Universe Jewelry collection

Inspired by beauty of our Universe…

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Fractals and neural adaptation

For my followers, sorry for a delay – I was overloaded by exciting projects at work (Intel Electronics), but recently got some time to get back to my hobby of modeling and concepts, so more posts to come soon 🙂

Meanwhile here is a small visual cortex experiment you can do to experience the neural adaptation in a cool way.

For those that are not familiar with the term, this is actually a set of adjustments of neural system to stimuli. The effect is, that once stimuli is removed, the adjustment continues for some time.

There is a lot of info in the web about various effects of visual neural adaptation, like image inversion that we all experience in our childhood, afterimage effect when you continue to see the light object after you close the eyes or motion effect during which the objects continue to move after they actually stop.

The subset effect of the latter I would like to show you here is radial visual adaptation. Have not seen works/material on this particular way, so here it comes 🙂

Attention! Can cause headache and nausea. Not for those that suffer from neural disorders, especially epilepsy!

Experiment: take a look at fractals zoom (e.g. Manderblot set or any other fractal long zoom animation) for couple minutes and then (if you succeed to move your gaze from this beauty) take a look at static screen/picture. You will see that it continues to “squeeze”. The reason for that is visual neural adaptation to radial motion of the fractal zoom, so our cortex is trying to proceed with the same visual transformation on static picture.

You can play with time of exposure to the zooming stimuli and see that there is a non-linear saturating dependency on duration of after-effect. Interesting to do some mass experiment and see wither the tau of saturation varies a lot cross population.

You can also play with the speed (in youtube – right bottom side settings) and experience non-linear correlation to speed. The after-effect magnitude is accelerating with increased stimuli speed, but if it is too fast, then there is a reduction in impact for given exposure time.

You can play with reverse speed (“zoom out”) of the stimuli and experience opposite effect of “expansion” of static picture.

Leave a comment if you have found any other interesting effects and enjoyed the infinite beauty of fractals.

Skills network

Anything related can be a network. Any network got a hidden magic inside. Building a network is unleashing another part of the beauty of this world. And when you do this, when you find the secret clusters, when you connect the lonely entities of existence – then this magic is flowing though this network, enlightening and reviving nodes, breaking out over the invisible strings into the life, connecting everything and everyone.

Our skills are shaped by the templates of education and jobs, by human behaviors and to get a glimpse of this bias we can do a simple experiment.

Let’s build s crawler that is getting LinkedIn skills from many people, connect those skills based on cross-correlation and build a network that is based on highly correlated skills.

Even small amount of people I took (about 150), is giving a network of over 400 correlated skills, connected by 3500 links and lots of interesting insights.

So… Mainly pics and less words.

Parts of the network, related to declared programming language-based networks (per language). Pay attention on differences:

Design (Since this is a small network, it is biased by my occupation, so the design is mainly represented by word of semiconductors – doing it widely would expose other meanings of design):

Artificial Conductor

Why there is a conductor for orchestra? Actually there are many reasons, even though musicians can play without a conductor (and sometimes they actually do).

Question is – can we make a better conductor by making the artificial system that could answer all the needs and maybe do things that could improve the performance of the orchestra?

Let’s  take several primary reasons and try to refer to each while replacing each functionality by technical capability.

1. Synchronization
   In a large orchestra, the time taken for the sound to travel is long and ear-based feedback of musicians is insufficient (even if heard) and causing the lag.
2. Start/Stop
   Not just for the beginning, but for the resting of musicians. Especially for brass, woodwind and percussion players, there can be considerable stretches of time when they are not required.
3. Make sure that the volume of the instruments balances so nothing is drowned out
   It is very hard to synchronize the volume in large orchestra, so conductor is helping to stabilize it.
4. Phrasing, tempo, bowings and general style
   Those are the elements that conductor shall dictate to the members of the ensemble.
5. And… the Show.

To do this, we can provide the pre-programmed system with distributed audio sensors and visual central and distributed interfaces.

Required features of the system:

1. Conductor display to provide centralized signals such as beginning and stop, including preparation indicator
2. Local displays to be aligned with the instrument, position, adjust to and present a sheet music (it. partitura) and have personal musician’s configuration.
3. Local displays to provide begin signals and preparation
4. Compensation of delays (TDR) and full alignment between all local stations
5. Audio sensors and volume/misalignment feedback to local stations.
6. Gathering of audio data for analysis and post-performance feedback and continuous improvement of the ensemble.
7. The show/experience component might be intensified by leveraging the real-time data and showing some powerful visuals for people in the concert. In addition the system can provide the visual streaming from local stations so people could see the people behind the performance.
8. Visual tempo/phrasing/dynamics conductor display. Something like this (sketch): 

Obviously there is a need in a preparations and this might be just an instrument in the hands of the professionals, but this direction can scale up the use of conducting and maybe even improve it 😉

Cellular Automata in excel

Had some time recently while flying from one place to another and played with simple Cellular Automata rules in excel. It is very simple to do – you create a rule within the cell as function of other cells and extend it (you can simply copy/paste) to other cells.

Here, if A2 is equal to B1, we define a value within the cell “Set”, otherwise it remains empty. That’s all.

Now, if we will keep the first row and column empty (let’s call them “boundaries”), while extending the rule to bigger area, we are going to get a beautiful pattern:

Here I took the area of 200×200

The size of the “triangles” are recursive 2N+1 (1,3,7,15,31,63…)

So by very simple rule we have created pretty complex pattern

Now what is interesting that by simple change of the reference cell the pattern complexity can dramatically increase.

If we change the “offset” of the reference cell by one i.e. apply this kind of rule:

We will get the next pattern:

Annual pattern of Demand for Laptops

As I am working on analysis of Lenovo company (hobby/investment), here is an interesting chart out of the work.

Beautiful pattern of demand for Laptops (relative demand per week, comparing to an annual average of demand) during the last decade:

The pattern is very precise and stable since 2004 during most of the year except maybe some end of the year behavior inconsistency. Though there are expected two peaks of demand at winter holidays, year-to-year  variance during ww48 to ww52 is still high. Extremely high peaks at 2007 holidays, driven by Intel Core 2 Duo products wave.

You can see a clear back-to-school growth towards August from the (-10%) dead-season of Laptops marketing at Spring.

Equirhythmic translation

English (Английский)

Русский (Russian)

I would like to share with you another hobby of mine, which I enjoy when I find a grain of time and muse. It is called an “Equirhythmic translation”. Interesting,that there is no page, which describes it at English side of WIki, but Russian only. The term (French: “traduction équirythmique“) means translation of the verse, during which the Foot or prosody (rhythm, stress) is similar to original. Where have you seen it? In case you know only English, you probably have not, but if you are a bilingual or do not know English at all, there is a big chance that you have heard it in Disney movies, translated to another language. This kind of translation is a unique challenge, since it requires not only preservation of the meaning and creation of rhyme, but also adjustment of rhythm and length of the verse, so the song could be performed smoothly. Sometimes it is very hard to keep all the conditions and something has to be waived.Usually, this is small corrections of a meaning (without impact for the overall meaning of a song). Additional limitation that can be applied is line-to-line alignment, meaning – you cannot “push” words to another line. That is giving an “extra bonus” to my pleasure 😉 Sometimes, though, I purposely change a meaning of couple sentences (usually one or two), just to make it more interesting, even though I am “loosing points” in the game of Equirhythmic translation. I like it, since people that do not know English can really feel the song and become closer to another culture. Also… This is the most technical poetry, my engineering soul can enjoy. In case you know Russian, you are welcome to sing 😉

Я хотел бы поделиться с вами еще одним моим хобби, которым я наслаждаюсь, найдя крупицу времени и музы. Это называется “Эквиритмический перевод”. Занятно, что эта вики страничка существует только на Русском. Цитирую оттуда: “(фр. traduction équirythmique) — перевод стихов, выполненный с сохранением стихотворного размера (числа слогов, ударений, по возможности деления на слова). Необходимость в таком переводе возникает в случае, если переводится текст песни (или либретто оперы) для исполнения на другом языке. Перевод поэзии сложен и сам по себе; эквиритмический перевод особенно сложен. Подавляющее большинство переводов (на русский язык) не является эквиритмическими.” Скорее всего вы встречали этот вид перевода в мультфильмах Диснея, переведённых на Русский язык. Действительно, этот род перевода весьма сложен так как требует не только сохранения смысла песни и рифм, но так же ритма и длинны строчки, так что её можно легко положить на ту же мелодию и петь. Иногда сложно сохранить все условия и приходиться поступиться чем то. Обычно это небольшие отклонения от слов (конечно не меняя смысла песни в целом). Дополнительное ограничение которое можно поставить, это – построчное соответствие, при котором смысл обязан сохраняться построчно. Это – “дополнительный бонус” 😉 Время от времени я специально меняю смысл (обычно очень точечно) чтобы было интересней, даже ценой “потери очков” в игре Эквиритмического перевода. Я люблю это, так как люди, не знающие Английский таким образом могут глубже “почувствовать” песню и стать чуть ближе к иной культуре. К тому же…Это наиболее техническая поэзия, которой наслаждается моя инженерная душа.И… Прошу петь!

The full list on Youtube (15 songs/15 песен)

Example of Equirhythmic translation of Stromae (Paul Van Haver) – Papaoutai (French to Russian)

Пример перевода с Французского Stromae (Paul Van Haver) – Papaoutai

Market2Book (M2B) project kick-off

Happy to announce, there is a kick off for the new project that I am preparing to for several years. Market2Book is a consumer companies’ Equity Research for production optimization and stock market investment optimization. I am happy to work with team of BI and Advanced Analytics gurus that are making the magic behind the vision.

System components

www.Market2book.com (also redirection from http://www.markettobook.com) new landing page is hopefully a sign of coming progress…  More (obviously) to come.

This is a WIP project. Some modules, like Lead generation, Risk modeling, Signal Presentation are done manually/scripts, some got automation in developed and in evaluation stage (such as Model generation, Model Simulation, Data processing), while some are planned for future development (e.g. Order application, Portfoliio management).

What can I say – Good luck!

L’Oréal “Dino” – Intermediate Regression Model versus Loreal Stock.

My resume based “Cover Network”

Network based on my resume. Color of each node based on clustering. Size of node – based on connections weight’s sum. Full size