People often make irrational decisions. An article in Quanta Magazine describes how too much choice can often be to blame. The article also discusses the attempts of neuroscientists to understand the mechanics underlying irrational decisions. Technologies like functional MRI (fMRI) are driving the emerging field of neuroeconomics. Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher claims to be ...aiming for a … [Read more...]
R Notebooks
RStudio have announced R Notebooks. This adds an interactive execution model to R Markdown documents. In R Markdown documents text and code can be mixed to create active documents that perform and update analyses as they are run. However, R Markdown documents are executed in batch mode. This makes them more suitable for reporting than for teaching and investigation. With the introduction of R … [Read more...]
AI-first world
In his recent keynote Google CEO Sundar Pichai said In fact, when I look at where computing is headed, it's clear to me that we are evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world. Devices like Amazon's Echo and Google Home are "always-on" intelligent assistants designed to sit quietly and await our bidding. As the devices recede into the background it's the AI-powered services that will … [Read more...]
Machine learning at scale on HDInsight using Microsoft R Server at Spark
Microsoft have published an article on how to conduct a decision tree analysis using Microsoft R Server and Spark on Azure HDInsight. Using four 8-core 28Gb RAM (D4) worker nodes they were able to process 170 million rows (37GB) in around 5 minutes. This was 20% faster than using Spark's own MLLib libraries---although there's no comparison with Spark's newer ML libraries. … [Read more...]
Latin American Leadership and Effective Governance seminar
I gave a talk last month on interactive decision making at a Leadership and Effective Governance seminar run by George Washington University. The seminar is aimed at Latin American politicians and civil servants. My talk covered topics such as stakeholder analysis game theory confrontation analysis The techniques were illustrated by examples of confrontations facing the new government of … [Read more...]