As Head-Up Displays Become Common, Distraction Becomes an Issue – The New York Times

To automakers, the technology makes for safer driving because the driver does not need to look down for information. The illuminated graphics, which may be white or colored, are transparent, so that the driver actually looks through them onto the road ahead.But to skeptics, head-up displays are yet another informational distraction for the already data-overloaded driver.

Source: As Head-Up Displays Become Common, Distraction Becomes an Issue – The New York Times

Those of you following my series of posts on data informed engineering, this article should not come as a surprise. It is the working example I have been using all along.

Many more such generic pieces are likely to appear on this topic. But the problem is, no one is quoting any real data driven insights yet.

Car makers say “user feedback has been good”. Skeptics say “it is obviously a distraction”. But what does the the actual telemetry say? I have yet to see any actual data or metrics. So just now we are only stuck in the limbo of he-said-she-said.

When you buy a car a bunch of arcane numbers get thrown at you like mpg here and mpg there, and torque and horsepower and crash rating. But it is mostly around system health metrics. As I have remarked before, similar system health metrics are generated (more or less) no matter who sits in the drivers seat.

But what we really need are driver experience and driver success metrics. And these are likely to be extremely dependent on the type of person behind the wheel. Bring the human into the picture!

Unless we study the impact of these displays on the driving habits of a broad representative selection of real drivers, the jury is really out. And the only way to get those metrics is to deeply instrument the car from a user interaction perspective. Rather than showing me mpg, tell me how many hard brakes that car model experiences per mile driven. Rather than telling me the peak torque, tell me how often that car model runs a red light. Juxtaposition these numbers to well selected control groups. And then let me , as a buyer, make an informed decision.

Sargy Mann: Painting with inner vision

Sargy Mann: Painting with inner vision.

Amazingly inspiring! Just like the fact that Beethoven composed some of his most acclaimed works after he wend deaf at the age of 26.

Inner vision. Inner music. The inner light of the human being.

 

Learning to See Data – NYTimes.com

“Perceptual learning is self-regulated, in the sense that modification occurs without the necessity of external reinforcement. It is stimulus-oriented, with the goal of extracting and reducing”

via Learning to See Data – NYTimes.com.

More technically this is called “unsupervised learning”, and this happens at an especially rapid pace in children. See my past post from first hand experience of seeing my kids learn, and also the follow-on post on the role of supervision.

Unsupervised and supervised learning play an extremely complimentary role. In humans, it also happens to be the case that unsupervised learning happens dominantly at the perceptual/sensory level, while supervision happens typically at a higher cognitive level. There is no mathematical necessity that it should always be on, but this is rather dictated by the “cost” of supervision.  Supervision is vastly more costly than unsupervised learning and so it is invariable better to do it at a higher level (of abstractions, condensed concepts) rather than at the level of elementary signals.

So for example, a violin teacher may supervise her students about how to play a phrase with the right emotion, dynamics and emphasis, and get them all to play it quite similarly over time. But each of her students may “see” or “feel” the notes and their structure in a very personal and quintessential way. This is also the reason some players will learn much faster than other. We attribute this to a natural proclivity to music or a musical instrument, but I think this is more specifically due to the way different people have developed different ability to perceive written and played music, as well as interpret the physical muscular feedback as they play it.

And because this perceptive process is learnt automatically (unsupervised) over time, especially in childhood, music teachers strongly recommend that you keep listening to music (especially the instrument you are learning to play) all the time even when you are doing other stuff. Unconsciously, even as our higher brain is engaged in other tasks, our ears are capturing the sound waves, and our auditory system is creating/strengthening neural networks to process, interpret and represent them internally in more compact form. So then any supervised learning on top of that can happen much more quickly.

Other than genetic inheritance, this is also the reason  why it is more likely that kids of musicians are more likely to be musicians, kids of engineers are more likely to be engineers etc. It is because they are exposed to the raw signals of the field much more often than the general population and hence they have a far better chance of developing expertise in that field.

And this is exactly what the nature vs nurture debate is. Based on evidence from genetics, the “nature” camp likes to associate “talent” with genetic inheritance and calls it an evolutionary artifact. (Some religious minded folks will call it a “god given gift”, which is ironic since a significant portion of religious people tend to be incredulous about Darwinian evolution!) The people in the “nurture” camp will on the other hand use the evidence from studies like this article and say that talent comes from regular exposure and access to the field from a very early age.

The truth is probably that it is a combination of both nature and nurture. But merely stating this almost self-evident fact and then stopping the debate is an intellectual “punt”. We need to find out where exactly is the boundary between  nature and nurture. Is its location different for different fields like art, music, science, engineering, finance, leadership etc? Is the location different for different people? And most importantly, what are the implications of these findings for our education system? This is, after all, not simply an academic debate! By having a perverse and pig headed view of learning and talent development, our education system may be silently condemning millions of kids to drab fulfilling lives!

So this is research that is worth making heavy investment in. High profile scientific projects like exploring our cosmos (space missions) or the nature  of elementary physics (Large Hadron Collider) or charting the human genome, are expensive and high profile projects, and yes they are indeed worthwhile in my opinion. However, understanding the human mind, and how it learns, is an equally important project, and we do not see much visibility given to that. (There is still a “vodoo” aura to psychological sciences, which needs to be dispelled.)

To our current knowledge, the human mind (and I am purposely not using the word “brain”) is the most beautiful and complex structure in the universe. It is worth charting out that territory in detail!

 

 

 

List of Physical Visualizations

List of Physical Visualizations.

A mind boggling variety of physical visualizations.

With the advent of 3D-printing I think people can renew their interest in physical art like sculpture and architecture, and appreciate the embedding important data into day to day objects. For example, you could create a sculpture visualizing how your children have grown over the years (height, weight, important events, achievements) and put it in your living room!

We tend to reminisce on memories only via photos and videos, but in their digital form they are  not quite accessible. (That is why Polaroid photos had such appeal – they were instantly available in your hand!).  What if we could embed memories around us in objects that we can see and touch and feel, even taste and smell? What if, on your marriage anniversary, you are greeted by the sights and sounds from your honeymoon by the sea –  you can hear the waves, you can touch the sand, and can taste the Margarita?

This is actually the reason why we bring back souvenirs from our trips. Now, with the advent of technology, using the data gathered on trips, we can create  our own souvenirs, and relive our memories at will.

Start-up, anyone?

 

Research Blog: A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images

Research Blog: A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images.

Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software – NYTimes.com

Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software – NYTimes.com.

“I consider the pixel data in images and video to be the dark matter of the Internet,” said Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the research with Andrej Karpathy, a graduate student. “We are now starting to illuminate it.”

…

But “just single object recognition is not very beneficial,” said Ali Farhadi, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who has published research on software that generates sentences from digital pictures. “We’ve focused on objects, and we’ve ignored verbs,” he said, adding that these programs do not grasp what is going on in an image.

The Bionic Human

The idea of the bionic human has been around for a long time, especially in Hollywood movies. Robocop, Iron man, … . What is emphasized in these depictions is how the brute strength of the hero is multiplied by mechanical means. Iron man can fly, Robocop can nonchalantly brave bullets. But what I have never seen truly well illustrated is how a human’s mental powers are multiplied by artificial means, and his senses are sharpened by external sensors. In some sense that would be even more revolutionary and dramatic.

Lets do a thought experiment. Our skin is an extremely sensitive organ especially on the face and hands. Suppose we develop a type of clothing that produces a sensation of pressure or heat based on some supplied numerical value at various points on the skin. And suppose these numeric values were fed in in real time by sensors spread over some geographic area over wireless links (nothing SciFi here, all eminently possible today). What would the wearer of that piece of clothing feel? Suppose the sensors were temperature readings, then would the wearer feel the city temperature map as a whole? Suppose the sensors record car or house break-in alarms, then would the wearer feel the city crime map in real time? If the wearer was a cop how much more efficient could he become by this type of continuous information feed?

One thing to keep in mind is the human brain’s enormous plasticity.
It is well ddocumented how blind people can “see” based on reflections of sounds they make by clicking or tapping their canes. They literally repurpose their visual cortex to process the audio signals and learn to make sense of them. In another interesting experiment, if a person wears a visual helmet that inverts his view upside down then amazingly enough, after initial stumbles and disorientation, the wearer learns to make sense of the new inputs and ultimately is able to easily do tasks like driving or riding a bicycle.
Given this evidence I wonder how we will learn to process copious IOT data that is fed into and interfaced with our senses or perhaps even directly into our brain? How will we see, feel and experience the world then?

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Finding the Visible in the Invisible

Finding the Visible in the Invisible.

Cool video on motion magnification. I had seen this first hand at a demo in MIT a few years back, where you stand infront of a mirror and it reads your pulse. But to take any generic video and see the minute motions in it magnified is really very cool. I can imagine a hundred diagnostic uses of this, in medicine, mechanical engineering, architecture and so on.