This is cool. He discusses the concept of contracting and subcontracting for building houses and puts it into the perspective of sattelites and task allocation. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/339034/1.hasCoversheetVersion/jvdhorst_thesis.pdf
Ascending auctions and Bounties
So, what if we think of bounties as an ascending auction? The idea is that we have a bunch of tasks that we are auctioning off. Multiple agents can bid on a task (going after the task) at the same time. They win the auction by successfully completing the task. Like in bounties the price… Continue reading Ascending auctions and Bounties
Roots of Branching Processes
In branching processes you can find the probability of the system going extinct by finding the roots of the polynomial where the coefficients are the probabilities and the exponents are the number generated. The smallest root between 0 and 1 will be the answer. What do the other roots mean? Basically the root corresponds to… Continue reading Roots of Branching Processes
Neural Nets and Agent Hierarchy
So, the idea is that what if we have a hierarchy where some of the agents in the hierarchy have multiple supperiors. Then the underlying gets tasks from both its superiors. How does it learn how much weight to put on each of the tasks. How does it know which to do first? I think… Continue reading Neural Nets and Agent Hierarchy
blackhat
https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/archives.html#android-fakeid-vulnerability-walkthrough https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/archives.html#cloudbots-harvesting-crypto-coins-like-a-botnet-farmer https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/archives.html#hacking-the-wireless-world-with-software-defined-radio-2-0 https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/archives.html#miniaturization Some interesting blackhat talks.
Android exploits
I was just at a seminar on “Automated Detection and Mitigation of Inter-Application Security Vulnerabilities in Android”. Basically they told us that some Android apps even though they do not require permissions to access some info they acquire the info through the other apps on your phone. I just learned that millions of people have… Continue reading Android exploits
Gangs and the Future
Gangs are a nice emergent hierarchical multiagent system. They exhibit robustness, adaptability, high level of communication, vision (as in forethought and planning), and a strong level of cohesiveness given volatile settings. Of course all gangs and organized crime exhibit these features in varying levels, but they exist. The interesting thing is that they are fault… Continue reading Gangs and the Future
Machine Learning App
My brother got an internship as an accountant. One of his duties is a pricing things for the marketing department. Basically figure out how much all of the components cost and add in all the margins, expected demand etc. This takes about 3 days to put together a single price. This is crazy. It is… Continue reading Machine Learning App
Extract bib
http://www.molspaces.com/d_cb2bib-overview.php is a tool that will extract bib references from unformatted documents like email or webpages or pdf files. Which I could have used a couple of days ago when I did this manually.
Comparing clustering methods
So, I’m doing a pattern recognition project and I’m comparing different clustering techniques in R. I found http://www.r-bloggers.com/anova-and-tukeys-test-on-r/ has a nice intro on using ANOVA and Tukey. The method they show also includes a method for plotting the results (the confidence intervals)! So, thats nice.