertising, and online advertising is rife with opportunity with complex algorithms based on cutting edge topics such as machine learning, data mining, graph theory, etc. Online advertising is growing at a very fast pace, and the number of variables affecting the performance of an online ad has been growing at an even faster pace. Komli is devising methods for maximizing the yield of online advertising using advanced statistical machine learning methods over large-scale systems. This is a very interesting and complex algorithm problem.

Komli is currently using a set of algorithms for maximizing the yield of online ads, collectively called ‘Yin-Yang’. There are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to Yin-Yang that have yet to be tried. Komli is interested in determining if any of these alternative approaches can beat Yin-Yang by making better predictions.

Komli will provide participants with anonymous ad impression data and a prediction accuracy bar that is 50% better than what Yin-Yang can do on the same training data set. Participants’ solutions will be judged by ‘Time complexity’ and ‘Space complexity’ criteria. The participant whose solution works best will receive Rs. 2,00,000, bragging rights and an opportunity to work with Komli. Of course, participants have to share their method and code with Komli. Eager participants can signup for the contest by filling the form on the left.

See full article. Mukul who runs engineering for Komli is a friend of mine, and I had recently talked to him about their technology. I found it to be extremely interesting and it sounded quite challenging.