07 March 2018

Reimagining the Suburban Yard to Reverse Pollinator and Insect Decline

A Possible Pollinator Solution and Other Things I Learned from My Nature Yard



I wanted to share some things that I learned from growing native plants in my yard. This will be about what I learned about nature and some discoveries about how we might rethink the idea of the suburban yard from an alternate land management perspective.


My ideas and approach come from my childhood. I grew up in a bucolic setting in a heavily wooded area. My mother’s side of my family is Pennsylvania Dutch and we carried on some of those traditions in collecting wild berries for jams and pies and growing our own food in gardens. Another thing we would do was transplant plants from the woods to gardens, although I now realize this was probably not really a good thing to do. I was different from other kids, more curious. I thought plants were beautiful and learned to identify them. I still remember the thrill of finding large patches of native orchids. I was a general science geek and over the years I got distracted by chemistry and eventually computers which lead to my career as a software developer.





Years ago I purchased my first and to date only home. Initially I mowed my lawn and maintained it in the spirit of the American suburbs. My love of native plants never really died out and became rekindled by the local flora. Instead of transplanting plants I merely collected a few seeds here and there and started planting them in pots and the garden areas of my yard. Over time I let them take over my whole yard and what I came to see was amazingly beautiful.


Please note that I took all the photographs in this post and with one exception, try to guess which one, they were all taken in my yard and thus they document the biodiversity that I created. You can click each photo to enlarge.



Aggressive Native Plants Will Own Your Yard


My yard became something of a Darwinian botanical Battle Royale. As I planted various species of native plants and spread their seeds in my yard, I realized that given the soil and varying climatic aspects of the environment of my yard, some plants tended to be dominant. Unfortunately some of the more interesting plants got outcompeted by the more robust plants. These plants are perhaps less glamorous and while they are native plants and in some cases represent the natural cultural heritage of the region, Arlington County Virginia considers them weeds. The upside is if you are lucky enough to live in a municipality that respects science, nature and its regional natural cultural heritage, you can with little watering and some periodic weed pulling of invasives create an environment where native species can dominate your property.



Bees Are Very Diverse



If you follow the news you have no doubt heard about the plight of the bees, for brevity’s sake the beepocalypse. What you may not realize is that the bees whose plight wins the attention of the media are an alien European species. They are even trucked around like cattle to almond groves and other places and are made of use to pollinate the flowering plants that feed us, excluding the wind pollinated plants like wheat and oats. In these stories we contemplate the Matrix like gruel that humanity will be subjected to when the pollinators die off and we only have the wind pollinated species for food. What they never tell you is that there are another set of bees constituting over a thousand species that might be able to step up and take on that role. Maybe they could make the difference in pollination. What would happen if we give them the habitat and opportunity to flourish? Maybe we wouldn’t even need to create Black Mirror style robobees.


In my native plant yard I saw many species over the years and in the summer of 2016 it seemed that hundreds maybe thousands of bees visited my yard in a day. At times it was like a small cloud of dozens of tiny bees floating above each of the plants in addition to all of the other bees. That year in my yard the pollinator crisis seemed to be a myth as I saw the exact opposite of what I have read about. Admittedly this is only one observation.





Bees Are Not the Only Pollinators


While this statement might seem somewhat obvious as most people know that Butterflies (Lepidoptera) are also pollinators.





There are also other insects in the Hymenoptera family such as wasps and ants that also pollinate plants.





Additionally some flies (Diptera) are pollinators as well. In fact some plants like the Pawpaw tree, a tree known to my ancestors, with its fleshy colored flowers are dependent on carrion flies and beetle pollinators. People will sometimes hang rotting meat and chicken bones on its branches to attract these pollinators.





Many Things Are Pretending to Be What They Are Not


Deception Might be a Preferred Approach in Nature


In nature insects use mimicry to try to deceive predators and prey. Hemipterta often try to look like parts of a plant, such as thorns or look like insects that are infected with fuzzy white insecticidal fungus.





Lepidoptera will have eye patterns to dissuade predators from sneaking up on them. One even mimics the Monarch Butterfly which is unpalatable due to absorbing milkweed toxins.





Another potential human deception is to try to look like a badass. In the insect world some of biggest badasses are wasps and bees of Hymenoptera who have stingers. So if you want to look like a badass look like a wasp or a bee that can sting you even if you are a wimpy little fly. The bottom left is a moth so even Lepidoptera gets in on this deception. Nature is not without irony the Large headed fly (bottom right) actually lays its eggs in bumble bees and they gestate “alien style”, although apparently do not usually kill their hosts like the aliens.





You’ll Have Lots of Predators


When you create a habitat that attracts a lot of insects it also attracts a lot insect predators. Birds and spiders obviously fall into that category. There are many insects that predate on other insects. Many larva including those of flower flies are predatory. I suspect that yellow larva (bottom right) is waiting for an unsuspecting pollinator. Top left an assassin bug feeds on a flower fly. The two iridescent flies are long legged flies, predators who do elaborate mating dances on leaves throughout the day.





Arachnids Are Sneaky and Exhibit Intelligence and Individualistic Social Behavior


Some spiders employ deceptive hunting techniques. As you can see above there are two crab spiders hiding and blending into the flowers. I don’t know what the longer legged one in the two adjacent pictures is but it seems to be mimicking either a flower or a flower fly which I suspect was one of things it was trying to capture as there were lots of them around the Enchanters Nightshade plants it was hanging from.





Around the time I got my macro lens and started observing the jumping spiders in my yard, I came across an article about the surprising intelligence of the Portia jumping spider. I have to admit they are fun to watch they move incredibly fast and their eye configuration is remarkable with two large eyes in the front and posterior eyes that potentially give them 360 degree vision, just try to imagine your brain processing that perspective. They seem intelligent, it also seemed like they got used to being photographed and went from fleeing me to just ignoring me.





Opiliones aka Daddy Long Legs aka Harvestmen exhibit individualistic social behavior. The photo above shows what is reffered to as loose aggregation social behavior. They would hang out with each other all day long sometimes in clusters of up to 20-30 individuals.





I can’t help but to go on an astrobiological tangent here. If you look at our deep ocean creatures you’ll often find cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc.) and arthropods like crabs and lobsters which are related to our terrestrial arachnids, insects, among others. A recent article talked about the possible ocean and life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. I used to think it would be Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it might have issues of the water being under too high pressure. If complex and even intelligent life were to evolve in these environments it could look similar to life in our oceans.





Cephalopods clearly display intelligence. However, if one were to consider the jumping spider intelligence and individualistic opiliones social behavior this could point to the idea of intelligent social arthropods. Could these species be a possible mirror to what intelligent life might look like deep in these ice moons oceans?





Spiders Seem to Have a Better Understating of Topology than Humans


Ok, I’m going to embellish these a bit. In the top left you can see the conical shape created below the egg sac, probably a trap to funnel prey. However, it’s very much a two manifold exhibiting a local maxima, most of the computer industry is trying to find these places with machine learning. The bottom left shows the Cartesian-esque plane making it locally Euclidean and thus a 2 manifold yet again. The bottom right shows a typical spiders web, this, albeit a bit irregular, exhibits a polar coordinate representation of two dimensional plane, or perhaps a vector field on a two dimensional plane. The spider on the top right sits atop an irregularly spaced two dimensional plane.



Indian Hemp Is an Amazing Plant


It is likely the local Necostins relied on Indian Hemp (Apocynum Cannabinum) for fibers for their bowstrings and maybe for other uses. You can lean more from the film Soft as Silk - Strong as Steel: The living heritage of Apocynum Cannabinum. In fact I would make the case that this plant should be allowed to grow everywhere based on the fact that it is the natural cultural heritage of our region and I know it sounds cheesy but out of respect for those who came before us here on this land.


Ok, Native American pretense and drama aside, there are some very practical reasons to grow Apocynum Cannabinum. Last year it seemed to flower for about six weeks in late spring early summer, which means it supplied six weeks of flowers to support pollinators in that time period while not competing with the late summer plants it grew next to in my yard.





Its strong structure that is comprised of those fibers seems to provide a physical support lattice that benefits other plants. Indian Hemp Apocynum Cannabinum grows to a certain height. Amongst it Jerusalem Artichokes, Wingstem, Hairy Leafcup, and Common Milkweed, grew taller and bloomed later. When I was forced to cut down my yard, I manually removed all of the Indian Hemp first as I had intended to investigate how to extract fibers. I noticed that the other plants seemed to have some physical dependence on the structural support it provided as they immediately fell over. Now I know this is all anecdotal but it really did seem to make a difference. Of course I had to cut down all of the other plants too so who knows how that might have played out. Indian Hemp is related to milkweed, it has a milky sap and the leaves are hydrophobic as you can see in the photo above. This creates significant plant mass that is pretty insect resistant. It’s also a very hardy species so it can probably survive a lot of hardship.





If you look at many of my pictures of insects and spiders it plays the role of the stage for many of them. In fact the jumping spiders seemed to use it as a way to move quickly in three dimensions and to catch ants on it. While, the iridescent long legged flies performed their mating dances on its leaves.





Every Year Brings Something New


Every year in my yard I would see something I had not seen before and in many cases would not see again. One year it was shiny metallic Dog Bane Beetles. Another year it was lots of ants symbiotically tending to a brood of Rhino Thornbugs and aphids the next year. Last year it was lots of jumping spiders, tiny bees, flower files, and lots of milkweed bugs mating. The year before that it was an Opiliones explosion with hundreds of them. I suspect things like predator prey cycles or other factors in climate and the plants and fungus each year affected what I saw. Regardless, it is such a thrill to just experience what a nature yard will throw at you each year. While this year brought me ground dwelling bees and hawks, sadly it also brings me much sorrow and stress.





You Can Create an Amazing Amount of Biodiversity in Even a Tiny Yard


My little yard, less than a quarter acre, supported around 20 species of native plants. This is fairly diverse for such a small yard. But the real diversity came in the form of the visitors especially the terrestrial arthropods, insects and arachnids but also many birds, chipmunks, and rabbits. I am still astounded by what I saw when I would just look out the window or take a few steps out of my front door. The photos here present it and there are many more species that I did not show.



You Can Witness Mysteries of Nature That Even Scientists Don’t Really Understand


Above I mentioned the Loose Aggregation Social behavior of Opiliones. What’s really interesting and maybe a little sad is that scientists don’t really understand this behavior and there are way more questions than answers about the social structure and motivations of these creatures. In a sense this is a true mystery of the universe and it happened one summer in my own back yard. Amazing!





You Can Be a God


I the movie Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors declares himself a god, not the god, but a god. This is due to the fact that he knows everything about the local environment and all events that he has not altered ahead of time. When you plant a yard of native plants you create the natural environment in your yard. You create the opportunity for the most amazing things in nature to exist in your yard. You conjure these things into existence. Ok, it’s an: “if you build it they will come” scenario. In a sense you become a god creating nature. Admittedly a less dramatic perspective is you allow this to happen and the nature already existed. But it’s a fun way to think of it and chances are all the drones living next you are creating the antithesis of this in their chemically treated monoculture yards.





Your Local Municipality Is Most Likely the Enemy of the Environment


Unfortunately many municipalities, in spite of their pro-environmental rhetoric and propaganda, consider dense native plants in residential yards a nuisance. In Arlington County the code enforcement officers refer to it as an “infestation”, which vaguely sounds like saying “witch”. They also call it a public health and safety hazard for which I doubt they have any supporting evidence. If you want to grow a native environment on your personal property, which should be your right, expect to be treated like a criminal and to be met with very parochial attitudes from very ignorant, very arrogant, and very officious local government employees whose salaries are paid for by your tax dollars. Unfortunately, local ordinances effectively promote the use of toxic chemicals in suburban yards to maintain monoculture grass yards over native plants.





The Solution to Our Pollinator Crisis Might Literally Be in Our Backyards


America really needs to rethink its obsession with the chemical treated manicured lawn. Of course this is big business and I would not be surprised that if in aggregate, chemicals, services, equipment and other incidentals would number into the billions of dollars so there are obvious economic incentives to keep this going. But are we really looking at the true costs here. Local municipalities promote this through their ordinances and here in the Chesapeake estuary local citizens and service companies probably contribute tons of pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer run off that ends up in the Chesapeake. My yard used none of these and replaced almost all of the grass with native plants. In my back yard there was exposed dirt at the base of thick swaths of Virginia Knotweed, this is good habitat for native bees. I would also leave tree branches to rot in my yard which also provided habitat for native bees, flies, arachnids, fungus and other things. This also reduced the amount biomass that got fed into the county collection system which is funded at taxpayer expense. It even felt like my air conditioner ran less with tall Jerusalem Artichokes, Hairy Leafcup and Indian Hemp in the front yard and as I mentioned it was amazingly beautiful.





Now of course there are some potential pitfalls that need to be avoided and can be through the management of a nature yard. Things like rat harboration would be a potential issue. I did have a chipmunk burrow, not sure if that counts as a hazard. Especially since chipmunks are super cute and the baby ones are even cuter. Also I would destroy any colonies of wasps or yellow jackets as they are a danger to people unlike many of the native bees which are stingless.


It seems to me if local municipalities would take an active role in encouraging native plant yards and were to create programs to help manage them and inspect them for potential hazards that many pollinators could be added to our local environments. I don’t have any actual numbers so this is guestimate but it seemed like my tiny yard at its height was supporting hundreds maybe even over a thousand flower fly and native bee pollinators and I mean habitat for them to breed as well.


Arlington County and other municipalities could probably add hundreds of thousands if not millions of pollinators locally by allowing and incentivizing these types of yards, even at relatively low rates of adoption. They would benefit the Chesapeake as well from reduced run off. Think of the effect if this approach were to spread through the Mid-Atlantic megalopolis and the other megalopolises in the United States.


Of course this is all conjecture on my part and I am a fan of science, I regret not applying a more scientific method to my yard, but it started as an innocent hobby. This is an area that is under study at the National Arboretum (pdf) and should probably be studied more in situ. Of course how can you when it’s illegal in most municipalities in the U.S.





All Things Come to an End


I have decided to sell and move out of Arlington. Arlington loves McMansions with monoculture lawns and that’s exactly what they will get: one more. I used to be somewhat proud to call myself an Arlingtonian, now I am just disgusted by Arlington County Government. There are some other very annoying issues pertaining to the neighborhood that I live in that I tolerated due to my yard, they are now unbearable. I will try to transplant some of the plants but many will not make it. I will be sad to see the remains of what I built completely destroyed. But in life sometimes you have to let go to move on. I just hope what I did here will make some difference some day.



10 April 2017

The Problem with Today’s Software Thought Leaders



Albert Einstein once said:  "What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right."   The current zeitgeist in software development has this exact same feel.  Our lives as software developers have been shaped by the ideas of many people.  Some of those ideas are right and some are popular.  In time the wrong ideas will fade and the right ideas will dominate.  The problem is: How do we make that determination in the present?  What are the good ideas and what are the bad ideas? 

As software developers our working days usually consist of two types of professional activities, one is obviously creating software (software development) or related technical tasks configuration management, troubleshooting, deployments, etc. and the other is being managed or other duties that relate to providing information (status) to managers (software development management).  The software industry is very young and constantly changing.  At any given moment there are dominant de facto standards that are followed for both software development and its management.  Although it varies across industry sectors, many development practices and tooling have become standards, things like IDE’s, continuous integration, the use of tests and testing frameworks, etc.  Some of these have been influenced by Agile and XP.   On the management side the standard seems to be largely dominated by Agile like scrum and associated practices from XP.

The people who dominate our industry with their ideas could be described as our thought leaders.   Wikipedia has the following definition for thought leader


A thought leader can refer to an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.

The creation of Agile was done in a ceremonious fashion, depicted in an odd ritualistic looking and now famous photograph, by signatories to a manifesto.   Let’s call these people the Agile Thought Leaders or just the Agilistas (since brevity is our thing).  The Agilistas have come to have their ideas dominate the industry and in many cases dictate how we now spend our days. 

It seems that Agile’s rise in popularity is directly proportional to my increasing skepticism about it.  I find myself internalizing that skepticism into frustration and even feelings of anger towards it and the Agilistas.  These feelings become exacerbated by the various incarnations of Agile created by legions of certified Agile consultants that roll into my life to tell me how to spend my days.

Now those feelings are not constructive and one really needs to step back and ask: Why is what I see in the industry wrong and how can I form and a constructive criticism of it? 

I was lucky to come across Greg Wilsons’s talk: "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True".  This is a very enlightening talk which I highly recommend.  In it he looks objectively at how we have arrived where we are and how we can possibly better move forward.   I got the term Agilistas from his talk, although I don’t know if he coined it.

The talk touches on issues that I feel plague both my career and our industry. The problem manifests itself in how we make our decisions about what we do on projects both from the day to day and to the larger industry practices. Many of these decisions seem to be influenced all too often by people who claim some authority, sometimes it’s positional authority, sometimes it’s due to some form of gravitas and all too often right or wrong it boils down to someone’s opinion.  To better illustrate this about our thought leaders let's look at Greg Wilson’s critique of one of Martin Fowler’s publications about DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages).  The relevant quotes with time stamps are as follows:


11:26 [Martin Fowler] is a very deep and careful thinker about software and software design and last summer in IEEE Software he had an article on Domain Specific Languages, this notion that build a tiny language in which the solution to you original problem in easy to express. And in that he said using DSLs leads to improved programmer productivity and better communication with domain experts.

11:51 I want to show you what happened here. One of the smartest guys in our industry made two substantive claims of fact in an academic journal and there is not a single citation in the paper.  Not a single foot note or reference. There is no data to backup this claim. I am not saying that Martin is wrong in his claims. I am saying is what we have here is a Scottish verdict. Courts in Scotland are allowed to return one of three verdicts, guilty, innocent, or not proven.  Arguments in favor of DSLs, arguments in favor of functional programming languages making parallelism easier or Agile development leading to tenfold return on investment or whatever are unproven.  It doesn’t mean they are or wrong, it doesn’t mean they are right, it means that we don’t know and we should be humble enough to admit that.

12:38: Carrying on in that same article "Debate still continues about how valuable DSLs are in practice. I believe that debate is hampered because not enough people know how to develop DSLs effectively."   Crap I think the debate is hampered by low standards of proof.

12:55:  Listening computer scientists argue, listening to software engineers in industry argue, it seems that the accepted standard of proof is I’ve two beers and there’s this anecdote about a tribe in new guinea from one of Scott Berkin’s books that seems to be vaguely applicable therefore I’m right.  Well no, sorry that’s not proof and you should have higher standards than that.


I think these are excellent points. I disagree with Greg Wilson here and feel that Martin Fowler is not one of the smartest guys in our industry, although he maybe one of the most influential. I also question whether he can be considered a careful thinker.  I think his approach like many of the other Agilistas is self serving and shows very little humility or willingness to be self critical. This is something that Bertrand Meyer commented on when reaching out to the Agilistas in conjunction with his book on Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly that almost all of the Agilistas treated him with "radio silence" after receiving his draft.  The problem is that the Agile business is just too lucrative for consulting and on the speaking circuit.  A great example of this business model is "Uncle Bob" Martin’s infomercial-esque site promoting his wisdom for sale. I refuse to link to it, so google it, if you want to see that spectacle.  All of these guys make a lot of money selling Agile and if they started being critical of it that would be a risk to their revenue streams.  Also how many of these guys still do significant software development work?  Ironically I think Uncle Bob still codes, but I am talking about opening up an IDE or text editor after checking out a big code base from version control and fixing bugs or doing actual coding or refactoring.  Now maybe that’s not fair to ask that, or is it?  After all they are driving how we spend our days being managed on software projects.

Another point of contention I have can be found on Martin Fowlers website under the FAQ section:


Why is your job title "Chief Scientist"?

It's a common title in the software world, often given to someone who has a public facing technical role. I enjoy the irony of it - after all I'm chief of nobody and don't do any science.


He openly admits he does no science (the black bolding is mine). Therein lays the problem with all of the Agilistas. There seems to be no scientific method involved in many if not all of their claims.  These claims as we have seen are sometimes made in "academic" journals without any citations. Of course I am skeptical about much that is written about software in journals published by ACM or IEEE and of the organizations themselves.  I think Greg Wilsons observation validates my skepticism and further draws attention to the lack of scientific method involved in software.  We need better science and people who are intellectually honest about the fact that they are just expressing unproven and in some cases unfounded opinions.

It seems to me a more conscientious approach would be for the Agilistas to promote and fund studies. Use the scientific method to back up their claims and help move the industry forward.  Whether they like it or not that is what will most likely eventually happen and they will either need to get on board or be left behind.

The irony here is that while we need more of a scientific method in defining software methodologies, much of our infrastructure comes from mathematics, another area that seems to be lacking with the Agilistas.  For example: Noam Chomsky’s formalization of grammars were adapted by Jim Backus and further refined algebraically by Donald Knuth to give us modern compiler theory and compilers.  There’s a long list of people who have laid down the mathematical foundations, people like Alan Turing, John Von Nueman, Alonzo Church, Stephen Cole Kleene, Haskell Curry and the list goes on.  Unfortunately I think too many people in our industry are ignorant of our field’s true mathematical underpinnings. I have also encountered a large degree of anti-intellectualism from programmers when it comes to applying modern math to programming.  Again I think this is an area where one should only ignore it at their own peril.

If you want to see the work that should and probably will drive our future I would recommend looking at what the researchers are doing, people like:



These are just a few. There are many people doing research that will eventually find its way into our industry. It has been happening this way all along.  The problem with these people’s work is it requires real intellectual effort as opposed to the Agile approach which, while in some cases maybe common sense, all to often seems to come across as a bunch of platitudinous management speak.

I think we need to hold the Agilistas to higher standards of proof!

Disclaimer: I still code personal projects but have not been on a dev team doing real dev work in about 3-4 years after doing it for over 25 years.  Actually from what I have seen of Agile management techniques and war room/open office layouts, I am in no hurry to do any of that any time soon.


References and Further Reading



08 February 2017

Data Science DC: Deep Learning Past, Present, and Near Future


Here in Washington DC we are lucky to have a robust technical community and as a result we have many great technical meetups which include a number that fall under the local data science community. I recently attended the Data Science DC (DSDC) talk "Deep Learning Past, Present, and Near Future" (video) (pdf slides) presented by Dr. John Kaufhold who is a data scientist and managing partner of Deep Learning Analytics. This will be the second DSDC post I have written, the first is here. Parts of this post will be cross posted as a series on the DSDC blog (TBA), references to my previous blog posts either here or there will be to referring to my blog elegantcoding.com. My previous DSDC post was pretty much just play by play coverage of the talk. I decided to take a slightly different approach. My goal here is to present some of the ideas and source material in John's talk while adding and fleshing out some additional details. This post should be viewed as "augmentation" as he talks about some things that I will not capture here.

I am guessing that some proportion of the audience that night is like me in that they feel the need to learn more about deep learning and machine learning in general. This is a pressure that seems to be currently omnipresent in our industry. I know some people who are aggressively pursuing machine learning and math courses. So I would like to add some additional resources vetted by John for people like myself who want to learn more about deep learning.

I decided to make this a single post in with parts. This will essentially parallel John's presentation, although I will change the order a bit. The first part will summarize the past, present, and future of deep learning. I will be doing some editorializing of my own on the AI future. The second part will be an augmented list of resources including concepts, papers, and books in conjunction with what he provided for getting started and learning more in depth about deep learning.

I will give a brief history of deep learning based in part on John's slide, well actually Lukas Masuch's slide. I am a fan of history, especially James Burke Connections style history. It is hard for me to look at any current recent history without thinking of the greater historical context. I have a broader computer history post that might be of interest to history of technology and history of science fans. Three earlier relevant events might be the development of the least squares method that lead to statistical regression, Thomas Bayes's "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" and Andrey Markov's discovery of Markov Chains. I will leave those in the broader context and focus on the relative recent history of deep learning.

An Incomplete History of Deep Learning

1951: Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds build SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator) a neural net machine that is able to learn. It is a randomly connected network of Hebb synapses.

1957: Frank Rosenblatt invents the Perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory with naval research funding. He publishes "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in The Brain" in 1958 . It is initially implemented in software for the IBM 704 and subsequently implemented in custom-built hardware as the "Mark 1 Perceptron".

1969: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons which showed that it was impossible for these classes of networks to learn an XOR function.

1970: Seppo Linnainmaa publishes the general method for automatic differentiation of discrete connected networks of nested differentiable functions. This corresponds to the modern version of back propagation which is efficient even when the networks are sparse.

1973: Stuart Dreyfus uses backpropagation to adapt parameters of controllers in proportion to error gradients.

1972: Stephen Grossberg published the first of a series of papers introducing networks capable of modeling differential, contrast-enhancing and XOR functions. "Contour enhancement, short-term memory, and constancies in reverberating neural networks (pdf)".

1974: Paul Werbos mentions the possibility of applying back propagation to artificial neural networks. Back propagation had been initially context of control theory by Henry J. Kelley and Arthur E. Bryson in the early 1960s. Around the same time Stuart Dreyfus published a simpler derivation based only on the chain rule.

1974–80: First AI winter which may have been in part caused by the often mis-cited 1969 Perceptrons by Minsky and Papert.

1980: Neoconitron, a hierarchical, multilayered artificial neural network, is proposed by Kunihiko Fukushima. It has been used for handwritten character recognition and other pattern recognition tasks and served as the inspiration for convolutional neural networks.

1982: John Hopfield popularizes Hopfield networks, a type of recurrent neural network that can serve as content-addressable memory systems.

1982: Stuart Dreyfus applies Linnainmaa's automatic differentiation method to neural networks in the way that is widely used today.

1986: David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Ronald J. Williams publish "Learning representations by back-propagating errors (pdf)". This shows through computer experiments that this method can generate useful internal representations of incoming data in hidden layers of neural networks

1987: Minsky and Papert publish "Perceptrons - Expanded Edition" where some errors in the original text are shown and corrected.

1987–93: Second AI winter occurs. Caused in part by the collapse of the Lisp machine market and the fall of the expert system. Additionally training times for deep neural networks are too long making them impractical for real world applications.

1993: Eric A. Wan wins the an international pattern recognition contest. This is the first time backpropagation is used to win this contest.

1995: Corinna Cortes and Vapnik publish current standard incarnation (soft margin) in "Support-Vector Networks". The original SVM algorithm was invented by Vladimir N. Vapnik and Alexey Ya. Chervonenkis in 1963. SVMs now take a dominant role in AI.

1997: Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber invent Long-short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks greatly improving the efficiency and practicality of recurrent neural networks.

1998: A team led by Yann LeCun releases the MNIST database, a dataset comprising a mix of handwritten digits from American Census Bureau employees and American high school students. The MNIST database has since become a benchmark for evaluating handwriting recognition. Lecun, Bottou, Bengio, Haffner publish "Gradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition (pdf)"

1999: NVIDIA Invents the GPU

2006: Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov publish "Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks (pdf)" This is an unsupervised learning breakthrough that now allows for the training of deeper networks.

2007: NVIDIA launches the CUDA programming platform. This opens up the general purpose parallel processing capabilities of the GPU.

2009: NIPS Workshop on Deep Learning for Speech Recognition discovers that with a large enough data set, the neural networks don't need pre-training, and the error rates drop significantly.

2012: Artificial pattern-recognition algorithms achieve human-level performance on certain tasks. This is demonstrated by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey E. Hinton using the ImageNet dataset and published as "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (pdf)".

2012: Google's deep learning algorithm discovers cats. AI now threatens the cat cabal control of the internet.

2015: Facebook puts deep learning technology - called DeepFace - into operation to automatically tag and identify Facebook users in photographs. Algorithms perform superior face recognition tasks using deep networks that take into account 120 million parameters.

A Brief and Incomplete History of Game Playing Programs and AIs

1951: Alan Turing is first to publish a program, capable of playing a full game of chess, developed on paper during a whiteboard coding interview.

1952: Arthur Samuel joins IBM's Poughkeepsie Laboratory and begins working on some of the very first machine learning programs, first creating programs that play checkers.

1992: Gerald Tesauro at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center develops TD-Gammon a computer backgammon program. Its name comes from the fact that it is an artificial neural net trained by a form of temporal-difference learning.

1997: IBM Deep Blue Beats Kasparov, the world champion at chess.

2011: IBM's Watson using a combination of machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval techniques beats two human champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! Later versions of Watson successfully banter with Alex thus further surpassing human capabilities.

2013: DeepMind learns to play 7 Atari games, surpassing humans on three of them, using Deep Reinforcement Learning and no adjustments to the architecture or algorithm. It eventually learns additional games taking the number to 46.

2016: AlphaGo, Google DeepMind's algorithm, defeats the professional Go player Lee Sedol.

2017: DeepStack becomes the first computer program to beat professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em.

The Present and Future

John also included the idea of Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio being the triumvirate that weathered the AI winter, a theme that he used in his first DSDC talk as well. Since it was one of Homer's vocabulary words, I couldn't resist creating my own graphic for it:

While the triumvirate researchers are definitely major players in the field, there are many others. There seems to be some drama about giving credit where credit is due. John goes into some of the drama surrounding this. Unfortunately it seems to human nature sometimes we have drama surrounding scientific discoveries and this is no exception in the Deep Learning community today. Geoffrey Hinton also catches some flak on reddit (ok, no surprise there) for not properly crediting Seppo Linnainmaa for backpropagation. It is natural to want credit for one's ideas, however, these ideas are never conceived of in a vacuum and sometimes they are discovered independently, Calculus springs to mind. As they say history is written by the winners. John made a remark about Rosalind Franklin's Nobel Prize for the double helix. I asked him how many people in the audience he thought got that remark and he replied: "One, apparently :) I'll take it!" Lise Meitner is another interesting example of someone who failed to be recognized by the Nobel committee for her work in nuclear fission.

A major name in the field is Jeff Dean. John mentioned Jeff Dean facts. This is apparently based on the Chuck Norris facts. Jeff Dean somewhat of a legend and it is hard to tell what is real and what is made up about him. Do compilers really apologize to him? We may never know. As I understand it he was one of the crucial early engineers to have helped create the success of Google. He was instrumental in the conception and development of both Map Reduce and Big table not only solidifying Google's successful infrastructure but also laying down much of the foundation of major big data tools like Hadoop and Cassandra. There is some serendipitous timing here in that Jeff Dean published "The Google Brain team - Looking Back on 2016" on the Google Research Blog a few days after John's talk. His post lays out a number of areas where deep learning has made significant contributions as well other updates from their team.

The present and near future for Deep Learning is very bright. There are many deep learning companies that have been acquired and many of these are small averaging about 7 people. John describes this as a startup stampede. Most likely a lot of these are acqui-hires since the labor pool for deep learning is very small. Apparently the top talent is receiving NFL equivalent compensation.

It's fairly obvious that deep learning and machine learning are the current hotness in our industry. One metric might be, given any random moment, go on hacker news and you will most likely see a deep learning article if not a machine learning article on the front page. As if this is not enough, now Kristen Stewart famous for the Twilight movies, has coauthored an AI paper: "Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim". I am now waiting for an AI paper from Jesse Eisenberg.

As for perspectives on the future of Machine Learning John recommends chapters 2, 8, and 9 of the free O'Reilly book The Future of Machine Intelligence. He also points out that the idea that deep learning does not necessarily mean neural Nets and that it means the number of operations between the input and output. This means that machine learning methods other than neural nets can have a deep architecture. It's about the depth itself that learns the complex relationship. For this he cites "Learning Feature Representations with K-means (pdf)" by Adam Coates and Andrew Y. Ng.

Christopher Olah in his post: "Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming" talks about how deep learning is a very young field and that like other young fields in the past things are developed in an ad hoc manner with more of the understanding and formalisms being discovered later. As he points out we will probably have a very different view of what we are doing in 30 years. Although that last point is a bit obvious, it still helps to put things in context. So it is probably hard to tell what will be the most fruitful AI algorithms even ten years from now.

At the end of his talk John touches on a bigger issue that is becoming more ubiquitous in conversations about deep learning and AI: What are the larger social implications for society? So I thought I would contemplate some possibilities.

The first and perhaps most imminent and frightening concern is the loss of jobs due to automation. Many people argue that this is the same fear that was raised especially during the first two industrial revolutions which occurred in the late 18th-early 19th century and the late 19th-early 20th century. Of course how you classify industrial revolutions can vary and can easily be off by one if you include the Roman innovation of water power. These industrial revolutions displaced certain skilled jobs by mechanizing work and created new, perhaps less skilled factory jobs. The third industrial revolution mid-late 20th century can be thought of be the rise of more factory automation and the development of microprocessor which can be described in simple terms as a general electronic controller, of course it is way more than that. This continued automation lead to many things like specialized robots for manufacturing. This meant still less jobs for people. Now we are on the cusp of what is being called the fourth industrial revolution with generalized AI algorithms and multipurpose robotics.

I have often heard the argument that this has all happened before. John brings up a valid point on this which is when it happened before there was a lot more time for society to recover and new jobs were created. There was an article on NPR identifying truck driver as one of the most common jobs in America. There is some dispute of this in that the most common jobs are retail jobs. Regardless of which is the most common job, still there are by some estimates 3.5 million truck driver jobs in the US. Self driving vehicles are very possibly less than five years away. That means those jobs, not to mention taxi jobs as well will be lost. How long before you click purchase on an ecommerce website like Amazon and no humans are involved in that purchase arriving at your house? This might be about that same timeframe. This is an unprecedented level of automation and it affects many other professions for example some paralegal and radiology jobs are potentially now under threat.

There is of course an upside. If AI's become better at medical jobs than humans that could be a good thing. They won't be prone to fatigue or human error. In theory people could liberated from having to perform many tedious jobs as well. AI's could usher in new scientific discoveries. Perhaps they could even make many aspects of our society more efficient and more equal. In this case I for one would welcome our AI overlords.

It is hard to contemplate the future of society without thinking of the work of Orwell and Huxley, this comic sums up some of those concerns and begs the question how much of this do we currently see in our society. From the Orwellian perspective programs like PRISM and the NSA's Utah Data Center allow for the collection and storage of our data. AI's could comb through this data in ways humans never could. This creates the potential for a powerful surveillance state. Of course it is about how this power is used or abused that will determine if we go down the trajectory of the Orwellian dystopia. The other scary aspect of AI's are idea of automated killer drones, this of course is the Skynet dystopia. I think we should fear the Elysium dystopia with both aerial and Elysium style enforcement drones.

Maybe we go down the other path with a universal income that frees us from having to perform daily labor to earn our right to live. How do we now fill our days? Do we all achieve whatever artistic or intellectual pursuits that we are now free to explore? What happens if those pursuits can also be done better by the AI's? Is there a point in painting a picture or writing and singing a song if you will just be outcompeted by an AI? Some of this is already possible. ML algorithms have written reasonable songs, created artistic images as well as having written newspaper articles that are mostly indistinguishable from human writers. Even math and science may fall under their superior abilities for instance Shinichi Mochizuki's ABC conjecture proof seems to be incomprehensible by humans. What if math and science becomes too big and complex for humans to advance it and it becomes the domain of the AI's? So in this case do we fall into Huxley's dystopia? Actually many people would probably find themselves, as some do now, exclusively pursuing drugs, alcohol, carnal pleasures, porn, video games, tv, movies, celebrity gossip, etc. So do we all fall into this in spite of our aspirations? And the AI's will most likely be able to create all of our entertainment desires including the future synthetic Kim Kardashian style celebs.

Ok so that's enough gloom and doom. I can't really say where it will go. Maybe we'll end up with AI hardware wired directly to our brains and thus be able to take our human potential to new levels. Of course why fight it. If you can't beat them join them and the best way to do that is to learn more about deep learning.

Deep Learning 101/Getting Started

Online Learning Resources

John mentions a few resources for getting started. He mentions Christopher Olah's blog, describing him as the Strunk and the White of Deep Learning through his clear communication using a visual language. I have had his "Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology" post on my todo list and I agree that he has a bunch of excellent posts. I admit to being a fan of his visual style from his old blog as my post on Pascal's Triangle was partially inspired by his work. His newer work seems to be posted on http://distill.pub/. John also mentions Andrej Karpathy's blog as well as the Comprehensive Course on Convolutional Neural Nets that he teaches Stanford: CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, which can additionally be found here.

Additionally John did a write up "Where are the Deep Learning Courses? after his first DSDC talk.

If you are local we also have the DC-Deep-Learning-Working-Group they are currently working through the Richard Socher Stanford NLP course.

Some Additional Resources

I wanted to include some additional resources and came up with a list that I asked John's opinion on. These are some that I found that he endorses with high recommendations for Richard Socher's NLP tutorial.

Neural Networks and Deep Learning By Michael Nielsen http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville http://www.deeplearningbook.org/

UDACITY : Deep Learning by Google

ACL 2012 + NAACL 2013 Tutorial: Deep Learning for NLP (without Magic), Richard Socher, Chris Manning and Yoshua Bengio

CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing, Richard Socher

These are the additional resources that looked interesting to me:

Deep Learning in a Nutshell by Nikhil Buduma

Deep Learning Video Lectures by Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto:

Lecture 1

Lecture 2

Nuts and Bolts of Applying Deep Learning (Andrew Ng)(video)

Core Concepts

I wanted to list out some core concepts that one might consider learning. I reached out to John with a list of concepts. He replied with some that he thought were important and pointed out that such a list can grow rapidly and it is better to take a more empirical approach and learn as you go by doing. I think a brief list might be helpful to people new to machine learning and deep learning.

Some basic ML concepts might include:

These are some that are more specific to Neural Nets:

Some additional areas that might be of interest are:

Additionaly a couple of articles that lay out some core concepts are The Evolution and Core Concepts of Deep Learning & Neural Networks and Deep Learning in a Nutshell: Core Concepts.

Git Clone, Hack, and Repeat

John mentions the approach of Git Clone, Hack, and Repeat. I asked him if there were and there any specific github repo's that you would recommend? I am just using his reply here, with some of the links and descriptions filled in:

This is really, choose your own adventure, but when I look in my history for recent git clone references, I see:

Torch is a scientific computing framework for with wide support for machine learning algorithms that puts GPUs first. It is easy to use and efficient, thanks to an easy and fast scripting language, LuaJIT, and an underlying C/CUDA implementation. github

Efficient, reusable RNNs and LSTMs for torch

Torch interface to HDF5 library

Computation using data flow graphs for scalable machine learning

This repository contains IPython Notebook with sample code, complementing Google Research blog post about Neural Network art.

Neural Face uses Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGAN)

A tensorflow implementation of "Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks"

Among others--playing with OpenAI's universe and pix2pix both seem full of possibilities, too.

Image-to-image translation using conditional adversarial nets

Openai Universe

To learn, I'm a big advocate of finding a big enough dataset you like and then trying to find interesting patterns in it--so the best hacks will usually end up combining elements of multiple repos in new ways. A bit of prosaic guidance I seem to find myself repeating a lot: always try to first reproduce what the author did; then start hacking. No sense practicing machine learning art when there's some dependency, sign error, or numerical overflow or underflow that needs fixing first. And bugs are everywhere.

Data Sets

I asked John to recommend some data sets for getting into deep learning, he recommended the following:

MNIST

CIFAR-10

NORB

Andrej Karpathy's blog post "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks" provides some examples using a Shakespeare corpus, wikipedia data, and linux kernel code that can illustrate a lot of really interesting properties of RNNs

Deep Learning Frameworks

He also mentions a number of Deep Learning frameworks to look at for getting into deep learning, the top three are tensorflow, caffe and Keras.

As I was writing this I saw this: "Google Tensorflow chooses Keras". This makes Keras the first high-level library added to core TensorFlow at Google, which will effectively make it TensorFlow's default API.

Building Deep Learning Systems

One area of interest to me is how to build better software. In traditional software development tests area used to help verify a system. In these instances you can usually expect known inputs to yield known outputs. This is something that software developers strive for and is increased by things like referential transparency and immutability. However, how do you now handle systems that behave probabilisticly instead of discretely? As I was researching the topic of how do you successfully test and deploy ML systems, I found these two resources: "What's your ML test score? A rubric for ML production systems" and "Rules of Machine Learning:Best Practices for ML Engineering(pdf) ". I asked John his thoughts on this and he recommended: "Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt" as well as "Infrastructure for Deep Learning", although he said this is more of a metaphor us normal humans that don't have Altman/Musk funded budgets. He also pointed out that building these types of systems also fall under the standard best practices approach to any software and trying to maintain high software development standards is just as helpful as in any project.

Final Thoughts

My contemplation of the future is pretty pessimistic from the societal perspective. From the AI perspective it is pretty optimistic on what can be done. New articles about AI achievements like "Deep learning algorithm does as well as dermatologists in identifying skin cancer" are constantly appearing. However, then you see things like "Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan". Although this is not related to Deep Learning it does touch on a well known issue, which is our lives are effectively run by software and we still don't really know how to truly engineer it. From what I understand, we really don't know exactly how some of these deep learning algorithms work. This makes the future of our software and AI seem even more uncertain. Hopefully we will overcome that.

Lastly I wanted thank John for being very generous with his time in helping me with additional resources for this post.

References and Further Reading

Some Leading Deep Learning Researcher's Links