2019 – A Year in Photos
December 31, 2019
Agile, Waterfall, Wagile, and All That
December 21, 2019
I was recently asked a question on what are the weaknesses of Agile as a framework, and what do we have to do to work around those weaknesses. This is a real if somewhat unusual question, and I can imagine many people who grew up with traditional waterfall project-management methodologies asking that question from time … More Agile, Waterfall, Wagile, and All That
Distributed Privacy-Preserving Prediction
November 3, 2019
Another day, another paper, this time by my postdoc Lingjuan Lyu and a few collaborators. Here’s the abstract: In privacy-preserving machine learning, individual parties are reluctant to share their sensitive training data due to privacy concerns. Even the trained model parameters or prediction can pose serious privacy leakage. To address these problems, we demonstrate a … More Distributed Privacy-Preserving Prediction
Accurate and Efficient Privacy-Preserving String Matching
October 20, 2019
A few ANU colleagues and I have just completed a paper on a suffix-tree-based algorithm for computing the longest common substring of two strings in a privacy-preserving manner. Here’s the abstract: The task of calculating similarities between strings held by different organizations without revealing these strings is an increasingly important problem in areas such as … More Accurate and Efficient Privacy-Preserving String Matching
The Success Formula
September 8, 2019
The Networks scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s latest book The Formula: The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail is a cracker. His six laws of success summarise more than a decade of research into the science of success, in particular how the social network in which we live and operate, with its many kinds of relationships … More The Success Formula
Private Digital Identity on Blockchain
August 27, 2019
Tom Hamer, one of the honours students I co-supervise with Kerry Taylor, has written a paper on a Private Digital Identity System on Blockchain. I don’t yet completely understand the paper, but the parts that I do understand have some pretty cool ideas. Here’s the paper: Here’s the Abstract of the paper to pique your … More Private Digital Identity on Blockchain
Thoughts on Index Investing
August 25, 2019
When proponents of index investing talk about the benefits of index investing, several things tend to come to the fore: share markets tend to rise over the long term, and dollar-cost averaging is a low-risk strategy to get the market returns; most active fund managers underperform index investing over the medium to long term, after … More Thoughts on Index Investing
What Kind of a Data Scientist Are You?
June 30, 2019
Data Scientists, because of the versatility and range of their skills, can suffer from the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing a career. According to Barry Schwartz, a strategy for good decision-making when there is an abundance of choices will involve these steps, executed in a way that takes careful consideration of all … More What Kind of a Data Scientist Are You?
Linking Integer Records: The Simplest Case of PPRL
May 26, 2019
Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) is one of those problems that still doesn’t have a solid and widely accepted mathematical definition, perhaps because the problem of Record Linkage itself, especially the kind that doesn’t reduce to supervised learning through an abundance of labelled matches, still doesn’t have a solid mathematical definition despite thousands of papers published … More Linking Integer Records: The Simplest Case of PPRL
Strategy: The Art of Creating Power
April 22, 2019
Outside Agile, Strategy is probably the most (ab)used word in the modern corporation. I used to have a very basic definition of what a strategy encapsulates, which has four components: an analysis of the current state and how we got to where we are; a statement of the end goal we want to achieve; a … More Strategy: The Art of Creating Power
Mental Models 4 Life 