cat /proc/claus

Moving out of Tokyo, I suddenly have a lot to write about in my Blog. Many times my Japanese (and sometime international) acquittances made questions about life in Brazil that I dismissed as “not so different from the rest of the world”. However, after 6 years living in Japan and 2 weeks back in Brazil, I started to realize that these questions may actually have interesting answers.

So suddenly I have a lot to talk about. I’m trying also to take pictures of some of these interesting points, but this has been a little difficult since I don’t feel comfortable carrying my big honking camera when walking around by myself (hey, one difference there!). But let’s see what I can do.

I’ll try to provide updates about my life, research and random stuff as well, along with the Life in Brazil discussions. For starters, let me introduce my new living arrangements: The Lego Beach Resort!

I’m living in the 23rd floor of a building with a great view of the bay and the mountains. The neighbourhood has plenty of bars and other shops, and is much cleaner and well kept than I was expecting. The apartment itself has three rooms, a living room and a kitchen, for PLENTY of space. I’m sharing it with Ju, a friend of mine from my Unicamp days. She is also a former Comp.Eng. graduate, which means the apartment is kind of a Nerd Fest, something I was missing since my undergrad days. For example, the living room’s walls are decorated with a Retro Mario theme, and cabling can be seen everywhere. (see the picasa album for more info - with captions!).

The building also has some things of note. First one of its elevators has a creaky wheel or something, so it shakes and make terrible noises all the way up. I took that elevator by mistake on my first day here, and boy I don’t remember being so afraid for my life before (I was kinda enjoying the rush, though).

One particularly Brazilian thing, not only in this building but on the vast majority of apartment buildings in Brazil, is how they have “service” and “social” elevators. On a first look, this might seem a reasonable idea - you would want at least one elevator that should not be used for trash, animals, cargo, etc. However on practice the social and service elevator are the same size, and usually side by side with each other, and reflect on Brazil’s practice of segregating rich people from their servants. Fortunately, newer apartments don’t seem to have service elevators like these anymore, or when they do, it is actually a proper cargo elevator.

Gas is in the tubes, like in Tokyo, but water is heated by electricity - which last I remembered was cheaper in Brasil than gas, due to our hydro plants.

Compared to Tokyo, the rent is indeed cheaper. I’m paying about half what I used to pay in my Tokyo apartment. Considering that I’m sharing the flat, it means that the full rent would be similar to that of my old home. For a much bigger place, in a great location, and with good services. Remember also that Rio is considered to be one of the most expensive cities in Brazil.

Tomorrow my research activities begin. I’ll keep you all posted, and feel free to ask more about my living arrangements in the comments!

In a recent interview, the interviewer asked me to briefly explain my PhD work. While showing him what I did, he intersected “that’s just like Genetic Algorithms, right?” - “Yes, I am actually working on Genetic Algorithms” - “But your curriculum said you worked on “Evolutionary Computation”

…

I can’t really blame him. The field of evolutionary computation (and bioinspired heuristics in general), is plagued by too many “cute/cool” names, such as “Ant Colony Optimization”, “Ant Clustering”, “Memetic Algorithms”, “Queen bee optimization”, “Cat Swarm Optimization”, that often say very little about the technique under them, and less about what other techniques are related.

These names are often the result of well intentioned researchers who want to relate their findings with their inspiration, or who think that a new cool name can bring in more attention, more people and more ideas to the field. But I feel that these names more hinder than help, by making it difficult for people not in the field to have a grasp of what is connected with what, and for people in the field to make sure that what they are doing was not already done by someone else with a different cool name.

Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing has recently discussed the case of Landmark Digital Services (Creators of “Shazam”, an audio fingerprinting tool) threatening a guy who was discussing how to implement an audio-fingerprinting algorithm. To make a long story short, Landmark Digital Services (”Shazam”), accused Roy van Rjin of infringing on their patents by discussing how audio-fingerprinting worked, and is trying to force him to put his blog post down. Go read the above links for more detail.

This is not only a jerk move from the part of Shazam, but it is also a very sad example of how companies use the murky idea of “IP” (Intellectual Property) to try and enforce rights that they DO NOT HAVE.

Recently “Intellectual Property” has been used to put together three very different kinds of laws, whose only thing in common is that they deal with ideas: Copyright Law, Patent Law and Trademark Law. Put very simply, Copyright law describes who has the right to copy a creative work; Patent law describes who has the right to implement and use a certain technical idea; and Trademark Law describes who has the right to use a Brand on a certain service or product.

Now, these laws give very different rights and duties, for very different situations. For example, patent law, which is described here, says that if you have a technical idea (like, how to make a machine), you can give the government a very detailed description of how your idea works, and the government will give you a monopoly of the use of your idea in exchange of explaining to everyone how your idea works. It makes sense, if the working of your patent is not public, how will someone know if they are infringing it or not?

Copyright is almost the opposite - you register your copyright work with the government, and you get a monopoly on copying/distributing your work, in exchange of letting everyone copy/distribute your work for free after a certain time has passed. (And big media companies are trying to cheat us and extend this time indefinitely, but that is another discussion).

Now, what happened in the case of Landmark Digital Services/Shazam is that they are trying to enforce “copyright” rights into their patents. “We have a patent on this idea, so you can’t discuss this idea, or show this idea to anyone!”. If they were alleging that copyright rights were infringed, they would have a case, but the whole point of patents is that everyone is supposed to know, discuss and understand how the given patent work. You can only infringe a patent if you are actually using the patented idea, not talking about it.

This is what happen when we put together all these laws under the same term. We start to think of them as the same. And unethical people will try to rob us of our rights by using this confusion.

* Some more discussion about why “Intellectual Property” should not be used can be seen here.

Small script that might be useful for analysing data. The script takes multiple files (filemask is $1) which are composed of data columns, and produces the average of each data point across the files. Leaving around for future reference.

Usage: $ average.sh “filename.*” > filename.avg

sum=`ls -l $1 | wc -l`
tf=`ls $1 | tail -n 1`
fld=`tail -n 1 $tf | wc -w`

count=1
while [ $count -lt $(($fld + 1)) ]; do
paste -d” ” $1 | nawk -v s=”$sum”\
-v fld=”$fld” -v f=”$count” ‘{
for(i=0;i< =s-1;i++)
{
ta=f + i*fld
tta=tta+$ta
}
print tta/s
tta=0
}' >> tmp$count
count=$(($count + 1))
done
paste -d” ” tmp*
rm tmp*

Bonus points for anyone who can make the above code simpler.

UPDATE: Thanks Pat for the bugfix. Whups.

Two days ago I went to this Nomikai (work-related drinking “parties”) with some industry contacts of my lab. While the nomikai itself was not very exciting (I don’t really like this kind of Japanese event, but that’s for another post), I had a nice little neat idea while chatting there.

One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.

A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times - when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible - a lot of research has been done in both areas.

Now, the idea - how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.

A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome

Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition