Werner Vogels Talk

Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, delivered a talk to the 12 people who showed up for CS 309 class at Stanford a few days ago… he had previously been a researcher at Cornell for 12 years. Seemed a very down-to-earth guy and talked freely about something I had heard of before but never realized the importance of: Amazon’s services to businesses, including the Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud. Why is it a big deal? Because startups (and there was one there that backed his claim up) will never have to deal with infrastructure growth pains again… Amazon spent $2 billion building their data centers, and essentially they’re allowing you to rent virtual machines and storage space on-the-fly, meaning you only pay for what you use, and you can instantly scale up from 1 to a few hundred servers… with prices in the tens of cents/hour, it’s very impressive.

Not to mention Amazon Historical Pricing, which is a statistician’s dream (I spent an entire day trying to find sales & pricing data for pharmaceuticals for a statistics paper, only to find them in a yearly publication known as ‘the Red Book’ in the Med School library).

After the talk, I got a chance to ask him why you could sort by average customer rating with book searches, but not DVDs. He said it was possibly just an oversight, and asked me to email him.  Update: This seems to be possible now.

A few months ago I met with my friend Howard Shen who just finished up his MBA @ MIT and asked him about how Amazon’s warehouses work. He explained that there’s no classification system – items are placed randomly on shelves and employees simply scan the item and the item’s location into the database… when an order needs to be filled, you simply look up the number in the database and scan the item to make sure it’s correct. They measure efficiency in terms of how many errors they are between the database and the ‘physical’ reality.

the Gyrobot

The Segway is neat but too expensive (even Trevor Blackwell’s version)… but two wheels are redundant, no? Problem is unicycles are incredibly hard to balance – it apparently takes months to learn. Though you might be able to use the precession of gyroscopes to stabilize it when not in motion like these guys are doing. Or use a spherical/ball motor, except that they don’t exist outside of research. This is another approach, which I still have to read up on, but looks very neat:

Which gets me into recumbent bicycles, which hold the land-speed record for human-powered vehicles. While this is a regular bike, Olympic cyclist John Howard set a record back in 1985 going at an insane 152 MPH; if that sounds hard, he was helped by the fact that the vehicle he was trailing eliminated essentially all the wind resistence, as seen below (a similar technique is used in professional cycling, allowing the person in front to break the wind for you):

reminds me of the movie “the World’s Fastest Indian.”

Defeating Captchas

So if you’ve been on the web recently, you’ve probably seen something like this prompting you to enter the text before the site grants you access:

known as CAPTCHA’s, they are a form of reverse Turing tests meant to identify an entity as a person or a ‘dumb’ machine based on their capabilities. Seems to have originated with Max Levchin when he was trying to combat spammers on PayPal. But I was puzzled when I was prompted to solve one when I was uninstalling a piece of spyware on an old computer – why would they bother to ask me? It was later that Jacob elucidated the motivation for me: malicious bots on the internet can bypass the CAPTCHAs by simply defering it to a human on the other end of some screen wanting access to typically a porn/gambling site on the internet. The human solves it, it takes the input from them and sends it to the site the bot needs access to, and presto, problem solved.

It’s essentially what’s become known as a ‘man-in-the-middle’ attack to cryptography people… but it extends to other disciplines – such as the military. The example I remember is of the South African air force trying to detect whether a plane flying overhead is a friend or foe – because enemy planes can try to act as hidden communication intermediaries between the ground system and other South African aircraft, essentially passing the outgoing communications of one to the incoming channel of the other, and vice versa.

My Summer at the $100 Laptop Project

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend 3 months @ MIT working on the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) this summer. I was joined by a cadre of four other students from all over, including:

* Jacob Russ, Harvard, obsessive digital photographer
* Samat Jain, Columbia, taught me half of everything I know about Python
* Aaron Burton, Carnegie-Mellon
* Manu Kumar, Delhi Institute of Technology

I was working under Jim Gettys (co-authored the X desktop system) and Ivan Krstic (a Harvard stop-out) for most of the time; started off doing stress-testing, moved on to develop an email client which was cut off in favor of a webmail client, and then spent the rest of the time learning Python in order to do some crypto library work.

Nicolas Negroponte was the head of the initiative but as his assistant liked to say, he “spends 95% of his time travelling” so I only got to see him twice. Mary-Lou Epstein was the LCD monitor wizard who was in Taiwan half the time, but brought back the first demos of the high-res, non-volatile (meaning you turn off the power, you can still read it) monochrome/color LCD. We spent most of our time working with the prototype motherboards shipped over from Taiwan…

Spent our retreat at Barry’s house kayaking on the Charles River. Played Aerobee with the guys in a government lawn which we were subsequently kicked off of by a European security guard who couldn’t pronounce his negatives (You can play here…-OK… no, no, you can take pictures here). Two-hour lunch breaks at Anna’s discussing everything from spam to Chiapas, Mexico to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict… free passes to the Siggraph conference. Free pizza on Fridays with the rest of the office Spent some time roaming around MIT’s campus, tunneling through their underground catacombs, and got to see the fire truck on top of the dome to commemorate September 11th (there is no way to gain access to the roof – I’ve checked – but my friend Zaina thinks they must have climbed up and used ropes/pulleys).