Effective decision-making is one of those skills that separates good leaders from the more ordinary leaders. In this post, I summarise a few lessons I learned from good leaders I have had the privilege to work for in the past. These decision-making principles have served me well in the last couple of years as I … More Some Decision-Making Principles
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
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
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 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
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
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
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?
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
Mental Models 4 Life 