Internet Of Things

An Internet of Things is an interesting concept. However, quite open ended and still very much an emerging area. The idea is also about making smarter cloud driven applications to ubiquitously find things in general. A thing may be something tangible for enhancement towards smarter living. In some ways, making lives easier and yet becoming ubiquitous in our every day lives. Using the Internet to make things more connected. Things here could be any concept - a device, a service, or even an abstraction of some kind to conceptualize data in some useful way. Ordinarily it requires some form of smart identity profiles similar in respects to the idea of RFIDs. Making things smarter means such concepts become more accessible and extensible as resources. In semantic web, things and concepts hold separate meanings. However, the same approach can be applied to the Internet of Things as well. The interaction can be seen in a distributed computing context as well with rich information flows even in real-time. The domain context is extremely broad and is valuable in areas of mission-critical applications. They also enable smart city life where almost every device or gadget becomes alive from embedded intelligence with a constant stream of data without requiring significant human intervention. Obviously, in this regard even the most mundane functionality such as light switches can be made complex by their embedded circuitry to enable them for such an ideal. There are also security risks for making everything enabled for privacy concerns in general. Such self-controlled intelligence can also make people lose a sense of control of their lives. There is also a need for more efforts towards a formal policy, protocol or framework to allow for the concerns to be tackled and a seamless integration process.

Docker

Building to linux containers makes portability and deployment easier with Docker. The approach is to build applications inside isolated software containers for automated deployments to cloud environments. Thus, easing packaging of application and their dependencies within virtual containers that can run as isolated instances on environments with different linux distributions. The engine has many points of integrations with various infrastructure libraries and frameworks.   It is obviously an alternative to the standard virtualization approach in the market. One aspect to the project that is core to the ethos is that features take a back seat over quality. The tool was developed as part of the dotCloud PaaS project. The approach to lightweight portable applications that can run in-container means better options for scalability, portability, and lower overhead costs, at same time easing the process of maintenance between physical and cloud architectures. The approach is in some ways similar to Solaris Zones. However, in Docker the underlining approach is on linux containers. Rather than building applications to a system software, one then builds to a container. This container has no OS but is able to share the OS from its host. Such containers are faster and less resource intensive than standard virtual machines as far as one limits to a single host to provide the shared OS. The launch time is also improved from a matter of several minutes to fraction of a few seconds. The complexity of configurations is wrapped around an interface abstraction. They have become quite appropriate for mission-critical applications. Initially, supporting Linux distributions only, the project has ventured into cross platform support as well with use of hypervisor.

Docker Developer Tools:
Flynn
Deis
Dokku
Kubernetes
Panamax
Shipyard
Drone
Serf
Fig
CoreOS

Semantic Web For Idea Creation

Companies face continuous pressures from the outside in order to function. They also have to keep abreast to the changing tides. Often having a strategy for defining a competitive advantage for a distinctive product and services offering keeps a company on target for consumer demand and profitability against competitors vying for market share. Progressive research and engineering of new ideas can be core aspects of a company's strategic motives for staying competitive in the market. Semantic web can be one such option in developing knowledge engineered solutions to harness better ideas to develop more tangible insights, to represent such knowledge, as well as to discover new knowledge for future which could even come handy for business planning. They could even help in building rich brainstorming ideas with clearly defined contextual maps as well as more constructive ways to backtrack.  Such approaches could even provide insights for companies to better manage their existing resources and business functions in order to identify cost efficiency, for meeting targets, as well as enable more collaboration between internal departments. Furthermore, such approaches could come handy when developing design ideas for specific projects like: logo and identity creation, advertising campaigns, web design, market research campaigns, development of new business ideas, re-engineering of existing platforms, and across the whole idea generation process. They could even come in handy for pharmaceutical industries mining for medical drugs which may require multiple stages of clinical trials as well as a way of effectively backtracking through such trials. Semantically defined idea creation can come in handy in a multitude of domain contexts where there is a clear gain from representation of knowledge.

Orange Is The New Black

Orange is the New Black is an interesting autobiographical story of a woman's life behind bars, her struggles to fit in and adapt, as well as the way she grows tougher through each passing day. Every episode draws a new experience and a distraction from inmates. Often allowing one to understand the unique ways in which prisons for women function as well as the social dysfunctions within the system both between inmates as well as the prison system as a whole. The format uses random character flashbacks to connect the many plot lines within the episodes as a way of providing contextual cues. With each season the intensity of prison environment is explored as well as characters of inmates appears to enfold as relationships are broken and reformed with the outside world. However, it is questionable as to how long such a prison environment story can be explored before it veers on repetition and over extended plot lines.

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is a provocative tale told from multiple vantage points for conquest of empires and houses trying to attain hold to lands and throne. Every episode is an explosive drama in its entirety with some superb plot lines. However, the show does provide for some questionable viewing especially with the depictions of characters and scenes. Yet, at same time they can appear quite intriguing in the graphic nature of exploring issues related to social hierarchy, religion, loyalty, corruption, crime, war, punishment, and specific personal struggles of each character. At times, the scenes do converge on almost making one squirm. While, every episode attempts to draw a packed full of drama from start to finish. The fantasy drama is loosely based on the story lines from "A Song of Ice and Fire" novel, which it seems still has a lot more to come before the whole series comes to an end.  The story contrasts in much the similar way to the High Medieval Age of Western Europe as well as sharing similarities from past English history. 

CMIS, JCR, and OSGI

Content frameworks for building content management systems have been around for ages and there is a continuous drive for portability as well as huge feature sets. The complexities and approaches are numerous. There is also no one purpose solution that could fit for all problem cases. Often there is a need to develop customized solutions for specific use cases where flexibility and extensibility become key areas for exploration. Even the way content data is defined for storage can be a key element of design as it can dictate capacity for optimization and searchability. There have been many standards that have come about to provide for commonality, integration, and reuse across data repositories. The below diagram illustrates the state of play in the content services and repository management.

JCR and CMIS comparison

ECM Vendors

JCR
Jackrabbit
ModeShape
Chemistry
Sling
Stanbol
ManifoldCF
CouchDB

Advertising 2014

Online advertising is an ever changing market for consumerism with constant buzz in technological innovations, often disseminated through big data processes for recommendations. Watching the digital trends is important as it provides for the most effective ways of reaching an audience with advertising campaigns. However, advertising online is directly related to the way consumers relay their interests and through the different technology drivers. The shifts in trends are often the big indicators for launching advertising campaigns for mass digital appeal. 

The following are a few key trends that are emerging online:

Real-Time Bidding

Native Advertising

Video Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Localized and Geo-targeted Advertising

Mobile Advertising

Data Science ToolBox

In a recent meetup, the exploration into building one's own data science toolbox was covered alongside Spark compared to the standard Hadoop MapReduce approaches. There are now slides available for the toolbox presentation which were aptly popular with many invitees. There are also interesting focused courses in data science available on coursera.

Data Science Event
data science toolbox
building a data science toolbox
Data Science Specialization

ChatScript

ChatScript is an interesting framework which provides a unique natural language processing engine with ontology to detect sentences. It has recently included integration for mining the wikipedia documents. A very flexible framework for developing chat enabled bots for various domains of context. Being open source it provides a lot of flexibility towards application in a variety of projects.    

Game 2048

2048 is a recently developed tiled game. The objective is to slide the tiles around until the number 2048 is reached. The game is very similar to Threes. Often the game is played on a 4x4 grid set in tiled block of puzzle. One then uses the arrow keys to navigate and direct the plays.  Two similar numbered tiles collide to form one merged tile with total number. The game reaches a win state when 2048 emerges as total for a tile after which it continues on in a sandbox state. One can devise an automated problem solver for a game using various state based representations. 

using artificial intelligence to solve the 2048 game

DBPedia Related Projects

DBPedia has a hefty extension of research projects for linked data. Some of them are in active development, others provide research for further development of newer projects. The progress in linked data for the web is ever growing and with a fast pace. However, as a web user, it does not appear fast enough. Most of such projects are almost always research led and lack the level of visibility required in order to allow for the development community to test and provide for feedback for further progress in the area. There needs to be more accessibility of research projects in semantic web that is available for developers in the community to harness as well as to play around with to showcase what such approaches can do, in order to uncover and grow the web of data in practice.

linked data projects

LinkedData

aksw

semantic web

LOD2 Stack
LDA API
linkedgeodata
linking linked data projects across europe
deri linked data

Cultural Fit

These days more and more companies are looking for cultural fit. But, what exactly does this mean? And, how does one go about measuring the fitness? Is it by asking the right types of questions or is it the attributes that one draws from some superficial bias? It seems cultural fit is a nice way of diplomatically labelling all the things that a company cannot state in a straightforward way, in case it comes out politically incorrect. Cultural fit really means whether the team likes one as an individual, not whether one can do the job. It can boil down to a lot of tongue and cheek nonsense as well as possibly just gibberish of managerial buzz of what they think is the feel of the culture. It is almost like whether they class one as the in crowd, a bit like at school where everyone hung around with their own type of people. Cultural fit is no real indicator of whether the person will perform or even add any value. They could even be culturally unfit when they join. Managers often devise strange ways of measuring recruitment processes and they have equally more bizarre practices of retaining staff as well as keeping them satisfied. The relative buzz of a company may be its culture. But, if the company is not doing well and has no direction then that is also a spontaneously combustible culture to have with very little in way of positive growth. Some companies go so far as to look for so called culturally fit individuals that they basically end up with a bunch of useless rejects with no direction, skills and the business goes belly up. With so many directionless and overpaid managers, is it any wonder we are seeing economic meltdown and uncertainties for businesses.

Divergent

Another copycat movie to The Hunger Games albeit providing another source of earning for box office. Perhaps, we are seeing a trend here in the way the selection process works for giving the go ahead for production of such movies. There is even a sequel lined up in future. Divergent was quite well positioned and exciting enough to watch. But, the ending is a bit of a let down where the build up of the plot draws to a close, only to make one realize they could have done so much more towards the end. Shailene Woodley might just end up being another upcoming Jennifer Lawrence or possibly a lead up to a significant movie. 

Noah 2014

A movie dramatized through excessive changes in storyline almost like a jigsaw. The movie is an amalgamation of sorts in interpretation especially from the vantage point of vegans, atheists, and lord or the rings trilogy. There is a clear reliance on the acting of Russell Crowe for dynamics and the many graphic dramatizations. The movie brings together artistic imagery in terms of heroic epic only to distort and leave one pondering over the questionable character of Noah. It also leaves one puzzled and confused as to how disrespectful the movie appears to be to the true depictions of Noah and the associated religious faiths of the world. Perhaps, in some ways it displays the very purpose of how Hollywood purposely provided such a misrepresentation of character with an explosive drama for cashing in on box office. At least, they could have provided some justice by staying true to the story as well as respecting the religious significance of Noah's character. 

Semantic Web For Dance

Dancing is deeply ingrained in almost every society on the planet. The art is so varied in routines and styles often providing depth into the cultural diversity of a society. It is an open expression, an exercise in one's freedom, and provides for unlimited ways of displaying creativity as well as a way for humans to identify with their individuality. With the ever growing styles of dancing, it also is an added complexity in keeping up to new changes in moves and routines. It also makes it complicated for learning as well as in keeping track of all the different types. Semantic web could come in handy in area of dance for insurmountable ways. It could help choreographers with planning routines. It could also help enhance learning in dance. It could even help semantically categorize all the different dance styles, trends, and moves as well as provide for better ways to track them. It could also help annotate dance videos and general content on the web for indexing. It could even help in knowledge discovery through linked data. Also, such approaches could go further in historical context towards understanding the cultural diversity, evolution, and the importance of dance in various societies over time. They could even help towards gaining insights for developing even newer dance styles. Dances also have embedded messages within them in form of expression, one can attempt to understand the semantically rich feelings and attitudes of an individual with the moves and choice of routines.

List of dance style categories
List of dances
IDTA
Popular Dance Styles
most popular dance moves from music videos 2013
top 10 list

Emoji

Emojis and emoticons can be extremely useful in capturing subliminal messages and moods within the social context of conversations. An almost perceived sentiment is captured with such simplicity can give added information to a document with actionable intent. However, they may be difficult to define in metadata translation unless each iconic derivation can be interpreted from their pictograph representations. And, as such most have a Unicode representation with a standard pixel grid size. These ideograms add much variety to text speak in reducing verbage but also adding valuable meaning. May be, even a semantic data could be incorporated over such emojis supported with such open sentiment dictionaries like sentiwordnet. They are portable as well as quite varied, available as plugins, website services, on desktops, and mobile phones. Symbols and signs have always held valuable cues in our society from traffic signs, health and safety, to various other domains. The semiotics of such symbols holds much value in understanding language pragmatics over the web to discern, relate, pattern recognize in their universality, and then to even catagorize with their specific distinctions. In general, such pictograph ideograms can be categorized into the level of abstractions they provide for an individual from quality of feeling, to reaction and relation, and for their explicit representations. Such interpretations can often be provided through philosophical logic influenced in part by their psychological and sociological implications for inference.

Arquillian Testing

Arquillian tests are quite useful as alternatives to mocking especially for in-container testing where one needs to do a full component test end-to-end at runtime, most aptly appropriate for JEE environments. It builds on JUnit and TestNG. It is amazingly good for integration testing and is portable across multiple environments and containers allowing one to control each run mode through in-process invocation or through remote client. This is also faciliated with multiple ways of injection on fields and methods with annotations. Additionally, one can utilize the shrinkwrap to declaratively define an archive that encapsulates the tests and resources. One can use the arquillian to package the shrinkwrap to deploy and run in the container which will then execute the tests and provide the captured results as it remotely communicates with the server.

When To Use Nodejs

The ideal sort of projects have need for long polling, real-time streaming and potentially also are using functional approaches yet want to stick to JavaScript for both front and backend work. They also want to move away from a standard web project implementation to a full application view. There may also be multiple data sources to stream from. Perhaps, one wants to keep things simple but agile. And, also have time constraints. Maybe, there is even a need to evolve the project but initially have a need to prototype with a responsive feel. Maybe, there is a desire for the whole approach to be flexible from create, run, test, share, and deploy. There might also be a necessity for easy builds with plugins as well as cloud friendly environment. There could even be a need to build with flexibility to relational models as well as NoSQL. The primary reason for using nodejs for a project would be if there is a huge requirement for a callback concurrency model that does not excessively hog on CPU cycles per request, marginalizing on complexity with using a single language across the stack, have little overhead on serialization/deserialization of JSON, reuse across the full stack, as well as keeping the code base as lightweight as possible with no limitations on configuration and plugins. 

Typical Use Cases:

Chat Application

Online Games

Collaboration Tools

Real-Time Analytics Dashboards

Command-Line Utilities

Web APIs

Desktop Apps

Simple Web Servers

Single Page Apps

Educational Apps (especially with Gamification)

Service Monitoring Dashboards
Search Aggregation

Most anything on Ruby/Rails can be switched to Nodejs
....and possibly more and growing use cases

Air Pollution

We have wind power, solar power, water purifiers, and even dehumidifiers. We even have air purifiers that we can buy for home and office. And, yet we are not able to build air purifier solutions for large scale. As South East of England suffers high levels of smog it is necessary to run air purifiers over cities to reduce the pollution and treat the many contaminants in the air. Perhaps, people can learn from the carbon and nitrogen cycle in an aquarium as a model example. We often have solutions for agriculture in form of crop dusting, why not use something like that to neutralize the pollutants in the air. A lot of times, it requires an agent to activate and speed up the chemical process of reduction. Even aquariums have it resolved by reducing ammonia levels in tanks by using filtration chemicals to speed up the nitrification process. Even plants are a natural source of filtration. In similar respects, the air could be filtered out through a cyclic process. Even furnaces fuel an excessive amount of pollutants into the air and so does road traffic. Perhaps, it is time to start installing smarter filters and renewable energy sources. Maybe, this might even push for more action and interest for electric powered vehicles.

London Pollution
Pollution in South East England

Selfies

Selfies have hit big time on the social media scene. As everyone seems to be doing it. Even Google has started to provide a shelfie for selfies or more colloquially named for shareable selfies. What is so trendy about taking snaps of oneself, other than to display how self-obsessed one is in their life. At least, they do spell the three fundamental words: me, myself, and I. Taking snaps has always been about depictions of surroundings and of others. At least, that is what has always made photography interesting. What is this craze about a selfie that makes one want to snap every instance of their waking life? Strangely enough, they are also more popular among celebrity culture and teenagers. May be, it has also been influenced by the forward-facing cameras on mobile phones of making them so accessible, for the sheer reason of starting a craze, or the simple need to explore the options on the phone. Being able to share and showcase one's life in an instance could be exciting and addictive for some. But, it does show a very shallow society and also an indication that some people just have far too much time on their hands. In a way, they are a historical pre-dated concept from taking photos at a photo booth, to using the self-timers on an antique camera, to even the old kodak moment, to the polaroid instant photos, and even the instant moments caught on a postcard. And, as people document their lives on social media they will inevitably take snaps to depict their every day lives whether boring to some and interesting to others with the added benefit of having little need to explain the moment in words to have them posted on instagram or pinterest.

Google User Interfaces

Although, Google have always looked to streamlining user interfaces, they often fail to improve on the experience per each iteration of a change. In a lot of respects, as they change the functionalities they also effect much of the user interaction which a lot of times happens for the worse rather than for the better. Perhaps, while making such functional changes the user experience value takes a backseat or is forgotten. Google over the years have developed many applications around the advertising model. However, most services work well at the first iteration of launch. But, following on, as they try to improve the interfaces and features, they usually fail to improve on the user experience value. Perhaps, it is emerging slowly that user interaction may not be Google's strongest point as a business. Most of their interfaces are minimalist which might hint at the thought of smart user interfaces. But, at the heart, the business model is around tech savvy applications and tools. Most of their website goes through regular transformations in some form or another. However, if one wants to navigate through their website, it would be like trying to map one's way through a maze. Unless, obviously one knows where everything is located. Making more engaging and intuitive user experiences could go a long way towards continuing the iterative improvement on interaction design, while not forgetting on the functionality.

user experience design
interaction design
user interface design
nngroup

API Explorer
Google Products

Many Faces Of Architecture

Architecture has had a phenomenal influence in the way we perceive through models as well as design. The perception of architecture in technology has also grown in the manner with which we see things over time and often taking inspiration from nature as well as from building structures in general. Over the years, architecture has formed a co-existence in science, engineering, as well as in effecting the makeup of our cities from globally shaping and transforming our societies to an integrated whole. The profound effects can be seen as our software has evolved and grown with each abstraction. It can also be seen in the way our societies have evolved over time. As the landscape of the internet enfolds before us, so will the evolving architecture and the influences it brings through added intelligence. We will find ourselves constantly astonished as our individual abstractions build clearer images in our minds of how to move things further and to create from the foundations of previous iterations. Perhaps, also building and learning from mistakes. Technology like architecture is ever growing, ever changing, with a fast pace. But, at the same time, both co-exist to influence and inspire each other. The application of technology has taken on many influences from nature and from other disciplines. There is a tight mesh in the way things interconnect and through research each takes on inspiration from another in path to glory and advancement.

architecture models
architecture abstractions
abstract architecture
semantic architecture
opensource architecture
software architecture

Pearson Developer Network

Pearson has made significant efforts towards making content more accessible for developers through APIs as well as a shift towards platform as a service for learning. However, there is a fundamental drawback to their services which is primarily the fact that there is no source of advertising and the services have a very high premium cost factor. Although, content is a fairly high value, the cost factor would really need to marginalize in order to make it more appealing. Also, one fundamental issue with providing Pearson books seems to be with the fact that one cannot download a whole book using a reader which is a real shame as section by section and even by chapter can be a real drag for most readers especially if it requires batch loading and reloading of content. As newer services and content are made more discoverable on the internet, there are chances that other providers may be able to take advantage by providing more cost effective solutions for both developers and consumers of mashups. Furthermore, in order to stay competitive content providers are going to be more cost aware and make content more reassuringly accessible for a wider audience, intern also looking to reduce the cost factor over time. Thus, pushing more savings for both developers and readers.

Semantic Health

It would be useful to have curated health, medical and wellness semantic data to define various diseases, chemicals, biological agents, medicines, ingredients, allergies, as well as nutrition. In process, it could be used in form of internet of things for mashups providing interesting mobile applications in context. People these days are more aware of what they buy and what they are eating as well as health. They want to know what is in each product and how it could effect their health. They also want to know how it relates to their diets and nutrition as well as if it poses any specific risks for allergies. Most labels on foods are quite generic but they do not all cater to our personal tastes and requirements. Also, health information needs to be made more accessible and useful for meaningful applications. Being able to use the data and information is more important. Semantic web in form of linked data for health can also help penetrate and connect the many complexities people face in understanding aspects of medicine and biological factors. Linked data can also provide for shared knowledge to provide for a faster way to harness data towards reaching for more effective cures.

Stream Processing

Stream processing has become an integral part of many web analytics applications of today that have big data and real-time requirements with multiple sources of input. The application context could utilize such sources as web click-streams, financial information, manufacturing information, social media, logs and metering data. Many applications depend on real-time decision making to provide updated recommendations and analytics in order to respond to changes in data.  There are various open source and cloud based options now becoming available that are of use in multiple informational contexts in a pipeline solution where multiple data sources provide for streaming data analysis.

Samza
Storm
S4
MillWheel
MUPD8
Spark
Tez
Dempsy
Esper
Streams
SAMOA
Kinesis

in stream big data processing
big data right now five trendy open source technologies

April Fools' Day

On average fewer people globally celebrate the April Fools' Day. It is one day where a lot of people dread while for others it is a time to be goofy and filled with fascinating pranks. In fact, it is one of the many notable days of the years where the significance is dwindling as people go about their day like any other in passing. It is also a day where many are only more self-aware of their surroundings and prepared in case of a prank catches up to them. While for others, it is a time when they wish it never came. Often from work colleagues, to school time pranks, to even siblings it seems many rivals emerge to offset the delicate balance with tricky escapades. Everyone deserves a little humor and laughter from time to time.

History of April Fools' Day
origins of april fools' day

Online Shopping

The web has become a big hub for ecommerce activity with many contextual products and services on offer. However, there are still limitations of what one can sell online for which many it does become a difficult and an awkward affair. A lot of this is down to our five senses and how difficult it is for us to measure the goods and services in context. At other times, such goods and services may just be classified as illegal for which there is an obvious regulatory block. Consumers generally want to be able to hold, smell, taste, and see products before they buy. How does one measure the comfort of a mattress online? How does one check the expiry of dairy products before buying online? How does one check the freshness of meat, vegetables, and fruit online? How does one go about buying lipstick online? How does one know that a pair of shoes fit comfortably? How does one know that the pair of slacks or shirt actually fits well? Even the likelihood of ordering a tailored suit online are quite slim. However, there will always be people that are just plain lazy, have no time to spend on grocery shopping, or going out to try on clothes before buying. People obviously want to be able to experience online shopping like they are physically there but in comfort of their home. More and more people are taking advantage of the flexibility as they shop online at their leisure. Ecommerce has become a big business but with it also brings certain levels of awareness of meeting customer expectations as well as complexities in window dressing while drawing a virtual mirror into the five senses of the human perception. Also, the constant need to stay competitive is another hurdle. Often times prices online are set much cheaper than in store until there is an obvious sale. Online shoppers are also generally a lot smarter with their buying habits, at least in some respects. Customers also have the luxury of using third-party applications that can provide assisted tools for shopping such as in aggregation of online bargains. There is always a constant need and necessity of ecommerce businesses to stay competitive and in order to stay competitive there is a need to monitor the market and consumer behavior. Ecommerce as a result makes a huge return from big data analytics both in form of social media, advertising, as well as general customer engagement efforts. Businesses online seek to entice customers and increase online traffic to their sites while customers want to find the right product or service that meets their needs. The Internet provides businesses an instant global platform to showcase their products and services with a global consumer base. There are also regional limitations and restrictions to conform to in respect of trade regulations. There is also complexities in consumer behavior from region to region which influences the online store front. Ecommerce also faces many complexities in security and the way they manage consumer transactions. All in all, as billions of transactions are conducted online in all array of contexts, there is a need to analyze consumer behaviors in rich information flows, but at same time providing a connected and satisfying experience for all. As knowledge discovery grows leaps and bounds through artificial intelligence, we are likely to see more breakthroughs in technological advancements to emerge, to influence, and add further dynamics to the ecommerce domain.