vRRitti.com, providing sentiency

The other day, my twin 15-year-old daughters came home from school hunched over, each engrossed in a Rubik’s Cube. Solving the Rubik’s Cube, they said, was a way to learn algorithms. They then explained that algorithms were “sequences of moves that have a desired effect” and were a very, very important concept in learning higher forms of math.
http://www.thesunnews.com/2011/12/31/2572619/peter-mckay-kids-surging-ahead.html

High Frequency Trading

Jürgen Schmidhuber is director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab and professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. He is an expert on machine learning, financial data prediction, and mathematically optimal universal Artificial Intelligence (AI) among other topics. ”Currently we see a strong tendency to minimize the length of time and connection between the computers at the exchanges and those that do the trading. This of course creates an incentive to build ever closer and ever faster computers. This incentive is both hilarious and stupid because it helps the traders but it doesn’t help the market at large.” Instead, Schmidhuber advocates an auction scheme that doesn’t incentivize high frequency trading.

“Right now [high frequency trading] is just a loophole that allows a few smart guys to make a profit at the expense of others and the broader market.”

High frequency trading (HFT), accounts for around 53% of all transactions in the U.S. stock market, up from just 26% in 2006, and it has reaped $12.9bn in profits over the last two years. It is a controversial topic for many traders and governments.

On Friday, the CME Group fined a trader $50,000 for using a high frequency trading strategy that malfunctioned and sent thousands of erroneous orders to the New York Mercantile Exchange and caused a $1 change in price to the price of oil. Currently, several governments are involved with assigning a concrete definition to the practice to determine what it is, how it should be monitored and what rules should govern its use.

http://www.opalesque.com/640034/Schmidhuber_simplicity_drives_algorithm_performance003.html

CME Group Fines Trader $50,000 Over Rogue Algorithm
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111223-710257.html

Facebook

Facebook has two algorithms that are important to marketers and developers but are largely misunderstood by people across industries.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/12/27/edgerank-and-graph-rank-defined/

Google

3 Reasons People Love Google
http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/3-reasons-people-love-google-0111166

Google has a problem in being both poacher and gamekeeper. It has to police its search results to make sure that evil, but otherwise hardworking publishers, don’t find a way to “spam” the search results that are placed in front of the innocent user, i.e. Google plays the good guy. However, at the same time most of the advertising on the web is sourced from Google and of course this isn’t spam – no really it isn’t, it’s helpful extra results in your search that you asked for, well you might have asked for given the option to opt in or out. This strange situation puts Google in a position where one part of it has to”fight spam” at the same time as Google’s business development team has to push to “make spam.”
The combination of these two actions, plus the changes to the fundamental search algorithm, have virtually made the value of a simple link equivalent to zero – or so says SEO Book.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/81-web-general/3526-how-google-made-linking-irrelevant.html

Google rolled out the new, unannounced News algorithm last week which drops “duplicate” content from the original articles. Google’s new algorithm favors large websites only, and here’s one tiny proof.
http://popherald.com/news/googles-new-tricky-algorithm/14016/

Vision Algorithm To Automatically Parse Addresses in Google Street View
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-12/google-wants-computer-vision-algorithms-can-read-addresses-street-view

We’ve always known content is king, even before all the 2011 algorithm enhancements, Google has always regarded highly websites with substantial amounts of content. With all these recent changes, Google is trying to put more emphasis on good content; not just a lot of content– but a lot of well written, unique content. 2012 will see a decent percentage of Google’s updates refining the Panda update, putting more and more significance on brands, with bigger brands getting more favourable results.
http://www.living-streams.co.uk/news_article_name/search_engine_optimisation-403922-internet_business_ideas.aspx

Based on the last year of algorithm changes, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google will not put much effort into natural language search developments until one of its competitors successfully implements it. Then, we can probably expect Google to swoop in, develop a $1 billion product, and leave everyone speechless. But for now, it seems as though they’d rather not.
http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/natural-language-the-google-algorithm-and-understanding-the-difference-between-speaking-and-searching-0112656

Mobile Advertising

A force for innovation and progress in the mobile advertising industry, LeadBolt today announced the latest advance in its exclusive suite of mobile advertising solutions. Designed to boost eCPMs and increase revenues for mobile app developers and advertisers, the frequency optimization component works with LeadBolt’s proprietary ad serving algorithm to deliver more relevant ads at ideal occurrences to consumers who install mobile applications. This increases revenues to LeadBolt clients and improves the overall experience for the end user of the application.
http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/11/12/p2186514/leadbolts-new-advertising-algorithm-delivers-200-increase-in-ecpms-for-

Bing

Bing Algorithm May Have Cost Businesses and Students
http://www.webpronews.com/bing-algorithm-may-have-cost-businesses-and-students-2011-12

eBay

For me, the only reason I’ve been selling on eBay for years was their traffic. I always chalked up their huge fees, hostile seller policies, and the out of control buyer behavior (and the continual escalation of all of these things) as the costs of accessing that traffic to make a living. I am so grateful for your site’s coverage of their new Cassini Project algorithm implementation 3 months ago. If it wasn’t for that information I would never have been able to figure out what happened and what to do about it.
http://letters.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2011/12/1323747185.html

Spotify

Spotify Radio, the Pandora-like Internet radio service, launches today, but to make it work, the Stockholm online music service reached out to Somerville’s The Echo Nest. “They had 15 million songs, but no way to do music discovery. And music discovery is what we do at The Echo Nest,” said Brian Whitman, chief technology officer of the Davis Square-based MIT Media Lab spinout, which maintains an algorithm that can listen to and read about music online.
http://www.bostonherald.com/jobfind/news/technology/view.bg?articleid=1388985

Crime

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have begun developing an algorithm that predicts which cars were most likely to run red lights. The algorithm detects the car’s deceleration rate and its distance from a light. Using this data, it determines which cars are most likely to obey traffic laws and which cars are most likely to disregard them.
http://www.independentcollegian.com/algorithm-detects-fast-and-furious-1.2681565#.TwBtwrzKefE

Twitter

How Twitter’s Trending Algorithm Picks Its Topics
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/07/143013503/how-twitters-trending-algorithm-picks-its-topics

Meeting people

Tagged CEO Greg Tseng said “we are a site about meeting new people. We use the same expertise [as Topicmarks], but look at user profiles and comments to extract meaning and match people together.” Tagged plans to incorporate the machine learning technology into its algorithm. “Facebook’s algorithm is about surfacing the best content from your friends. Facebook is a content-matching algorithm,” Tseng said. “Google is for web pages, Netflix is for movies, ours is for people. We call it internally a Pandora for people.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/12/08/businessinsiderboonsri-dickinson-ta.DTL

Industry & Coatings

Researchers at UC3M Develop Control Algorithms for Industrial Automation
http://www.azorobotics.com/news.aspx?newsID=2300

Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory have developed a new system to inspect the exterior coatings of ships. The Topside Corrosion Detection Algorithm (TCDA), one of the AFTCAT algorithms, can automatically assess the extent of corrosion damage and degradation. Other algorithms assess coating color uniformity and the extent of coating failures due to flaking and delamination and blistering.
http://www.vision-systems.com/articles/2011/12/cameras-check-ships-coatings.html

Special Effects

Photoshop gives you much power of editing photos. You might have enjoyed it heartily but it is only limited to 2D art. Harvard University researchers have successfully dealt with 3D aspect. The technology developed at Harvard can easily aid you in transplanting face itself in a video. The algorithm developed will help the low budget films to get special effects as that of any super hero film made in Hollywood.
http://www.crazyengineers.com/digital-face-transplant-to-change-hollywoods-low-budget-films-1410/

Credit Cards

How Credit Card Algorithms Work: The Anatomy of Credit Card Numbers
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-credit-card-algorithms-work-the-anatomy-of-credit-card-numbers-2011-12

Government

NSA officials also define two suites of security algorithms: Suite A and Suite B. Suite A encryption, used for highly sensitive, national-security information, refers to “a specific set of classified cryptographic algorithms used for the protection of some categories of restricted mission-critical information,” according to the National Information Assurance Glossary. Suite B, applied to a majority of data and devices, is “a specific set of cryptographic algorithms suitable for protecting classified and unclassified national-security systems and information throughout the U.S. government and to support interoperability with allies and coalition partners.”
http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-12/technology-focus/in-defense-of-data.html

The US Navy recently tested the autonomous system capabilities of an unmanned undersea glider as the military prepares to deploy squadrons of air, surface and undersea robotic vehicles later this decade. ”Using new algorithms, the vehicle has a greater ability to make its own decisions without requiring a human in the loop,” explained Marc Steinberg of the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/60077-navy-wants-autonomous-undersea-bots

Gaming

As a bit of background, we’ve been seeing glitches and bugs (or even deliberate changes) in the in-game algorithm that determines how many citizens a players needs to add to their city before being allowed to expand for some time now. After the Halloween Monster event, which saw two separate populations becoming one, it was quickly apparent that something wasn’t quite right as player after player saw their population requirements go from 1,000 – 5,000 all of the way up to 10,000 or more in a single day. With a game as large as CityVille, it would be impossible for Zynga to please everyone, but it does seem like these outrageous numbers (in my own previous experience, I would have needed over 41,000 citizens for a single expansion) have been lowered, but what of those users on the forums that report increased figures?
http://blog.games.com/2011/12/27/cityville-land-expansion-requirements-lower/

User Interfaces

International Business Machines Corp. announced its sixth annual “IBM 5 of 5″ technology report including the predictions our smartphones will be able to read our minds and we’ll no longer need passwords. With Apple’s Siri making waves this year, Big Blue’s predictions don’t seem as much science fiction.
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/will-computers-read-our-minds-in-five-years.html/

Social Behavior

Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order - The way people copy each other’s linguistic style reveals their pecking order
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/

Biometrics

Neurotechnology, a provider of high-precision biometric identification technologies, today announced the availability of VeriLook Surveillance 2.0, a software development kit (SDK) for biometric face identification using live video streams from single or multiple high-resolution digital surveillance cameras. VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 provides real-time identification of faces and can be used in a wide range of surveillance systems for retail and commercial areas, entrance monitoring and counting, automated time-attendance systems, law enforcement applications and transportation security. The new, integrated face tracking algorithm in VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 includes a robust, dynamic face model which can adapt to visual appearance changes as subjects move across the scene. It continues tracking of subjects even when their faces briefly disappear from the frame or when they are partially blocked by other objects or even other faces (a common problem while tracking multiple faces). Because it can now simultaneously process video streams from multiple surveillance cameras, VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 is suitable for use in large surveillance systems.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verilook-surveillance-20-sdk-advances-face-recognition-for-large-multi-camera-video-surveillance-systems-2011-12-21

‘Hit potential’

Pop Hit Prediction Algorithm Mines 50 Years of Chart-Toppers for Data
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/12/hit-potential-equation/

Sorting Algorithms as Dances

http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/theory/3531-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

Key algorithm sees first advance in 24 years

Although the new method of matrix multiplication, an essential tool for solving problems in physics, economics and most areas of science, is not practical for use on today’s computers, it is a surprising theoretical leap that could one day have myriad applications. And it’s creating quite a splash on the mathematical blogosphere.

Although today’s computers can’t take advantage of this specific speed advance, Vassilevska-Williams has also created a mathematical framework that could allow for further theoretical improvements that might be practically useful for computing. “You can think of this as a new tool to be added to the toolbox,” she says

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21255-key-mathematical-tool-sees-first-advance-in-24-years.html

Previously:

It’s the algorithm stupid! Part II
http://vrritti.com/2011/11/23/its-the-algorithm-stupid-part-ii/

It’s the algorithm, stupid! Do algorithms offer the ultimate grounds for exoneration? Can they fail, or only the people writing them?
http://vrritti.com/2011/09/30/its-the-algorithm-stupid-do-algorithms-offer-the-ultimate-grounds-for-exoneration-can-they-fail-or-only-the-people-writing-them/