Mental Models 4 Life

Many of my most successful data science projects happen by accident.

Having spent nearly a decade studying the design and implementation of declarative programming languages in a previous life, I get a bit frustrated whenever I see people getting religious about programming languages and platforms.

Judging by the muted response, the market is effectively assigning a near-zero probability on the threat of a war on the Korean peninsular.

Congratulations to the ACSRI-led team for winning $50-million in funding from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science to set up a new Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre in Australia.

I put together this simple mapping of corporate leaders as a half-joke last week.

Most data science projects are doomed to failure before they even start.

In a previous post on the problem of detecting complex financial crimes, I described the following basic technology framework for financial intelligence units (FIUs) and their partner agencies and reporting entities (REs) to engage in collaborative but pr…

Complex financial crimes are hard to detect primarily because data related to different pieces of the overall puzzle are usually distributed across a network of financial institutions, regulators, and law-enforcement agencies.

The Paillier Cryptosystem is a partial homomorphic encryption scheme that supports two important operations: addition of two encrypted integers and the multiplication of an encrypted integer by an unencrypted integer.

I have learned over the years to distinguish between good data scientists and great data scientists in the way they handle the seemingly mundane aspects of data analysis, tasks like loading large but poorly structured datasets, dealing with missing data or

The June 30 Quarterly Report from Platinum Asset Management’s European Fund contains some great insights and here’s an excerpt that I find particularly interesting.

Solving big hairy problems like detecting complex financial crimes requires solving a series of smaller, mundane but technically non-trivial problems.

Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) around the world collect data like threshold transaction reports, international fund transfer reports, and suspicious matter/activity reports from Reporting Entities (REs), which include banks, money remitters, casinos,…

I have just received the excellent news that Apache MADlib, a big data machine learning library for which I was a committer until recently, has graduated to become a top-level Apache project.

15 May 2016 – First Meeting 27 May 2016 – First day in the house A little unsure, missing Susan May 2016 – Getting comfy June 2016 – Experimenting and putting on weight July 2016 – Grrrl, the chill, but thank god for Annie’s coats August 2016 – This is my…

In this third post on setting up a data science practice, I address some of the analytics processes that need to be in place to maximise value from analytics.

In the previous post, we discussed the key principles of setting up a data science practice.

I have been involved in the setup of several data science practices in both industry and government.

I stayed at my sister’s new place in Pasir Ris in my latest trip to Singapore and were treated to a different side of the island nation.

I bought into an ETF replicating the MSCI Russia Capped Index back in April 2014 on the basis of the Russian market’s low Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings ratio (CAPE), which was around 5 at the time and the lowest in the world.

I have paid more than my fair share of bank fees in doing international fund transfers over the years.

With movies like Toy Story, Up, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E, Pixar has left an indelible mark on the world, enriching our personal lives with characters that speak to us at a deeply emotional level.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a relatively new framework stemming from the idea of “treatment of customers as an asset”, in use at innovative companies like Harrah’s, IBM, and Capital One.

Greyhounds are such wonderful pets it’s hard for owners to stop at one and so it is that we found ourselves adopting a second grey on 30 Dec 2016 after a 3-week trial period, our last act for the year.

Woolworths and Coles are the two largest grocery retailers in Australia.

Confession: As a computer scientist, I have always been comfortable with discrete mathematics.

To be a good scientist and investor, Charlie Munger counsels that we must “Invert, always invert.”

After roaming around Asia the past couple of years, 2016 was a relatively quiet year in terms of trips.

Organisations with immature delivery capabilities can become debt-laden very quickly.

Slightly less than 5 years ago, I had the fortune of being hauled in front of the then richest man in Asia and asked to talk about data science.

A selection of roses from the garden.

In addition to blooming magnolia trees, another visual spectacle to feast the eyes in Canberra during spring are flowering wisteria vines.

In Part 1 of this blog article, we looked at the problem of tokenising a URL as an intermediate step towards learning user preference models from browsing histories.

An important way telcos can increase revenue is to improve, within the constraints of privacy laws, provision of personalised services for subscribers.

Kooka still hangs around our back yard and it is becoming more comfortable in our presence.

If you have ever wondered how we can connect Tableau to Elasticsearch, this blog post should be of some interest to you.

Our liquidambar tree is a bit of an wild lives magnet.

Our little contribution to the spectacular magnolia blooms around Canberra this time of the year.

It’s been 10 years since I started practising Value Investing and it’s time to do a little introspection and write down a few reflections.

There is still another month of chill to get through, but signs of spring are now all around our house in Canberra!

Everything that is old is new again.

The Kalman Filter is one of the more useful tools in data science, but while there are a lot of well-written descriptions of the Bayesian tracking technique available online and in technical books/articles, for some reason it’s hard to find a simple deriv…

The NSW and ACT governments have just announced a ban of greyhound racing starting in 2017 following a Four Corners investigation into animal cruelty in the industry.

Who would have thought a garbage bin can look so interesting?

I have never warmed up to the use of “black swan” to signify an improbable but impactful event.

The life of a sea squirt has an important lesson for data science.

Whenever two organisations come together to share data, we have a data integration problem.

I had a chance to visit Westpac in early May as part of our agency’s Know Your Industry initiative.

Cinemas everywhere have little hesitation in making movie-goers sit through 15-20 minutes of advertising before each movie.