Nike Will Stop Making Wearable Hardware

Posted on April 21, 2014 by admin

Oh, Nike, – really?!

A company with such rich history of innovation surely could have tried harder to gain and preserve its strategic positioning in this space?
I do see why Nike would want to not be in the hardware business themselves and instead partner with companies who do hardware better, I do. Yet, I can’t help feeling just a little bit disappointed that they seemingly decided against trying to capture more, rather than less, of the wearable market.

A little bit less happy with all of my Nike sports gear today.

 

Disclaimer: I am a senior strategy consultant at IBM. The postings on this blog are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Posted in Consumer technology, How the world is changing, In the news, Industry trends, Sports, Technology, Wearable computing | Comments Off on Nike Will Stop Making Wearable Hardware

Microsoft’s Data Culture – and Fully Analytical Products?

Posted on April 17, 2014 by admin

For data enthusiasts everywhere, this is exciting news:

Great stuff. Surely there will be many lessons learned in transforming corporate culture like this. Microsoft is big enough and established enough to make this a real challenge, yet techy enough that it could be an absolutely natural transition.

Corporate data culture is one thing, but it also makes me think –  can you imagine all the possibilities, if all Microsoft products were truly analytical? MS Word and PowerPoint doing sentiment analysis on your writing. Outlook telling you how much time you spent writing your e-mails, and which types of e-mails took you the longest to write. MS Project providing feedback on how your Gantt charts change from iteration to iteration.

And if you do analytics on the inter-workings of the different products – oh, boy! Skype suggesting that you really ought to stop using it because the Power Point slide you have been working on is still out of alignment and you really ought to be sending out the next revision of it in an hour.

I am loving this vision. Parts of it sound like pure magic – but it could be not all that far on the horizon.

I am a senior strategy consultant at IBM. The postings on this blog are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Posted in Data science | Comments Off on Microsoft’s Data Culture – and Fully Analytical Products?

Lessons Learned from Running Streaks

Posted on April 5, 2014 by admin

Running streaks – which I define as running at least 1 mile per day for a large number of consecutive days – are surely an interesting thing to be doing. My longest one so far has been 100+ days: I ran every single day of each winter month over this winter.

Run_Streak_2014

What I noticed during my streaks:

  • When you are streaking, it is somehow easier to squeeze in a run no matter how busy you are. During my streaks, I ran through numerous things that I may have used as an excuse if I was not streaking – deadlines, trips, interviews, job transitions, apartment moves. No big deal – do what you need to do, then get out there.
  • When you are streaking, it is somehow easier to get out there no matter the weather, too! I ran through winter storms; rather than not run, I ended up buying additional outdoor gear. Easy breezy.

More interestingly, I believe doing these streaks gives me an experience of feeling how a habit forms and solidifies. Running every day, no matter what, after a couple of weeks leads to a perceptible, almost palpable, perspective change: running goes from being an elective activity (“should I go? Should I go now? I don’t feel like it – do I have to go, or maybe there are other things that I could be going instead?”) to being something that you just always do, without any internal questioning. Once the habit is formed, you feel differently. You no longer ever feel like not going for a run. It is no longer ever hard to get going – because getting going is just what you do. The brain rewires itself to expect going for a run rather than to expect crashing on the couch. Fascinating experience.

Posted in Achievement, Running, Sports, Tips and tricks, Training | Comments Off on Lessons Learned from Running Streaks

Data Empathy

Posted on March 21, 2014 by admin

I recently went to an amazing Data Science meetup which I highly recommend to all New York-based folk interested in all things data – Data Driven NYC, hosted (and generously catered) by Bloomberg in their beautiful 59th street office.

InsightDataScienceFounderFounder of Insight Data Science speaking at Data Driven NYC. This meetup had more than 300 people in attendance, and at least 150 more on the waiting list.

In this particular meetup, one of the speakers, head of analytics at Knewton, used a great term that I haven’t heard before – data empathy. Good data scientists emphasize with where the data comes from. What an amazing point!  Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Data science, Industry | Comments Off on Data Empathy

Post-Ph.D. Job Market: Timelines

Posted on January 4, 2014 by admin

I recently gave a talk at a WimNet group meeting regarding my post-Ph.D. job market experiences and lessons learned. A version of the slides that is not Columbia-specific and applicable to many EECS students is available below:

The first part of the talk focused on the job market timelines and demonstrated a step-by-step guide to approaching the job market while keeping the timelines in mind. Below are some additional details related to this part of the talk.

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Career, Data science, Graduate school, Industry, Ph.D., Tips and tricks | Comments Off on Post-Ph.D. Job Market: Timelines

My Favorite Collection: Running States and Countries, January 2014

Posted on January 2, 2014 by admin

In 2013 I had many opportunities to add new items to my running collection — the states, provinces, and countries where I ran at least one mile outdoors (gyms do not count — it has to be an authentic outdoor experience, with the place’s wind in my hair and its dirt under my feet). The countries and the states that are in this collection at this time are:

Countries_ran

StatesRan_Jan2014

Over this year I added 5 new states (Missouri, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Connecticut) and 3 new countries (Belgium, Netherlands, and Italy) to the collection. It was a great year.

I am planning to add as many, and hopefully more, in year 2014. Perhaps the next state will be Louisiana, which I always wanted to visit. Or Florida, which I had visited several times before starting this collection, but somehow not even once after. I recall swimming there, but do not recall running – it must be re-visited. And I must finally see Germany — Munich’s English Garden looks like a fantastic place to go for a nice long run. And it would be particularly wonderful to get to add a couple more continents to the collection, — we shall see how to make that happen!

Posted in Running, Sports, Travel | Comments Off on My Favorite Collection: Running States and Countries, January 2014

Duck’s Adventures

Posted on December 6, 2013 by admin

DuckInCadillacRange

This is Duck. He is a photographer, never separated from his little camera, and he loves to travel. He joined our household back in August, just in time for a 2-week New York to San Diego road trip.

Duck_Leaving

Here is him leaving for that trip – doesn’t he look excited?!

Continue reading →

Posted in Duck the Photographer, Road trip, Travel | Comments Off on Duck’s Adventures

Running while Traveling: Finding Good Running Routes

Posted on October 14, 2013 by admin

Our recent cross-country road trip allowed me to add 4 (!) new states to my favorite running collection. The new items in the collection are Tennessee (Memphis), New Mexico (Santa Fe), Arizona (Page), and Nevada (Las Vegas – the glorious Strip!). My hands-down favorite was the run in Arizona, where the hotel manager recommended a lovely 3-mile route through the ATV tracks and a dried-up river (locals called it “a wash”) on the outskirts of town, the scenic and deserted feel of which I absolutely loved. Got some red mud on my running shoes and could not have been happier about that.

I am sometimes asked how I find suitable running routes while traveling. I mostly use the following:

  • Google, Mapmyrun and a number of similar websites offer a very good collection of routes favored by the locals. Oftentimes, googling “Best running routes [ CITY X] ” is all it takes to find a good route.
  • Local running clubs’ websites often have detailed descriptions of the best routes in the city – such as NYRR does for New York’s Central Park, or SFRRC does for the city of San Fransisco.

While quite effective for bustling centers of large cities, websites tend to be not as efficient for smaller cities or for suburbs. Thus –

  • I also usually ask for good running routes at the hotel, during check-in or later, and oftentimes end up hearing great suggestions, – which on this trip was the case for both Memphis, TN and Page, AZ. Some hotels even carry special running maps that they happily share if asked. Perhaps equally important, the hotel staff typically known where not to go running – which on this trip was the case in California, where I was told that the road that seemed like a good option to me was actually too crowded and would not have been a pleasant experience.
Posted in Road trip, Running, Sports, Tips and tricks, Travel | Comments Off on Running while Traveling: Finding Good Running Routes

Data, Diverse and Mighty

Posted on August 21, 2013 by admin

I’ve been thinking lately about how many different types of data I actually worked with. Surely, there are indoor light energy traces that I collected and analyzed in an extensive study that resulted in 2 top-tier papers, a public dataset, and that was used to drive aspects of the design of the EnHANTs and the algorithms and protocols for light-powered nodes. And there are also human and object motion traces that we collected and analyzed in a study of motion energy for the Internet of Things that recently received some media coverage.

But there are also many others, including, but by no means limited to:  Continue reading →

Posted in Data science | Comments Off on Data, Diverse and Mighty

For Injury-prone Runners: Tips and Tricks

Posted on August 18, 2013 by admin

This post is prompted by a few recent discussions on how to prevent running injuries.  I am as injury-prone as runners come: a slew of biomechanical imperfections, a history of knee injuries, a comparatively larger frame, next to no sports in childhood and adolescence. When I started running a few years back, I was plagued by an endless string of injuries of all kinds, mostly to the formerly damaged right knee and the shin on the over-compensating left leg. The injuries got to be so annoying, at times I thought running was not for me.  I was 100% sure I could never run a marathon. Yet, over the last two years I trained for a 1/2 ironman and for a marathon nearly injury-free (knock on wood), and am now starting to dream of running ultras and other insane races like this one.

To stop getting injured:  Continue reading →

Posted in Running, Sports, Tips and tricks | Comments Off on For Injury-prone Runners: Tips and Tricks