Michi’s blog

This is a typed up copy of my lecture notes from the seminar at Linköping, 2010-08-25. This is not a perfect copy of what was said at the seminar, rather a starting point from which the talk grew.

In my workgroup at Stanford, we focus on topological data analysis — trying to use topological tools to understand, classify and predict data.

Topology gets appropriate for qualitative rather than quantitative properties; since it deals with closeness and not distance; also makes such approaches appropriate where distances exist, but are ill-motivated.

These approaches have already been used successfully, for analyzing

• physiological properties in Diabetes patients
• neural firing patterns in the visual cortex of Macaques
• dense regions in of 3×3 pixel patches from natural (b/w) images
• screening for CO₂ adsorbative materials

Jag har varit en god medborgare. Jag har börjat emaila politiker. Anledningen är gårdagens debatt och dagens återremittering av FRA-Lagen.

Kärnan i mitt email, efter en personaliserad inledning där jag återknyter till vardera riksdagsledamots insats i debatten, är följande argumentation.

Tanken med signalspaningen är att analysera trafikmönster, läsa innehåll,
och hitta allmänna mönster. Dock är inga av dessa metoder 100%
tillförlitliga, och det man vill hitta är väldigt ovanliga företeelser.

Problemen härvid är framför allt:
1) mönster är väldigt lätta att dölja. Det finns många och relativt
välkända metoder att bygga upp sina kommunikationer så att trafikanalys
blir i det närmaste värdelöst: man kan se till att alltid skicka massa
data åt alla möjliga håll, och därvid skicka mycket skräpdata, så att
när det väl skickas värdefull data så är det ingen skillnad i
trafikflödet.
2) kryptering är lätt att använda. Det finns många mjukvarupaket för att
kryptera all möjlig elektronisk kommunikation. Vi använder det för
bankärenden, för företagsintern kommunikation, och det är lätt att
använda för privata ändamål. Därigenom kan den som vill gömma sig
väldigt lätt göra all sin kommunikation oläsbar.
3) imperfekta metoder kommer dränka övervakaren i falska anklagelser.
Den internationellt kände säkerhetsexperten Bruce Schneier har
diskuterat det här fenomenet utförligt i sitt nyhetsbrev. En av de
bästa genomgångarna jag känner till finns här:

So, Heiligendamm just outside Rostock in northern Germany these days hosts both the G8 meeting and the numerous protest activities. This setup would have me ranting on and on about the violent left and failure to admonish extremists on your own side.

But that is not the issue that makes me reach for my keyboard.

Swedish news outlets report today about Tomas Eriksson, a swedish lawyer who came on the ferry from Trelleborg with his girlfriend yesterday morning.

In the entry checks, the German border officials found a t-shirt in the girlfriends luggage, with the symbol of the swedish political pro-media-piracy lobbying organisation “Piratbyrån”. A black tshirt, with the following logo printed in white:

Inspired by other bloggers on Planet Haskell, I thought I’d just sit down and write a retrospection post, reviewing the past year – primarily from angles such as mathematics, computers and my generic life situation.

It divides neatly into two different sections: the months as a commercial programmer and the months as PhD student and academic careerist.

The year began still working for Teleca Systems, and with security consulting for Stockholm-based firms and frequent trips back home.

Then as the year went on and my PhD applications grew more and more, I started getting results. I got invited to Bonn for an interview with the Homology and Homotopy graduate school program – which was in the end turned down because I was more of a homological algebraist than a topologist. And the week after that, I was invited to Jena for an interview for a position doing PhD work on computational homological algebra. The interview went well, the potential advisor was nice (and a once-roleplaying gamer to sweeten the deal more) and I got the position just a few days later.

Once upon a time, I wasn’t passionate about mathematics. Up to grade 6, I even disliked it quite a bit – it consisted of only mechanical plugging away of numbers, and training of multiplication tables that I had the feeling I already mastered.

Then something changed. Subtly at first – in grade 7, it started to gain texture, it got beyond the rote calculations ever so slightly. And so I started devouring the old popular mathematics texts my father kept in his bookcases. Soon, I stumbled across a new word – “integral calculus” – and of course asked my father to explain it. And thus it was that I, at the age of 13, got introduced to limits, derivatives and integrals.

A paper recently up on arXiv details the errors committed by an author of a paper in Non-Linear Analysis, who, by ignoring basic conditions of theorems manages to prove most of mathematics and substantial parts of physics inconsistent.

This is the second insufficiently reviewed paper at that Journal causing some sort of waves spreading as far as to me so far. The blogospheric and medial storm around the infamous “proof” by Elin Oxenhielm of the 16th Hilbertian problem a few years ago was, at the core, sparked from her getting the paper accepted at … right, Non-Linear Analysis … and taking this publication as a token that her results were in fact true and anyone critizising here were out to steal her credit.

Needless to say, with the density displayed thus far of crackpotism and sloppy publishing, I don’t think I’ll trust NLA for anything at all in the future.

Breaking news! Just in from /.

According to this article, there is a Cincinnati-based company that just had two of its employees implant glass-encapsulated RFIDtags in their biceps as a part of the access control system to their datacenter.

And we’re one step closer to the artificial linking of identity verification to body parts.

I see two aspects to discuss here. One is of the inherent security problems with the solution, and the other is about the sci-fi feel and possible problems and antagonists.

So let’s start with the second aspect. I can remember a lesson in eight grade, discussing in our social sciences class, where I suggested use of passive radio transmitters to implant small chips in people that would work as a central for identification and verification. The implanted chip would be used as ID card, as credit card et.c. et.c. and you wouldn’t have to juggle cards at all any longer. I was quite taken by the vision I had – until my baptist pastor of a teacher started quoting relevations on me, claiming that such an implant would be a perfect example of how the Mark of the Beast would manifest.

Since roughly september, a resolution has been making its way through the EU bureaucracy to institute mandatory storage times for, among other things, internet traffic logs with ISPs. Throughout the discussions, the image has been coming through that the resolution would in endeffect require ISPs to log more or less everything a user does, requiring insane disk volumes for the logs and infringing exceedingly on personal privacy.

The resolution, as it ended up, is actually less panicky than it could have been – somewhat surprisingly. I’m reading the changes instituted by the parliament during the first reading and acceptance of the resolution. They include addition of, among other things, the following text blocks

In particular when retaining data related to Internet e-mail and Internet Telephony, the scope may be limited to the providers’ own services or the network providers’.

making the ISP responsible for their own services, but not for connectiontracking outside their own services.