Asimov in Modern Science

Today I've read about PHRIENDS project. Funded by EU (2.16 € million), PHRIENDS tries to force robots to respect Asimov's laws. Asimov seems to be a great scientific since even his most futuristic ideas are influencing the actual science.

I spent a great part of my adolescence reading Asimov's books and dreaming about intelligent robots that make use of the 3 laws. Now, it seems that, sometime, I could even work with a robot that implements those laws and that is so cool... :D


P.D: For Spanish speakers, I've posted a larger post about the project in my spanish scientific blog.

Usama Fayyad quits Yahoo

Before joining Yahoo!, Dr. Usama Fayyad worked 5 years in Microsoft Research and building data mining solutions for Microsoft's servers division. From 1989 to 1996, Usama held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where. In 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine Inc. (now Revenue Science Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company.

Dr. Fayyad has been in Yahoo! for more than 4 years, being chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions. From that position , Fayyad has been the responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, the Yahoo!'s architecting data policies and systems, and the manager of Yahoo!'s data analytics and data processing infrastructure.

On June 12, New York Times Bits reported that

Mr. Fayyad told his staff yesterday that he would be leaving and his departure is expected to be officially announced later today. Mr. Fayyad was the data guru at Yahoo, the person in charge of mining the terabytes of data collected by the company to improve things like the targeting of ads and content to Yahoo users. He was also in charge of Yahoo’s well-respected research organization.

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro reported in KDnuggets some interesting words from Usama Fayyad, where he says it is a good time to quit Yahoo! as his team will be able to continue his work. Usama seems to want starting a new company taking advantage of his data mining knowledges and the huge vision about Internet, search, advertising and the future of interactive media that Yahoo! has offered to him.

With this announcement, Usama joins to many other Yahoo! execs that are actually trying to "run away" from Yahoo!.

The Discipline of Machine Learning

Tom Mitchell is one of the key personalities of Machine Learning discipline. He has been working in this area since the end of the 70's, published some reference ML textbooks and, first of all, he is the head of the first Machine Learning department all around the world.

In 2006, when he was "fighting" for the creation of the ML department at the Carnegie Mellon University, he was said that "you can only have a department if you have a discipline that is going to be here in one hundred years otherwise you can not have a department". For stating that ML would last more that a hundred years, he wrote a white paper, "The Discipline of Machine Learning", that is a real must-read paper for all the people interested in ML. The abstract of the paper states

Over the past 50 years the study of Machine Learning has grown from the efforts of a handful of computer engineers exploring whether computers could learn to play games, and a field of Statistics that largely ignored computational considerations, to a broad discipline that has produced fundamental statistical-computational theories of learning processes, has designed learning algorithms that are routinely used in commercial systems for speech recognition, computer vision, and a variety of other tasks, and has spun off an industry in data mining to discover hidden regularities in the growing volumes of online data. This document provides a brief and personal view of the discipline that has emerged as Machine Learning, the fundamental questions it addresses, its relationship to other sciences and society, and where it might be headed.

Tom also gave a speech related to this matter at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department in March 2007. You can watch Mitchell's speech in this video.

Interviews

Some interesting interviews to important people from DM&ML communities. Thanks to VideoLectures for hosting all that interesting stuff.

Dr. Usama Fayyad is responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data analytics and data processing infrastructure.




Tom Mitchell is the first Chair of Department of the first Machine Learning Department in the World, based at Carnegie Mellon.




Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ph.D. is the President of KDnuggets, which provides research and consulting services in the areas of data mining, knowledge discovery, bioinformatics, and business analytics