The WhimWham

I hereby present, without comment, the first official Tron Legacy trailer:

(“…For Dummies” was already taken. No offence intended, of course…)

The broad topic of my honours research at present is that of feature selection. This may sound horribly obscure and esoteric (and in many ways it is) but it’s also quite an everyday concept if we consider some loose analogies.

Feature selection is related to machine learning, where the goal is essentially to design algorithms that will allow a computer to learn concepts based on input data. (Why? This can be applied to anything from spam filtering to medical diagnosis to astronomy to any other number of fields.) A close analogy to machine learning is the process of teaching humans, especially children: by exposing a child to multiple examples of the same type of “thing” (e.g. dogs) and also contrasting that with multiple examples of a different (but related) type of thing (e.g. cats), the child begins to develop concepts that relate to each type of thing, allowing him or her to then associate new instances with these concepts. Dogs and cats are no longer mysterious entities but rather very specific types of things where each individual animal can now be understood as belonging to one of two groups.

But what makes a dog a dog and not a cat? Both have four legs, two eyes, a mouth, a nose and so on — these features are irrelevant when considering the differences between dogs and cats, and so we can safely tune them out without adversely affecting the learning outcome. This is the essence of feature selection.
(continue reading…)

Welcome to the first post of the (new) WhimWham!

The intention of this blog is threefold:

1. to process my thoughts on the relationship between science and religion;
2. to document my ideas on computer and cognitive science; and
3. to rave about a few of my other favourite things.

These three themes will, of course, intertwine on most occasions.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time knows that this is not actually the first post. But the old incarnation was too unfocused and self-indulgent — I want this blog to be an exploration of ideas, not a LiveJournal-style personal diary.

In any case, I intend to post at least twice a week. So, stay tuned…