Keep Your Requirements Close But Your "Crazy Ideas" Closer

One of the courses I teach, which I’m quite proud of, is the capstone course for the CS and IT majors.  In the two semester course, we design, build, and release something to the world.  The projects are based on interests in the various groups, usually 2-4 people per group.  We’ve built robots, network sniffing tools, video games (some better than others ;)), and a variety of web portal kinds of tools.  This cycle, one student team built an existential video game called Unbearable which was impossible to win and whose arcade-style high score tracker published random numbers.  It was a silly game on the surface but had lots of ironic and fun easter egg kinds of behavior.

The other teams collaborated to build what was functionally a tele-presence device.  The intent of the device when they started was to be able to “call home” to see your dogs and make sure they were ok.  They had promised “bark recognition” software that would send you a text if the dog was barking too much and a Pan-Tilt-Zoom functionality for the camera so you could watch the dog.  Early designs had a ball thrower so you could play with the dog remotely but that was simply too complex for the time we had.  There had been some discussion about blowing bubbles for the dog to chase instead or perhaps giving the dog “some kibble” to get it to come to the device.  The “kibble launcher” became the in-joke for the two semesters but was kind of moved to “nice to have” instead of a requirement.

Last night, the team demo’d their product with the intent of showing the customer that the product should be funded to actually be built.  One of the team members brought their dog in to show the reaction to the device.  Generally, the dog was less than impressed J  We joked that they should have included the “kibble launcher” after all to get the dog’s attention.  The student responsible for the case that the telepresence device lived in reached under the desk and pulled out a small box-like object which he hooked onto the side of the device.  You could see there was a place for wires and a motor though they had not actually been installed.  He then reached into his backpack and pulled out a baggie of dry dog food which he loaded into the new add-on.  It was manually activated but the dog was excited to get some “kibble” so at least hung around the device during the demo.  Network issues in the classroom prevented the demo from working well but we had seen the process work in the past. 

The reason I bring this all up is that the “kibble launcher” started as a joke with the team while we were brainstorming the functionality of the product.  In brainstorming, you write down all the ideas that come up, no matter how odd they may seem.  Using Affinity Diagrams and other tools, we pared down the ideas to a manageable number of requirements to build.  The launcher was decided to be a “if we have time” kind of feature and it was shelved.  But, we made so much fun of the idea that the cabinet builder kept thinking about how to actually do it.  He mocked up a prototype which he proudly displayed last night.  It helped their product and would have differentiated it on the market if we had really built it. 

My point is that we often come up with crazy ideas in brainstorming sessions and we filter them out right away because they’re silly/stupid/too expensive.  But sometimes, those ideas live on and we find a way to incorporate them into the product.  And we should.  Those “crazy ideas” are how we sometimes get new, cool products.

Happy Day After!

I have not been good about posting to my blog this last week and I'm not exactly sure why.

A lot of crazy things have been going on but that's not really newsworthy. That is kind of the standard state of things :)

School is still school. The job hunt continues. The house remodeling continues. And to complete the meme, "still single, still not king."

But you know what? I have had to interact with a lot of, well, ignorant people in the last two weeks. People who I would say are "just following orders" or don't stop to think about what they say. The hold message at CenturyLink says "…please tell the operator if you don't want us to use (your private information) to offer you goods and services. This has no bearing on the goods and services we'll offer." What? I challenged the operator that the message didn't make a bit of sense and she said "of course it does" and was annoyed with me for questioning the message. I can't say these people are "stupid" as they appear to be functioning members of society. They appear to have families and friends that love and support them. They appear to go about their daily routines.

But. Many of them seem oblivious to the surrounding world and basic world views which differ from their own like say the scientific method. 19th Century thought suggested that the entire world was knowable, either by observation or experimentation. Much of 21st Century thought seems to be based purely on our own opinions and observations. It's as though social media has taught us that our opinion, even if based on nothing, is so important to share, that we must constantly inform our friends of our merest thoughts. We see each other's thoughts which validate our own merest thoughts and we are reenforced.

The conspiracy shows are all talking about how the MMR vaccine is likely to be the cause of the increase in Autism. This is akin to the folks who earlier were saying, "well, this winter is the worst in recent history, therefore global warming is a hoax." Forgetting of course that our limited experience is not the sum total of all experiences. And I hate to point it out but all of those new autism patients have also breathed air, drank water, and eaten food in this country. I agree that autism rates are skyrocketing but vaccines are not necessarily the culprit. Studies have been done that show they aren't but this "well I just feel this is true" mentality doesn't watch for facts.

It's like we stopped exploring or thinking about the world when we were teens. Having worked with middle school students, so much of world history makes more sense now because the early teen-aged people are very set in black and white thinking and that there can only be one way of thinking. Witness the bullying that kids do to each other, especially that one kid that's different. Joan of Arc was 14 when she became famous.

We bemoan the loss of creativity and STEM knowledge in our society but it seems like we've lost a great deal of common sense and the ability to take a step back and actually look at a situation. Business schools pump out MBAs who have to research White Papers without critiquing the authors. Anyone can write a White Paper. Anyone can publish a study or an OpEd. I can't tell you the number of Dissertations I've read where I thought "wow, these are the wrong questions for this topic" or "that solution has nothing to do with causality." And yet, 100+ pages later the author has proved that there may or may not be a connection between what s/he wanted to prove and what they researched.

And that brings me to my writing. Here I am. I'll likely be a Doctor in Computer Science in the nearish future. I've read study after study. I've read the background material that is relevant to me and my research. I want to see further because I stand on the shoulders of giants. But I also know that it takes a creative spark to make a leap from what is known to what needs to be known. And I know that as I get a better view, I may divert from the course set out by my colleagues. I may have to blaze a new trail but I can't do it without observation and experimentation. I can't blaze it without being able to tell people where I am and how I got there. I can follow my gut and explore but if the data I have doesn't shine on my path, I may need to check my maps. The method I follow, the scientific method, allows for course corrections, it encourages me to find the flaws in my own thinking and correct it as better or more complete knowledge becomes available.

Now, how can I teach the robot that?  And more importantly, "should I?"

There's an App for that!

Today's post may go in a strange direction. To me, what I'm about to say is almost so obvious that it doesn't need to be said. We'll see.

This week I received a new piece of medical technology. It was ordered nearly a month ago by doctors who I had to wait for nearly two months to see. It was supposed to be delivered last week but the company "forgot" then labelled the equipment as patient pick-up even though it had to be installed in my home.

By time I actually received the device, I was beginning to wonder just how important it was to actually have it, a somewhat negative view I admit.

The delivery guy came out with the component and wheeled it in but did not know particularly how to attach it to the other piece of equipment that I had already received as he hadn't been trained on the new model I had. I asked him several questions about what the purpose of the machine was and how it performed its task. The driver wasn't terribly sure and couldn't call back to the office for help because their communication equipment wasn't work (you don't have a phone?). He made some claims about the equipment which I was able to disprove while he watched and it was clear he was reading from a memorized script and didn't know how the machine worked at all. I shoo'd him out and connected the machine myself after signing the waivers that if I died I wouldn't sue the company or the delivery driver.

This whole fiasco reminded me of the washing machine debacle from around Thanksgiving. I had found a screaming deal on a new washer/dryer that could be stacked in my basement. I wasn't going to be home for a few days so I had them deliver them a week later. They forgot even though I took time off to be available. They sent the machines out the next day with a driver who was not authorized to install them because they were gas. I argued with the delivery driver who decided that company policy is to just bring the machines back to the shop if there's any problem. A week later and several calls, the same kid brought the machines back but still did not know how to install them or that they were even stackable. The guys working in my basement helped the kids figure out how to install the machines but in the meantime the kids had accidentally broken off a component of the drainage system for the washer.

So here we go with my questions which are relevant to this article.

1) If you don't know what your job is, eventually a robot is going to replace you doing it. A robot cannot make decisions on its own so it's going to need failover decisions to choose when things go wrong. The robot would have reasonablly taken the washer and dryer back to the shop when confronted with a gas fixture or irate home owner. A human should be able to figure these things out.

2) Conversely, our society seems to be "dumbing things down" to the point where we can off-shore tasks that are technical in nature by defining scripts that people can read to their customers, even if they don't understand the content. If we have to do that, again a robot can take over the task.

3) With the building back-lash against off-shored tech-support and banking and who knows what all, the robots are going to have to make major strides forward to be able to handle what we now seem to consider easily scriptable processes.

Maybe the robots aren't going to come quite as quickly as we have been thinking!

I see I have a "futuring" course in the next year.  I'm curious to see where that class things we may end up...  and what part I have to play in the innovation. 

Testing Our New Robot Overlords!

I was confronted with the scope of what I am talking about recently: The robots will be "self learning" and we will want to stop them from learning things that are not relevant or that we don't want them to know. We might want a robot who makes sandwiches to know about foods and allergies and presentation and cultural items related to food, but we probably don't want it to know about politics or voting or whatever... Whatever we do to "focus" the robot's learning will eventually be applied to our children, which might bring us back to the days of tests that determine your career futures... If the robot makes a "bad decision" based on what it has learned or because it had to choose between two bad choices, who is to blame? The tester? the coder? the building? the owner? the robot? How would we even punish the robot? And how is this really different from blaming the parents or the teachers when kids do dumb things? If the robot is a car and it has to decide which other car to hit because it's going to be in an accident, how does it determine which car is a better target? Will the robot know something about the relative "worth" of the other vehicles? their cargos? Is a car with 4 people in it worth more than a car with 1? The insurance people would argue yes I imagine. If the robot has this worthiness data, how long will it be before an after-market device is sold which tells the robot that this particular vehicle is "high value" in an effort to protect individual property? I realize this is all outside the scope of what I'm doing and that greater minds than mine have to address these issues. Especially on issues which address the human condition! But, it's sobering to see how large this field could become. This is not just testing a new phone app!

Cybernetics in the Real World (per COSine)

I spent this weekend at COSine, a science fiction writer's conference here in Colorado Springs. I participated in several panels about the state of the world, especially for cybernetics. The conversations were quite lively but ended up being debates about "how cool the technology could be" interspersed with discussion on whether we should "require" people to accept the augmentations. I suggested it wasn't terribly different from the Borg (in Star Trek: The Next Generation) meeting new species and immediately implanting them with the technology that makes the Borg hive-mind work. The panelists likened the practice to forcing all deaf children to receive the Cochlear implant. A very spirited discussion ensued. Afterwards, I apologized to the moderator for hi-jacking the discussion like that and she said while that was an interesting discussion, she was more intrigued by my "throw away" question about how the the augmented would be considered in our society: Right now, there's some stigma to people with artificial limbs, pacemakers, insulin pumps and the like. People who augment themselves with drugs for performance are stricken from the record books because they aren't "fair," or more accurately, not purely human. And this leads back to the robot question. How do we determine what is "beneficial" and what is "useful"? How do we differentiate between things that help but pollute for instance? These are tricky questions and I am somewhat concerned about the outcome.

Kitchen's Clean and Quiet

The title today is a line from "Scott and Jamie" which has been stuck in my head all week. The song itself is a bit of a tear jerker as it's about two foster kids being yanked from a gay couple but, I don't think that's why it's been in my head. Instead, I've been counting down to the roommate moving out. I've been counting down since the end of summer more or less.

I don't think the guy knew how to wash a dish which drove me crazy. I told him how much it annoyed ne on several occasions and it just never sunk in. So he moved out today and I cleaned the dishes up and put them away.

The song says, "the kitchen's clean and quiet, we moved the furniture around..." I want to move the furniture but the construction debris is still in the way so it has to wait a bit. Already the house seems bigger without the roommate here. But you know what, I'm not as happy to have him out of the house as I expected to be. I don't feel like that part of my life is now over. And I don't know why. I don't *miss* the roommate or anything but I'm more "meh" about him leaving than I thought I'd be. I'm not sure I like this feeling. I was hoping to be energized to go on with my remodel, but I'm just not feeling it. At least not yet... Maybe soon? :)

This song has been stuck in my head for days! It so fits my mood though. “You can be the expert by picking up a book,” it says. And isn’t that the point of the Literature Review for the Dissertation?

We study the thoughts that came before ours, not just to give us context but, to borrow from Bernard of Chartres, to help us see further. My ideas may turn out to be revolutionary but without the context of the researchers before me, my ideas may never gain traction. Or worse, like the Professor in Rescue From Gilligan’s Island, I may be reinventing a wheel that already exists.

But the song. The song says there are stories “everywhere we look, if we look in the right way.” I’ll take that to mean that when I’m sitting at my computer cussing the ProQuest database for not finding me a good reference, maybe I just need to step back and think of a new keyword to try.

Hmmm… which reminds me, I haven’t tried …

FOOTNOTES (this time)
Bernard of Chartres actually said “Like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, we see farther than they.” In 1159 though we often attribute the quote to Isaac Newton.
The only scene I recall from watching “Rescue From Gilligan’s Island” as a youth was the Professor in a lab somewhere after the Castaways returned to civilization. He had “invented” a Frisbee and was depressed to find out someone had already marketed it, while he was on the Island. He felt he wasn’t really contributing to society and the Castaways eventually returned to the island… Interestingly, today is a year and two days since the actor playing the Professor died.