There are many gems in the book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For a Complex World, written by General Stanley McChrystal and co-authors based on McChrystal’s experience leading the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting Al-Qaeda. One that stuck with me is a small section called The Need-To-Know Fallacy. … More The Need-To-Know Fallacy
Meet Bailey from Queanbeyan. It’s a bit embarrassing now but, twelve months ago, I was an insecure pup and often cry and chew whenever the adults are away. My coat was in pretty patchy condition too. Dad likes to show me these photos to remind me of my humble beginnings. But luckily for me Aunt … More One Year of Bailey Baloney
Many of my most successful data science projects happen by accident. You know, the little skunkworks that arose from a serendipitous hallway conversation where an important and urgent business problem meets a half-baked analytical idea. With a suitable dash of data and the right mix of office politics and corporate kung fu, a baby data-science … More Agile Data Science: On Opportunism
Having spent nearly a decade studying the design and implementation of declarative programming languages in a previous life, I get a bit frustrated whenever I see people getting religious about programming languages and platforms. In the data science circle, an active discussion is around Scala (on Spark) vs SQL (on parallelised relational databases). They are … More The Missing Data Science Language?
Judging by the muted response, the market is effectively assigning a near-zero probability on the threat of a war on the Korean peninsular. I think that is likely misguided. There is certainly very low probability of an US-initiated preemptive strike — the strength of the soft institutions in the US will guarantee that, regardless of … More The Real North Korean Threat?
Congratulations to the ACSRI-led team for winning $50-million in funding from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science to set up a new Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre in Australia. It’s great to see the Australian government putting resources into a key research area that is increasing in importance as the world becomes more and … More Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre
I put together this simple mapping of corporate leaders as a half-joke last week. I think there’s something in it for everyone. (I’m an ex-consultant so naturally I think anything that requires more than two dimensions is unnecessarily complicating things. That’s another half-joke. :P) Joke aside, there is a serious dimension to the post. Much … More Organisational Psychopaths
Most data science projects are doomed to failure before they even start. There are a couple of reasons. The aspiring data scientist and management may be drawn to a sexy problem rather than an important problem. The full range of data required to do a complete analysis may be inaccessible or even non-existent. And even … More Agile Data Science: Don’t Let Your Model Die in a Powerpoint Presentation
In a previous post on the problem of detecting complex financial crimes, I described the following basic technology framework for financial intelligence units (FIUs) and their partner agencies and reporting entities (REs) to engage in collaborative but privacy-preserving and distributed risk modelling using confidential computing technologies. In this post, I describe a few concrete algorithms that … More Practical Algorithms for Distributed Privacy-Preserving Risk Modelling
Mental Models 4 Life 