Amrutha Dorai – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:13:05 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Amrutha Dorai – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 GSB economist uses big data to shake up the Internet https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/stanford-economist-susan-athey-uses-big-data-to-shape-the-internet/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/stanford-economist-susan-athey-uses-big-data-to-shape-the-internet/#respond Fri, 23 Aug 2013 17:56:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1078353 Athey, who has worked with Microsoft to develop new theories on the effect of the Internet on advertising, news consumption and more, is one of the leading experts in the field. Her research on the convergence of big data and economics, moreover, has even shaken up the way the web works.

The post GSB economist uses big data to shake up the Internet appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Internet. Economics. The two fields fall into separate departments, but according to Graduate School of Business Professor of Economics Susan Athey Ph.D. ’95, there is a considerable overlap between them.

Athey, who has worked with Microsoft to develop new theories on the effect of the Internet on advertising, news consumption and more, is one of the leading experts in the field. Her research on the convergence of big data and economics, moreover, has even shaken up the way the web works.

Digging into data

Athey first became involved as a consultant at Microsoft in 2007, while she was a professor at Harvard University. Since then, she has played an active role in Microsoft Research, the branch of the company focused on cutting-edge science.

Collaboration with industry is fairly common among Athey’s colleagues. Many professors in fields at the intersection of the Internet and economics, such as e-commerce, seek relationships with companies, according to Athey.

“Most of the research that’s taking place with very large data sets is in some way collaboration with either industry or government, because universities just aren’t creating and generating those large data sets,” Athey said.

According to economics department chair Jonathan Levin ’94, who has collaborated with Athey on research, Athey’s focus is those selfsame large data sets. Levin took classes with Athey while completing his graduate studies when she was an assistant professor at MIT.

“I think she’s always been interested in the application of sophisticated economic theory to real-world problems,” said Levin. “She has been, in her career, often very methodologically oriented.”

Causes and effects

Much of Athey’s work with Microsoft has focused on optimizing the efficiency of the algorithm that place ads alongside Bing search results and in the process generates millions of dollars in standing bids on certain keywords.

“What the job of the market designer is for these platforms is to try to set rules at the auctions and to manage the marketplace in a way that provides enough profits for advertisers so that they keep participating in your marketplace,” Athey said. “You’re also trying to make sure that you get the best advertisements to the users so that you create the most value in your market and, of course, the search engine wants to make money from these auctions.”

Athey has also done research on the impact of the Internet and social media on how people find and read news.

A future transformation

According to Athey, the evolution of the Internet is transforming the field of social sciences research in exciting ways.

“Economics has always been pretty empirical, but a lot of other social sciences have become much more data-driven once you can use Internet data,” Athey said.

In addition to allowing academics in other social sciences – like psychology, anthropology or political science – to obtain quantifiable data through mediums like social networks rather than simply through observations, big data techniques have found applications as diverse as fostering more efficient governance and administration in cities like New York and Chicago.

“The data created on the Internet came along, and it just opened up a whole bunch of new questions…and the ability to answer policy questions that weren’t really possible to address in the past,” Athey said. “It’s an incredible opportunity where professors in universities can really help push the ball forward by creating new methods and doing new research that’s going to affect the productivity of many different parts of our economy.”

 

The post GSB economist uses big data to shake up the Internet appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/stanford-economist-susan-athey-uses-big-data-to-shape-the-internet/feed/ 0 1078353
An interview with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg of “The World’s End” https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/an-interview-with-edgar-wright-and-simon-pegg-of-the-worlds-end/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/an-interview-with-edgar-wright-and-simon-pegg-of-the-worlds-end/#respond Fri, 23 Aug 2013 07:52:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1078233 There aren’t many film series quite like director Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which left plenty of room for discussion when The Daily talked with Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in advance of the concluding film’s premiere later this month.

Each of the three films — “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End,” out Aug. 23 — represents a collaboration between Wright, Pegg and Frost, but feature different characters, are situated in a different genre and tell a different story.

The post An interview with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg of “The World’s End” appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham / Focus Features
Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham / Focus Features

There aren’t many film series quite like director Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which left plenty of room for discussion when The Daily talked with Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in advance of the concluding film’s premiere later this month.

Each of the three films — “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End,” out Aug. 23 — represents a collaboration between Wright, Pegg and Frost, but feature different characters, are situated in a different genre and tell a different story.

While “Shaun” was a send-up of zombie flicks and “Hot Fuzz” did the same for buddy cop movies, “The World’s End” is a parody of alien invasion films. The story centers around Gary King (Pegg), a washed-up manchild who reunites the posse of his teenage years to complete a pub crawl in their hometown. A few pubs in, however, Gary and his estranged friends realize that the town’s population has been replaced with identical robots. Chaos ensues.

The idea of the individual being pitted against the collective is present in all three films. So is the concept of a seemingly innocuous setting turning out to be anything but.

“I came from a very sleepy sort of town, so I think I naturally gravitate towards being a dreamer and thinking about the dark secrets behind

Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham / Focus Features
Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham / Focus Features

closed doors or having these dreams of just wrecking the place,” Wright said. “So I always just returned to that idea.”

The film is packed with Easter eggs, including the obligatory fence-jump and Cornetto scenes. The attention to detail doesn’t end there, however, with each pub featured in the film named after one that exists somewhere in the United Kingdom.

“Every pub name has a bearing on what happens inside,” Pegg said. “The pub names are a key to the plot of the film in a way, down to the fact that the signs are even like tarot cards that will tell you what’s going to happen inside.”

After writing the script, Wright and Pegg sifted through names of pubs to determine the ones best suited to the plot. They applied a similar approach in selecting the tracks that appear on the nostalgia-heavy soundtrack — the pair listened to a mixtape of songs released from 1988 to 1993 on repeat while writing, and some of those songs found their way into the script.

“It wasn’t just a case of you get to the end and you see what works,” Wright said. “A lot of them were written into the script and even played in on set whether it was Primal Scream or Soup Dragons or Suede. There’s that scene where they’re walking through town, and it’s playing ‘So Young’ by Suede and the actors all had it in their ears — we had earwigs and they were listening to the songs and walking along.”

A choreographer helped to coordinate movements to music and also to simulate the drunken swagger the majority of the characters needed, as they spend the better half of the film utterly intoxicated.

While pubs play prominent roles not just in “The World’s End” but in all three films in the trilogy, Wright, Pegg and Frost emphasized that they aren’t encouraging alcoholism or hedonism.

“This film isn’t a celebration of alcohol, it’s not a celebration of the manchild and ‘Let’s get drunk all the time and have fun,’” Pegg said. “That isn’t the answer in this film. In a way, that’s Gary’s disability — his desire to do [so].”

“We are celebrating smashing robots’ heads in, though,” Wright noted.

Gary’s story, and the plot of “The World’s End” as a whole, functions as a cautionary tale of the dangers of nostalgia and of living in the past. It’s also a critique of the increasingly homogenized, even robotic, world we live in. Upon their return to their hometown of Newton Haven, the friends find that the pubs they left behind have become eerily similar to one another, a result of what Pegg refers to as the “Starbucks factor.”

It’s a defining characteristic of the Cornetto trilogy: what starts as parody of a genre evolves to become an outstanding example of the genre itself, bringing fresh and thought-provoking ideas to the table.

“A lot of comedies are so ephemeral and completely dissipate in your mind by the time you’ve gone to the parking lot,” Wright said. “We like films that might stick with you a bit longer, and even though they’ve got laughs in them and it’s silly and exciting, there are deeper themes that hopefully resonate longer.”

 

The post An interview with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg of “The World’s End” appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/23/an-interview-with-edgar-wright-and-simon-pegg-of-the-worlds-end/feed/ 0 1078233
Stanford startup guide https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/stanford-startup-guide/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/stanford-startup-guide/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:28:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1069197 Stanford University, with its array of resources and location in Silicon Valley, is a breeding ground of student creativity and technological innovation. Not surprisingly, it has been home to a number of startups over the past several years. Twenty-four of these have been helped along the way by StartX, or the Stanford Student Startup Accelerator, […]

The post Stanford startup guide appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Stanford University, with its array of resources and location in Silicon Valley, is a breeding ground of student creativity and technological innovation. Not surprisingly, it has been home to a number of startups over the past several years. Twenty-four of these have been helped along the way by StartX, or the Stanford Student Startup Accelerator, which provides Stanford student entrepreneurs with advice and resources to get their organizations off the ground. Here, we take a look at a few of the most recent of these StartX-incubated startups.

Stanford startup guide
Stanford University is well-known for producing students who create their own startups, sometimes as undergraduates. (LORENA RINCON-CRUZ/The Stanford Daily)

 

Predictive Edge

Marty Hu ’11 spent the summer after his sophomore year in college working at Cisco Systems, a technology company. While many of his friends and classmates at Stanford enjoyed their summer internships in the Silicon Valley, Hu was unimpressed. Unhappy with his lack of control at the company, his experience led to an epiphany.

“I realized that it really sucked,” he said. “I don’t know how other companies are, but I know that my experience working for a company really, really sucked.”

Future COO of Predictive Edge, Steven Wu ’11, whom Hu, the startup’s future CTO, had met the previous quarter in a class on entrepreneurial communications, felt the same way about his sophomore summer gig at Amazon.

After many IM conversations, the two returned to Stanford at the start of their junior year with a goal in mind: launch their own startup. They teamed up with Wu’s high school friend and future CEO Kevin Liu, then an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and also a member of the class of 2011, and Predictive Edge was born.

“So we all got together, and we were like, all right, we’re going to do a startup,” Hu said. “We don’t really know what it is, but we’re going to go sit down and figure it out.”

According to Hu, brainstorming yielded one particularly promising idea: designing a point-of-sale system for the Web.

“The idea was that if we could build some kind of point-of-sale system, we could collect all this information about buying patterns [online] and then save that all and do some cool stuff algorithm-wise with that,” Hu said. “[The question was,] what can we do with all these algorithms? And one thing we came up with was pricing.”

What the team knew was that there was really no competition for Amazon in the field of dynamic pricing. It was, in Hu’s words, “the dinosaur of retail,” one that was “basically killing the competition.”

Their goal? To try to make e-commerce more intelligent, building upon Amazon’s model with different algorithms.

“We’re trying to create a platform to enable small, medium-sized or even large e-commerce businesses to compete with Amazon,” Hu said.

The summer after their junior year, the Predictive Edge team worked at the company full time, a blur fueled by a $40,000 grant from the Lightspeed Summer Fellowship program, an organization aimed at providing funds for developing startups. It’s now been a year since all three graduated, and they’re still hard at work on expanding their fledgling company.

“There’s a future that I’d like to see, and that’s the company continuing to grow, becoming a good place for people to work,” Hu said. “But it’s hard to say. I mean, as long as I’m working on stuff that I really like and I’m doing something that I think is important, I think that’s good enough.”

 

WiFiSLAM

By 2011, WiFiSLAM co-founders Joseph Huang M.A. ’11 and Dave Millman M.A. ’10 had already nearly founded their startup. During their graduate studies at Stanford, they developed an indoor positioning technology able to pinpoint an individual’s exact location in order to find coupons for various nearby vendors. The only question was how to commercialize their idea.

With the help of co-founders Jessica Tsoong M.A. ’11, whom Huang had met through a class on tech venture formation, and Darin Tay, one of Huang’s classmates from his undergraduate education at the University of Waterloo and a current Google employee, WiFiSLAM was launched.

“We decided to start the company as we were all finishing our master’s programs, and our goal was to commercialize [this] indoor positioning technology,” Tsoong said in an email.

According to WiFiSLAM’s website, it provides users with a variety of functions, including indoor navigation, location-based coupons and gaming, automated check-ins and in-store product search.

“We have made significant progress to date — we have released our indoor positioning API and have begun integrations with a variety of mobile applications,” Tsoong said. “We have essentially built a location platform for any mobile application to use our indoor positioning.”

 

6Dot

For 6Dot co-founder Karina Pikhart M.A. ’12, the assignment was this: solve a problem at home. The prompt was that unspecific and open-ended.

Pikhart, at the time taking a design class during her senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found it eye-opening.

“[In this class,] we came across this experience that many blind individuals have, which is trouble locating or identifying or distinguishing between very common items, like medication or canned foods,” Pikhart said. “A lot of the tools that are available to attempt to solve those problems are pretty dissatisfying to use.”

Her in-class team designed and prototyped a product that would hopefully solve this problem more effectively: a Braille labeler. After moving to Palo Alto to attend graduate school at Stanford, Pikhart teamed up with Silicon Valley-based engineers and fellow 6Dot co-founders Robert Liebert and Raphael Hyde to create a startup that would make the Braille labeler widely available.

“[Our] aim is to provide tools or bring independence to the blind and people with other disabilities, and help people reach their full potential through developing innovative technology,” Pikhart said.

It hasn’t been an easy road, though; 6Dot has faced numerous difficulties, from assembling the right team to creating a sustainable business plan to actually making the jump from prototyping their idea to manufacturing it. After years of work, 6Dot put out its first Braille labelers in 2012. However, Pikhart is still hesitant to say that they’ve reached their goals.

“We’re a long way off from being successful at meeting that goal,” Pikhart said. “The vision of wanting disability to not be seen as a disability, the vision of wanting assisted technology to just look like any other technology is a long ways out.”

 

Jetlore

We use it as a verb now: “Google” this, “Google” that, “Google” anything and everything.

If Eldar Sadikov, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate in computer science, has his way, “Google” may soon be replaced with the name of his company: Jetlore.

Sadikov and his co-founder, Montse Medina, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate in mathematical engineering, founded Jetlore in January 2011 in order to create a smarter search engine for consumers. Jetlore, by using a social content aggregator called Qwhisper, personalizes results according to user’s activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

“The big vision from the very beginning was that we wanted to help any consumer out there…be able to [use] social content in decision making,” Sadikov said.

While this vision may have remained unwavering since Jetlore’s initial launching, their methodology has changed drastically. At first, Sadikov and Medina created a prototype that would refer you to someone likely to have the desired information. The example Sadikov provides is of someone wanting to purchase tickets to a Giants game but wondering where to find the best seats. The prototype would dig through previous Facebook or Twitter posts to pinpoint the friend most likely to have answers. But then the startup’s staff — originally composed of just Sadikov and Medina but now extended to include six others — had a revelation.

“Rather than having people provide the information, a lot of the information is already out there, already among the Facebook posts and the Twitter posts,” Sadikov said. “And we can show the existing information rather than helping people find the [right] person. We started working on really understanding content.”

Other companies have attempted similar feats before, but it’s not an easy task: much of the content on social networking sites is so colloquial and unstructured that designing an algorithm capable of decoding it requires a herculean effort. But Jetlore has thus far been successful, and it hopes to extend this success in the future.

“I think that’s where our future is, sort of making companies’ consumer services smarter, allowing them to personalize the experience for users and bring in the context they need — that’s really the future of search,” Sadikov said. “And I think that’s why we see ourselves as the next big search company.”

The post Stanford startup guide appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/stanford-startup-guide/feed/ 2 1069197
In repose, guards make lasting impression https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/in-repose-guards-make-lasting-impression/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/in-repose-guards-make-lasting-impression/#respond Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:59:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1069212 At first glance, the life-sized photograph suggests that the woman in the painting is modeled after the woman seated next to the painting, and further inspection only supports this conclusion. The similarities are uncanny: same white shirt, same periwinkle coat, same cropped, copper-colored hair. Even their facial structures seem to correlate.

The post In repose, guards make lasting impression appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
In repose, guards make lasting impression
Courtesy of Andy Freeberg

At first glance, the life-sized photograph suggests that the woman in the painting is modeled after the woman seated next to the painting, and further inspection only supports this conclusion. The similarities are uncanny: same white shirt, same periwinkle coat, same cropped, copper-colored hair. Even their facial structures seem to correlate.

 

Of course, it’s impossible. The photograph–one of 16 by Andy Freeberg that constitute the Cantor Arts Center’s new exhibit, “Guardians: Photographs by Andy Freeberg, an Exhibition in Three Parts”–is titled “Altman’s Portrait of I.P. Degas, State Tretyakov Gallery.” The woman portrayed in the painting is I.P. Degas; the woman sitting beside the painting is a nameless guard at the Russian State Tretyakov Gallery.

 

When Freeberg traveled to Russia in 2008, his goal was to capture the way in which capitalism had transformed the formerly communist nation. Upon visiting, however, he changed his focus to rest on the elderly women who serve as museum security guards, who appear to possess a deep passion for their work despite long hours and little pay.

 

Their passion–as well as Freeberg’s–is apparent in “Guardians.” The photographs, shot on a 35-millimeter digital camera, are elegantly composed, with gorgeous use of shadows and negative space. But although Freeberg, a San Francisco-based photojournalist, has tremendous talent, it’s also inarguable that he was given some compelling material to work with. The guards, sitting by the paintings entrusted to them, are beautiful. Freeberg does them justice.

 

In repose, guards make lasting impression
Courtesy of Andy Freeberg

The exhibit is divided into three portions, with the first two, “Antiquity to the Enlightenment” and “19th & Early 20th Century,” focusing on specific time periods and the last featuring photographs by Freeberg of Cantor’s own security staff. While these images fall short of the breathtaking beauty of the first two sets–no doubt hindered by the fact that, unlike the Russian guards, Cantor’s guards are required to wear uniforms–they are nonetheless a sight to behold. Also, it’s pretty exciting when you recognize a face (as the woman standing next to me so astutely noted when she asked, “Hey, isn’t that the girl from the lobby?”).

 

This last portion of the exhibit is accompanied by a five-minute documentary on Cantor’s security staff, directed by Josie Johnson ‘13 and produced by Justin Warren ‘09. The brief video has Cantor guards reflect on their favorite pieces of art at the museum, a question that prompts the subjects to launch into amusing anecdotes on everything from Sunday school to childhood vacations in England.

 

As delightful as “Guardians” is, however, be warned: the three parts of the exhibit are located in three different portions of the Cantor Arts Center, leading to much confusion. This difficulty in navigation is only exacerbated by the fact that the building is currently undergoing some remodeling. Arm yourself with a map, but even so, expect to have to ask one of Cantor’s helpful guards for advice.

 

How fitting.

 

“Guardians” will be on display at the Cantor Arts Center until Jan. 6, 2013.

 

The post In repose, guards make lasting impression appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/02/in-repose-guards-make-lasting-impression/feed/ 0 1069212
SLAC physicists react to Higgs boson announcement https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/12/slac-physicists-react-to-confirmation-of-higgs-boson/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/12/slac-physicists-react-to-confirmation-of-higgs-boson/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:27:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068527 The announcement revealed the findings of two independent research projects based at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which confirmed the existence of a particle that fit the profile constructed for the Higgs boson after years of speculation.

The post SLAC physicists react to Higgs boson announcement appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
SLAC physicists react to Higgs boson announcement
The Higgs Boson particle, recently discovered in Geneva, is a groundbreaking find for the physics community. (OLLIE KHAKWANI/ The Stanford Daily)

 

Although the July 3 announcement regarding the discovery of the Higgs boson particle was made in Geneva, Switzerland, physicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park were anything but distanced from the discovery.

Some Stanford researchers were there in Geneva. Ten Stanford-affiliated physicists were on location working for CERN at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, some were in attendance at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia, and some 25 theorists and six experimentalists waited until midnight to watch the announcement from SLAC itself.

The announcement revealed the findings of two independent research projects based at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva — Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS — which confirmed the existence of a particle that fit the profile constructed for the Higgs boson after years of speculation. Several SLAC physicists played a role in the ATLAS project.

“We saw the… reconstructed mass from the two experiments was roughly the same, 125 to 126 gigaelectron volts,” said SLAC experimental physicist Tim Barklow. “They both saw roughly the same signal and the same decay modes and roughly the same mass. And they both achieved that independently, so it was just absolute confirmation that a new particle had been seen.”

The important discovery of the particle resulted in an outpouring of praise and awe from scientists across the globe. The Higgs boson would explain the origin of mass through the establishment of a Higgs field, a ubiquitous quantum field responsibly for giving elementary particles their mass.

“What’s important is this thing called the Higgs field… and that’s what makes things have mass, that’s what makes things even exist,” said Andy Freeberg, director of media relations for SLAC. “So finding this Higgs boson, this particle, is sort of evidence for the fact that the Higgs field exists.”

Freeberg compares the Higgs field to a magnetic field. While in a magnetic field, objects are acted upon based on their mass, and a Higgs field would in and of itself determine this mass. The mass would be decided based on the extent to which the Higgs field interacts with different types of particles.

“The Higgs boson confirms what has been a crucial part of our understanding of subatomic particles for several decades,” Barklow said. “[It] has been theorized to give mass to all the fundamental particles in nature. And… the particle associated with this Higgs field has now been discovered after decades of searching.”

On top of the 40-odd SLAC physicists who played a direct role in the ATLAS project, research conducted at SLAC in the 1990s also paved the way for the discovery of the particle. Although SLAC’s particle collider is no longer in use, it facilitated research on the Z boson, another elementary particle. The understanding of the Z boson “helped determined where to look for the Higgs boson,” according to Freeburg.

Despite this landmark discovery in physics, however, both Barklow and Freeberg say that there is still much more ground to cover. The complexities of the Higgs boson and Higgs field still need to be mapped out. Their hope is that pinning down these specifics will allow the world of physics to apply this knowledge to other pressing questions, such as the existence of supersymmetry.

“This really key model, the standard model of physics, works,” Freeberg said, “and all of the major pieces are potentially now in place.”

The post SLAC physicists react to Higgs boson announcement appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/12/slac-physicists-react-to-confirmation-of-higgs-boson/feed/ 1 1068527