Big Learning Systems

I was in a talk from Tyson Condi, who is a very smart guy. He used to work at Microsoft and now moved to Academia. He is a faculty at UCLA. His talk is from the engeering side of Machine Learning. He introduces his work at Microsoft on the project YARN, which is a java library that split up the two major functionalities of the jobTracker, resource management and job scheduling/monitoring, into separate daemons.

Content-Based Cross-Domain Recommendations Using Segmented Models

I was in the talk from Sherry, my distinguished colleague, who just had an excellent internship at LinkedIn. In the talk, she introduces the work she was doing at LinkedIn on cross-domain recommendation. She and her collaborators at LinkedIn have experimented their logistic regression algorithm based on both online metrics, such as precison, recall and accuracy, and online metrics using A/B testing. Great Work! I hope I would have such a valuable intern experience in the next couple of years.

WithU - Collective Support System for People with Disease

After my surgery, I had a long time of depression thinking about dying, crying at midnight, complaining the unfairness, questioning the meaning of life. That was very hard for me cause very few friends know about my situation, and I did not tell any of my family. So I went through all alone. Fortunetely, I decided to carry on my life. When looking back this period of time. I was hoping that I could have some friends with similar situations so we could talk, support each other, since it looks like we then would have the same feelings getting through pains. I then made one goal in my bucket list to create a system for people with disease (PSD). I am so happy that this goal is coming closer each day as I have convinced a group of people working on it together. They are nice people with mercy to those people, and with creative thinkings. We have come up the proposal for it. I have attached the proposal for this project.
See the presentation at
http://prezi.com/yorpxqg601so/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Interesting project! Really hope it's being developed, being used and being helpful to PSD!

Introduction

General social network like facebook or twitter provide people a good way to communicate with each other. However, they don’t provide a strong community for people with serious disease (PSD), to share their similar experience and hence to solve the problems. We want to build a more purposeful social network for people who are experiencing health difficult problems. This kind of people could suffer a lot with both physical and mental problems. Sharing the experience could help them better go through the similar situation. Besides, people who have financial ability could be more easily encouraged to provide funding support to others under the similar health problems.

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Purpose

Our project goal is to design and implement a collective support web site for PSD. The website will allow them to guide, help and support each other emotionally and financially, such as encouraging others, and making donations to fund other members who can not afford paying, for example: procedures costs. And we provide some functions to help plan their limited time.

Targeted Audience

People who are experiencing serious health problems.

Functions:

As the purpose of this website is to provide emotional support for PSD, we would like to have particular functions to acknowledge that. Given people in most common scenarios also require financial support, we believe the web application will be of great help if it provides functions to enable fund raising. We also believe that functions aiding both processes should not be completely separated. It would be even better these functions interact or associate with each other and thus to make the users in the website more real and closer.

The web application will be a social website. Users of this website would get their own pages, like Facebook. However, instead of showing the timeline of each user like Facebook, we will show information more related to our particular users. We have thought about what people care about if they are with serious diseases. Before coming up with the solutions to this question, we need to understand their needs within information technology domain. Although this should be collected through surveys or interviews, our team has been brainstorming the ideas about what our users could have. To know better about users, though it is hard to simulate their feelings or actions, we wished to image as close as possible what they are thinking about and how they will deal with this suffering time.

1. Story Sharing

At beginning, it would be very hard to acknowledge that they are dying. PSDs will be always intertwined  with questions like ‘Is this really going to happen to me’, ‘Why me?’. It’s very natural for people to complain and to question the meaning of life. PSD have the need to vent their emotion. They may either go to their families or friends to find comforts from them. But what if that’s not enough, what if friends or families are not around, or what if PSD think they are not supposed to know it. Maybe other PSDs have the struggling  feelings in common, so they  understand better and can get more comforts from each other. We would like to ask the users to share their stories, and receive comments of comforts from others.  In this way, they will relieve from the despair and gain hope for life.

2. Future Letter

The next step is to say goodbye to all the beloved friends and families, although it’s always the hardest. PSDs are hesitated to tell them because they could not imagine how their beloved could bear the loss of them through the rest days. But they need it anyway. We are thinking about having a future letter function, so that PSDs can write letters in advance to their friends and families. Future letters could help PSDs write down the feelings when they have trouble telling their situations at that moment. Or it can record words that PSDs want to tell their beloved in the future. When their friends and families receive the letters in the future, words from past would be a comfort. Besides, after coming up this function, we think it would also be nice to write future letters to themselves, maybe as a reward after every deathly operation or treatment.

3. Bucket-List

PSD are dying, but they are still living and moving on with their limited time. Now it could be the best time for them to re-visit their goals in life and those got remained and persisted in the rest could be on the bucket-list. PSDs would take advantage of the bucket-list to write down their remaining wishes. The bucket-lists give PSDs hope and energy to live the best in the rest.

4. Joint Calendar

As mentioned above, each operation or treatment for PSDs could lead to death. Everyone fears it and feels helpless about it. There is nothing to do with it except one being strong. We understand that one could be strong for many reasons, for their families or their friends. One could also be strong by receiving the support from their online peers. We want to implement a joint calendar in the website, so the users could share their important dates on it. All users could see it and join to support. In this way, we could build up an optimistic and collective support system for PSD.

5. Fund Raising

Although money is not important at this point, some of PSDs do need money to pay for their medical bills. We would like to implement fund raising in the system, so every PSD in poverty gets to raise funding from the crowd to continue or conduct their treatment or surgery. The functions above are making this person more real and more favorable to the audience as PSD are building their own figures through their posts or interactions with others. To some point, we believe PSD would have more willingness to donate than others since they know better about the feelings and money are not crucial to them in some case.

To sum up, in order to provide support from crowd to PSD, we want to have five main functions, including story sharing, fund raising, future letter, bucket-list, and joint calendaring, ordered by the priority of implementation, given the limited time in the final project.

Standards

For the front-end part, we plan to use HTML and CSS. And we will use JavaScript to implement the functions.

1. HTML

HTML gives authors the methods to publish online documents with headings, text, tables, lists and photos, design forms for conducting transactions with remote services, for use in searching for information, making reservations and ordering products, retrieve online information via hypertext links or at the click of a button, and include video clips, sound clips, and other applications directly in their documents.

For our project, we will use HTML to design the structures of the social network pages, embed images and objects, create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text and add scripts written in languages like JavaScript.

2. CSS

CSS can be used to describe the presentation of Web pages, including colors, layout, and fonts. It allows us to adapt the presentation to different types of devices, such as large screens, small screens, or printers. CSS is independent of HTML and can be used with any XML-based markup language.

CSS makes sites clear and stylish. We will use CSS to share style sheets across pages, and tailor pages to different environments, which reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content and make it easier to maintain our sites.

3. ECMAScript (JavaScript)

ECMAScript is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web, in the form of several well-known implementations such as JavaScript.

With JavaScript, we will write functions that are embedded in or included from the HTML pages that interact with DOM of the pages. We will use JavaScript to implement the functions in many ways. By using JavaScript we can add animation of page elements, fading them in and out, resizing them and moving them, or append some interactive content to the pages.

Research Perspective from Google

October 2 @CMU

I was in the talk from Alfred Z. Spector, Vice President of Research & Special Initiatives, Google. He talks about some of their key research initiatives, projects in Natural Language, Vision, User Experience, and Systems. I am quite interested in their efforts in education domain, as that's my primary research interest. He introduced their crowd education platform CourseBuilder, which from my believe, is an excellent product, even better than Coursera, which is overwhelmingly popular recently. It does not have better UI or functions compared to Coursera, but I appreciate the idea that the best way of learning it is to teach it. So everyone is encouraged to create a whole course of their particular expertise, which sounds more interesting to me, as in Coursera, only distinguished lecturers with the support from world class university could develop a course. In interesting question is that which one will succeed in the end, CourseBuilder or Coursera, collective intelligence or individual expert?