This past weekend, I had the good fortune to attend this year’s Data Day Texas conference in Austin, alongside my young and energetic boss/CEO, Haikal Pribadi. The conference had several parallel and somewhat related tracks: graph database technology, natural language processing and data management in health care. It was an intellectually stimulating, cordial, and professional environment.

What follows is an overview of some of the highlights, for me at least, from the conference.

Both NLP and health care are domains which epitomize the problems knowledge graphs solve. In fact, the term knowledge graph is increasingly used instead of database to…

This is my reaction to a recent proposal for something called OPSN (Overlaid Personal Semantic Networks). I heard about it through the mathematician John Baez on Google Plus in the form of a recommendation about “an old friend who is very smart and is trying to do something interesting” :) Now there is a small community setup on G+ to discuss these ideas:

The Idea

I won’t summarize the general idea of OPSN here even though it deserves a more concise explanation, partly because I don’t feel I understand it so well (hmm, or maybe I understand it too well) as to…

When an algorithm developed for one problem domain applies almost verbatim to another, completely unrelated domain, that is the type of insight, beauty and depth that makes computer science a science on its own, and not a branch of something else, namely mathematics, like many professionals educated in the field mistakenly believe. For example, one of the common algorithmic problems during the 60s was the scheduling of tasks on multiprocessor machines. The problem is, you are given a large set of tasks, some of which depend on others, that have to be scheduled for processing on N number of processors…

(about a book on learning)

Cognitive psychology studies, among other things, the important human faculties of learning, memory and problem solving. These same faculties have become the subject of neuroscience, but neuroscience is too immature to provide a convincing narrative of such complex processes at the neural level. Rigorous research on learning in psychology has a long history and there is a small, pop science book that talks about it. It’s called How We Learn and it’s by one Benedict Carey, a science reporter. As the genre goes, the book is good: it reads as one big survey of research…

Being a hard-core developer who cares mostly about software, often for the sake of software itself, and having worked at a local government organization for the past 8 years, this is a question that I’ve pondered often enough. On the one hand there is a running philosophical theme in later years, and through all generations of programmers, that programming is the new literacy, that since software permeates every aspect of our lives, programming amounts to expressing knowledge just like writing does. Therefore deciding whether to write software based on what business you are in would be as silly as deciding…

(sort of a book review)

In the ever growing department of “common wisdom gets scientific confirmation”, there is idleness, the cousin of laziness which we all hope to achieve though it seems this particular art was lost to the ancients of the 19th and 20th centuries. In a recent book titled Auto-Pilot, The Art & Science of Doing Nothing, Andrew Smart goes on a diatribe against over busyness in modern times, and offers a vulgarization of some recent discoveries in neuroscience about the non-busy brain. But it’s vulgarization done right.

Why Idleness?

Methinks the popularity of meditation can be attributed to the…