Mental Models 4 Life

One of my PhD students has just released a paper titled Spatially Invariant Unsupervised 3D Object Segmentation Using Graph Neural Networks.

A friend sent me Safi Bahcall’s book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Disease, and Transform Industries” a couple of months ago.

A little while ago, a colleague asked why we as a research community care so much about cryptography systems that are based on lattice problems.

While going through some old documents this week, I rediscovered a set of notes I took while reading Michael Porter many years ago.

I am sometimes asked what is the difference between Machine Learning (ML) and X, where X is one of a number of things like Statistics, Evolutionary Computing, Control Theory, etc.

Boredom is the mother of creativity: fun that doesn’t cost a cent.

My former postdoc Lingjuan Lyu has been working with a few research collaborators on a fair and privacy-preserving federated deep-learning framework and a paper describing the framework has just been published at the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Dist…

When the GFC happened, I was managing so little money the whole thing was a non-event for me.

Effective decision-making is one of those skills that separates good leaders from the more ordinary leaders.

January: Bailey injured his dew claw (again) at the dog park on new year’s day.

I was recently asked a question on what are the weaknesses of Agile as a framework, and what do we have to do to work around those weaknesses.

Another day, another paper, this time by my postdoc Lingjuan Lyu and a few collaborators.

A few ANU colleagues and I have just completed a paper on a suffix-tree-based algorithm for computing the longest common substring of two strings in a privacy-preserving manner.

The Networks scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s latest book The Formula: The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail is a cracker.

Tom Hamer, one of the honours students I co-supervise with Kerry Taylor, has written a paper on a Private Digital Identity System on Blockchain.

When proponents of index investing talk about the benefits of index investing, several things tend to come to the fore: share markets tend to rise over the long term, and dollar-cost averaging is a low-risk strategy to get the market returns; most active…

Data Scientists, because of the versatility and range of their skills, can suffer from the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing a career.

Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) is one of those problems that still doesn’t have a solid and widely accepted mathematical definition, perhaps because the problem of Record Linkage itself, especially the kind that doesn’t reduce to supervised lear…

Outside Agile, Strategy is probably the most (ab)used word in the modern corporation.

I have always intuitively believe in the virtue of sleep.

Apparently, everything that has the word Blockchain attached to it is now news-worthy.

I have gone through quite a few articles over the last 12 months in my attempt to get a proper understanding of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes.

The Peter Principle states that in most hierarchical organisations, there is a natural tendency for employees to rise in the management hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence.

We have all read about network effects and how they underlie the business models of fast-growing and high-margin companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Apple.

The best investments I have made over the years tend to be the ones where the investment case is really simple and obvious, requiring only basic common sense and at best secondary-school arithmetic.

Many beginning researchers find it hard to cope with the sheer amount of reading they have to do to come up to speed in a certain technical field, and the issue is often compounded by the “lacking the prerequisites to the read the prerequisites” problem d…

I have just returned from my annual pilgrimage to Singapore and here are some interesting optics that caught my attention during this trip.

There is a lot of work in the data management community that looks at data quality as a first-class problem, capable of being solved largely as an independent problem that can then benefit many downstream systems.

Bloom Filters is a popular technique for privacy-preserving record linkage.

It’s not always easy for a technically competent data scientist to make the transition to a data science leadership role.

I moved the white clouds into a bigger pond under the deck in preparation for the onslaught of Canberra winter.

I planted some daffodil seeds in mid June.

I am reading Robert Kuok’s autobiography and these two paragraphs from the chapter Vintage 1963 jumped out at me.

Financial intelligence is not an easy area to get into.

As is well known, the Paillier encryption system supports addition of two encrypted numbers and the scalar multiplication of a constant and an encrypted number.

April May June

Back in Sep 2015, I wrote this article outlining the investment case for SJM Holdings.

Blind carbon copy (bcc) in emails is one of those dangerous features that has significant potential to cause harm when used inappropriately, either by intention or by accident.

A challenge with fraud-detection problems in many cases is the lack of any meaningful collection of labelled data for supervised-learning approaches to work.

Since starting my part-time appointment as an associate professor at the Australian National University, I have been thinking about spending more time on fundamental research.

2018 Canberra Balloon Spectacular — a 5:30am start to the day but the view was worth it.

Identify a problem that would benefit from using R Read An Introduction to R by Venables, Smith, and the R Core Team Work on solving the identified problem using R Get access to resources with lots of R code templates for solving different problems (e.g.

What is the optimal way to introduce and embed analytics in an organisation?

I recently concluded a two-year stint managing a team of ten highly skilled analytics professionals spread across three different locations.

Can you see the baby fry in the photo?

Dan Ariely is always worth reading and I picked up The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty over the Christmas break and it did not disappoint.

After a long bull market, most investors are sitting on healthy gains and a fair few are probably twiddling their thumbs wondering what to do next, if anything.

My colleagues and I have just published on arXiv a simple but highly effective Entity Resolution algorithm that can scale to billions of records and handle significant data quality issues.

There are many gems in the book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For a Complex World, written by General Stanley McChrystal and co-authors based on McChrystal’s experience leading the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan and Iraq fight…

Meet Bailey from Queanbeyan.