Categories: The Hermes Series

The Hermes Series – Issue 1

I am an information junkie

I enjoy keeping up with the world of technology. I take notes, keep links, and write about the things that interest me. I try to identify the connections with what I do at work, with what excites me.

I like to share. I learn a lot from discussions and alternate points of view. I find it very rewarding to engage in dialogs.

Introduction to the The Hermes Series

Hermes was the messenger for the Greek gods.

Whenever I can, I will spend some time aggregating those news I find interesting from around the Web and write down my thoughts. It’s my way of thinking more about what’s reported in the technology news and correlate it, if possible, with my areas of interest and work. This is the first issue!

It’s all about natural language understanding

The speech apps and platform space is getting crowded and extremely interesting. If you haven’t noticed, Apple is pushing Siri as a differentiator feature for the iPhone. TrueKnowledge (one of my favorite companies) released Evi and, of course, Nuance has been around for a while. It’s no surprise that even more companies are looking to enter this space

Given my interests, it should be of no surprise that I see this space through the eyes of knowledge representation and reasoning. In order to enable natural language understanding, we need to build knowledge bases and efficient ways of reasoning over those knowledge bases.

Wearable computing – sensors

We are soooo moving into a technology world where every aspect of our lives is going to be recorded. I can’t wait to receive my Basis device (come on… it’s been a while since I pre-ordered it 🙂 so that I can automatically record and reason over my excitement levels using their galvanic skin response sensor. I recently got to try a more expensive version of the sensor through Microsoft Research.

This is going to be a huge space. I want to ask the question “What was the title of the song that I really liked at my last concert?“. Given that my phone can record my location, I can get a structured data representation of the concerts (e.g eventful), and perhaps get the order of the songs, a platform should be able to determine with a degree of confidence that I was at a Radiohead concert (they were in Seattle two weeks ago and they were awesome!). Now, combine that information with the stream of excitement levels and we could perhaps determine with a certain probability the title of the song that I felt more than the others.

A TechCrunch article on “Report: Wearable Computing Will Soon Intensify The Platform Wars” points to a Forester report about the upcoming explosion of wearable devices. They point out that a platform play is inevitable. I couldn’t agree more.

Going from users’ interests to actions

This space is very much related with the previous topic on wearable computing. There is a lot of information in the data streams that we can collect.

It’s so easy for users to produce content today… updates on Twitter, activity data through Facebook’s OpenGraph, Pinterest, and so on. It’s funny how years ago we were talking about Web 2.0 as the era in which users were equally consumers and producers of information. I don’t think any of us back then realized how user-generated content would be king in such a short period of time 🙂

All the major social platforms want to analyze the data they collect and do something about it. Google recently made the news because of the change in their policy on how they use user-related data internally. No surprise really.

Going from data to actions is a natural step. It’s one of the possible value propositions for the companies.

Some random bits

The Tools

I was doing something similar to “The Hermes Series” for my team inside Microsoft (in my spare time). Folks asked me about the ways I keep up with technology news and what tools I use. The flow goes something like this…

While I exercise or during my night-reading time, I use my iPad to go through my favorite tech blogs (using the Reeder and Flipboard apps). If I find something that is interesting, I send it to Evernote. If an email contains a link to something that looks interesting, it will also find its way to Evernote. Over the weekend, I take time to read those posts more closely and do some more research on a topic if necessary. Then I just write down my notes/thoughts.

When it comes to blogging, Windows Live Writer absolutely rocks. I still find it as the best blogging tool around. And it’s completely free! I bought the Parallels Virtual Machine for my Mac OS just to run this app 🙂 (ok… I use Windows on my Mac for many other reasons as well).

 

Feedback/suggestions are more than welcome!

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about

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Savas Parastatidis

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