ESP Biography

The French Revolution annihilated the old order in France, introduced a new tradition of radical ideology to Europe, paved the way for Napoleon, marked the beginning of the end for traditional monarchies, and had immediate influence across the old world and new.

If you've ever used the internet, you've used a search engine. In this class I explain how typing a few words into a text box returns the most relevant pages on the internet from billions and billions that exist, with surprisingly little spam, in less than a second. Topics: Web-scale computing infrastructure, text similarity algorithms, trust on the web: the PageRank algorithm, MapReduce parallel framework, personalization, from keywords to meaning.

I discuss the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence research and application and how it's being influenced by an ever-increasing volume of digitized data, including examples you might know, like Apple's personal assistant system Siri, or IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson, and Google's self-driving cars, and those you might not, like technology that can sense the stock-market's movements before anything else.

Complexity science studies emergent phenomena that result when many simple parts build a system with dynamic behavior that simple models can't capture. How can a bunch of ants creates an enormous colony and efficiently search for and retrieve food, when each individual ant alone couldn't even feed itself? The answer is in the pheremone trails that each ant lays down when it's heading back to the nest, telling others whether it found food or not, leading to an ever-growing wave of followers swarming to the richest source of nutrients. These sorts of effects, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a surprising way, exist in systems like the stock market, Facebook, and the Billboard top 40 too!