Internet Of Things

An Internet of Things is an interesting concept. However, quite open ended and still very much an emerging area. The idea is also about making smarter cloud driven applications to ubiquitously find things in general. A thing may be something tangible for enhancement towards smarter living. In some ways, making lives easier and yet becoming ubiquitous in our every day lives. Using the Internet to make things more connected. Things here could be any concept - a device, a service, or even an abstraction of some kind to conceptualize data in some useful way. Ordinarily it requires some form of smart identity profiles similar in respects to the idea of RFIDs. Making things smarter means such concepts become more accessible and extensible as resources. In semantic web, things and concepts hold separate meanings. However, the same approach can be applied to the Internet of Things as well. The interaction can be seen in a distributed computing context as well with rich information flows even in real-time. The domain context is extremely broad and is valuable in areas of mission-critical applications. They also enable smart city life where almost every device or gadget becomes alive from embedded intelligence with a constant stream of data without requiring significant human intervention. Obviously, in this regard even the most mundane functionality such as light switches can be made complex by their embedded circuitry to enable them for such an ideal. There are also security risks for making everything enabled for privacy concerns in general. Such self-controlled intelligence can also make people lose a sense of control of their lives. There is also a need for more efforts towards a formal policy, protocol or framework to allow for the concerns to be tackled and a seamless integration process.

Docker

Building to linux containers makes portability and deployment easier with Docker. The approach is to build applications inside isolated software containers for automated deployments to cloud environments. Thus, easing packaging of application and their dependencies within virtual containers that can run as isolated instances on environments with different linux distributions. The engine has many points of integrations with various infrastructure libraries and frameworks.   It is obviously an alternative to the standard virtualization approach in the market. One aspect to the project that is core to the ethos is that features take a back seat over quality. The tool was developed as part of the dotCloud PaaS project. The approach to lightweight portable applications that can run in-container means better options for scalability, portability, and lower overhead costs, at same time easing the process of maintenance between physical and cloud architectures. The approach is in some ways similar to Solaris Zones. However, in Docker the underlining approach is on linux containers. Rather than building applications to a system software, one then builds to a container. This container has no OS but is able to share the OS from its host. Such containers are faster and less resource intensive than standard virtual machines as far as one limits to a single host to provide the shared OS. The launch time is also improved from a matter of several minutes to fraction of a few seconds. The complexity of configurations is wrapped around an interface abstraction. They have become quite appropriate for mission-critical applications. Initially, supporting Linux distributions only, the project has ventured into cross platform support as well with use of hypervisor.

Docker Developer Tools:
Flynn
Deis
Dokku
Kubernetes
Panamax
Shipyard
Drone
Serf
Fig
CoreOS

Semantic Web For Idea Creation

Companies face continuous pressures from the outside in order to function. They also have to keep abreast to the changing tides. Often having a strategy for defining a competitive advantage for a distinctive product and services offering keeps a company on target for consumer demand and profitability against competitors vying for market share. Progressive research and engineering of new ideas can be core aspects of a company's strategic motives for staying competitive in the market. Semantic web can be one such option in developing knowledge engineered solutions to harness better ideas to develop more tangible insights, to represent such knowledge, as well as to discover new knowledge for future which could even come handy for business planning. They could even help in building rich brainstorming ideas with clearly defined contextual maps as well as more constructive ways to backtrack.  Such approaches could even provide insights for companies to better manage their existing resources and business functions in order to identify cost efficiency, for meeting targets, as well as enable more collaboration between internal departments. Furthermore, such approaches could come handy when developing design ideas for specific projects like: logo and identity creation, advertising campaigns, web design, market research campaigns, development of new business ideas, re-engineering of existing platforms, and across the whole idea generation process. They could even come in handy for pharmaceutical industries mining for medical drugs which may require multiple stages of clinical trials as well as a way of effectively backtracking through such trials. Semantically defined idea creation can come in handy in a multitude of domain contexts where there is a clear gain from representation of knowledge.

Orange Is The New Black

Orange is the New Black is an interesting autobiographical story of a woman's life behind bars, her struggles to fit in and adapt, as well as the way she grows tougher through each passing day. Every episode draws a new experience and a distraction from inmates. Often allowing one to understand the unique ways in which prisons for women function as well as the social dysfunctions within the system both between inmates as well as the prison system as a whole. The format uses random character flashbacks to connect the many plot lines within the episodes as a way of providing contextual cues. With each season the intensity of prison environment is explored as well as characters of inmates appears to enfold as relationships are broken and reformed with the outside world. However, it is questionable as to how long such a prison environment story can be explored before it veers on repetition and over extended plot lines.

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is a provocative tale told from multiple vantage points for conquest of empires and houses trying to attain hold to lands and throne. Every episode is an explosive drama in its entirety with some superb plot lines. However, the show does provide for some questionable viewing especially with the depictions of characters and scenes. Yet, at same time they can appear quite intriguing in the graphic nature of exploring issues related to social hierarchy, religion, loyalty, corruption, crime, war, punishment, and specific personal struggles of each character. At times, the scenes do converge on almost making one squirm. While, every episode attempts to draw a packed full of drama from start to finish. The fantasy drama is loosely based on the story lines from "A Song of Ice and Fire" novel, which it seems still has a lot more to come before the whole series comes to an end.  The story contrasts in much the similar way to the High Medieval Age of Western Europe as well as sharing similarities from past English history. 

CMIS, JCR, and OSGI

Content frameworks for building content management systems have been around for ages and there is a continuous drive for portability as well as huge feature sets. The complexities and approaches are numerous. There is also no one purpose solution that could fit for all problem cases. Often there is a need to develop customized solutions for specific use cases where flexibility and extensibility become key areas for exploration. Even the way content data is defined for storage can be a key element of design as it can dictate capacity for optimization and searchability. There have been many standards that have come about to provide for commonality, integration, and reuse across data repositories. The below diagram illustrates the state of play in the content services and repository management.

JCR and CMIS comparison

ECM Vendors

JCR
Jackrabbit
ModeShape
Chemistry
Sling
Stanbol
ManifoldCF
CouchDB

Advertising 2014

Online advertising is an ever changing market for consumerism with constant buzz in technological innovations, often disseminated through big data processes for recommendations. Watching the digital trends is important as it provides for the most effective ways of reaching an audience with advertising campaigns. However, advertising online is directly related to the way consumers relay their interests and through the different technology drivers. The shifts in trends are often the big indicators for launching advertising campaigns for mass digital appeal. 

The following are a few key trends that are emerging online:

Real-Time Bidding

Native Advertising

Video Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Localized and Geo-targeted Advertising

Mobile Advertising

Data Science ToolBox

In a recent meetup, the exploration into building one's own data science toolbox was covered alongside Spark compared to the standard Hadoop MapReduce approaches. There are now slides available for the toolbox presentation which were aptly popular with many invitees. There are also interesting focused courses in data science available on coursera.

Data Science Event
data science toolbox
building a data science toolbox
Data Science Specialization