Sunday, August 20, 2006

Organizations Death and Life

Hello,
This post is gonna be boring, I don't even know how to start it.
Anyway, it is about how organizations die, and how they keep living. It's gonna cover a small part of leadership aspects.
Well, you are a leader of an organization, you have a vision, you have a goal which you have created that organization for. You see that goals clearly, you know what should be carried out to achive it. You have got 'employees', although I wouldn't prefer that term for NGOs (non-govermenta organizations) and volunteer organizations but I don't know what they call them in those, maybe members?
Anyway, you have had circumstances and left that organization, there will be 2 scenarios. The first one, the organization falls, and the second one the organization keeps workin fine and maybe outcome your own expectations or visions. You as a leader did compare what's happening to your vision, and telling ppl what to do. After you leave, they won't be able to continue without your vision and directions. So you can not leave them and take your vision away with you. You can't just depend on yourself and no one else in thinking and giving orders. You have to make EVERY member see you vision exactly (or even better) like you see it. Actually, no member should have joined until he sees the vision and BELIEVE in it and live for it, this is the only way for your organization to stay up, from the smallest NGO to the government it self. This shall keep government employees from taking bribes or from dropping effecient ppl for 'wasta' or so. Because they care about the success and achivement of the goal that they see and believe in.
My words are not just for leaders, it is for 'employees' too, don't join an organization unless you know,believe, and live for its goal, or your will be a useless member and don't deserver your salary (if the organization gives salary). And for leaders, appreciate who beleives and makes the most good for the organization. Healty organizations for you ;).

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Remember how your memory works

I was thinking about Neurel networks and memory an human brain. And about how humans can remeber stuff. You can easily remember stuff in your short-term memory. But remembering sruff that is not in it, requires a stimulus. In my perception (I don't know whether it is right or wrong), you can do so cuz you can make a loop on all the stuff in your short-term memory cuz it is small enough. But your long-term memory have incridible amount of data, as proven a human never forgets anything, you remember every smell every event every picture, even if you saw it for less than a second, you just don't know that. So it is impossible to traverse it unless the part you are traversing are well structured (from understanding), or from a stimulus from the short memory. To see that, see what you do when you try to remember something, you always try to remember something you aculally remember then see if that recalls something, if not, you remember the second thing and so on, till you find what you want to remember or you fail.
I am still thinking, what that have to do with a neural netword representation ? I don't think it is simple as simple recursive neural networks. As in NERO game (http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/NERO/about.html) skills are encoded in the neural netword structure. What is the difference between skills and knowledge in the storage context ?
Another thing, neural networks and genetic algorithms have united in that game (and long time before it too, that game's just testing modifying the net structure not just the weights), but I think there must be a way to involve SWARM in a more sophisticated way to enhance learning. I am also thinking about some informed neuroevolving agorithm, not only making offsprings by random mutations and combinations, but by have an insight about the neural network way of working, although humans don't know it yet; a neural network, in my perception, is just a big generic boolean formula.
This is all ideas of research, which I hope it wasn't made before.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Programming riddle 1

I have needed to do this for a topcode.com problem, the problem was to rotate an integer, so 78 becomes 87 and 40098 becomes 984. I have sloved it (numerically, not as string). But I am gonna give you a part of it to solve, get me the highest significant digit. In 78639 the highest signigicant digit is 7. It is the left most one. Anyone have an idea :) ?
You are to solve it numerically, not by converting it to string and getting the first character.

(hint: highlight the text to see the hint
consider using logarithms
)

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Is this called a chat bot or it is more complex 1

The Arab OS now is at the phase where it is ready to integrate with a memory manager and a process manager. So since the memory manager phase are somohow separated from the previous bootstrap phase, I decided to have a break from the OS for now (it have been a month and a half, I think). I am some how considering a new name, since ArabOS is just a development name, I thought about ArOS, what do you think ?
Anyway, in the break I have been interested in a new field, Natural Language Understanding. After I have seen a Question Answering System (QAS) in the ESEA Job Fair. Not all NLP applications are NLU, in my perception. Anyway, I thought about an application that can learn by itself from the web, or from you, and you can ask it for information, and personal opinions, and exchange jokes, and you can give it orders, like open that media player, play that song, or if it is a robot, move that TV, etc. I don't think this is just a chatter bot. chatter bots techniques are somewhat hardcoded answers or behaviours for certain patterns. There is A.L.I.C.E chatter bot, which depends on a large XML database of hardcoded-templated answers which he chooses an answer at random (it seems good at low level of complexity in the input). There is also encarta@conversagent.com which depends on an SDK which maps behaviour to certain templates.
Anyway, a chatter bot is desgined for making coversations, it won't be able to summerize information on its own. But an information retrieval application can like http://start.csail.mit.edu. Although that 'Start' can make very basic context tracking and a dialog answering skills, it is not in the same level as the previous too; it is not much of information retrieval system as it is of a QAS. Information retrieval (or information extraction), in my perception, is more complex than a QAS. It is the same difference between "get me info about cooperation between Masers and Lasers, and the relation between those and the hypersymmetry theory", and "how can Masers and Lasers cooperate?".
In the Artificial Intelligence, structures and strategies for complex problem solving, George F. Luger, chapter 13, "understanding natural languge"; it mentioned that SHRDLU block world's application have showed that a 100% knowledge of the world, can make natural language communication possible.

to be continued...