July 19, 2010

Print-On-Demand in India

Print on demand is a publishing process that allows an author to publish a book in paperback and then have a very small number of copies -- even a single copy, if necessary -- printed whenever required at a price point that is comparable to traditional offset printing.

I had first come across this technology when I had published, The Road to pSingularity, and had explained this new publishing paradigm in a post in 2007. The trouble then was that these print-on-demand publishers were based in the US and the price of the book was comparable to a US retail price which is quite high for us in India. Moreover the shipping cost was very often more than the cost of the book. Thus the whole process was not quite economically viable.

However the arrival of of print-on-demand vendors in India have altered the economics dramatically. Recently, I had the pleasure of publishing the first volume of the VGSOM Management Monograph Series through Pothi and the results were very satisfying.

A perfectly bound paperback copy of my 154 page book Information Systems for Crime Management is now available at Rs 235 only from Pothi and since the books is being shipped from Bangalore, the cost is quite affordable -- and comparable to any other online bookstore in India.

Authors writing on niche topics may use this technology to publish their works.

July 04, 2010

Google DoPe and the Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception is an iconic book by Aldous Huxley where, while exploring  the hallucinogenic properties of certain shrubs and herbs, he came to the unusual conclusion that any cognitive sentient has instant and automatic access to all possible knowledge in the universe. However the neural faculties that are expected to process this information and render them useful in a socio-cognitive context are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data -- as occassionally evident in what we refer to as 'madness' -- and so are protected and isolated from the same by the mind that works as a gate or valve that reduces the quantum of information that the brain is eventually exposed to. This mind or gate or valve is what Huxley refers to as the Doors of Perception : that can be opened wider by the use of mental techniques ( Yoga ?) or the use of hallucinogenic drugs -- to reveal a greater amount of "significance" or meaning to the sterile reams of data that is otherwise available. While the jury may still be out on the veracity of this hypothesis, the emergence of the World Wide Web has created for us an intriguing analogy that is well worth exploring.

There is no doubt that the Web represents a very large amount of information -- whether it is in the form of specialised packets as in Wikipedia, in the form of semi-structured information at social networking sites or finally in rather unstructured format of thousands of web pages scattered all across the internet. There is no doubt that almost any kind of information is certainly available out there and it is also true that barring some secret documents anyone, in principle, can access most of it. As a thought experiment (like the one performed by Einstein in riding a beam of light !), one could -- again in principle and of course in a moment of madness -- take a print out all that information but then what ? Can any human being, a cognitive sentient, ever hope to make any sense from that mountain of paper on his desk ? Obviously not.

So what do we do ? We use a search engine to act as a filter that reduces the amount of information that is dumped on our digital desktop and then we navigate through this using our own intelligence to reach our goal. This combination of search engine and our own intelligent data interpretation is in my opinion analogous to what Huxley could refer to as the Doors of Perception.Can we improve on this man-machine hybrid and create a better search-interpret product ? Can we bring improve upon it until it starts to resemble the mind more closely. To do so we need to understand that the interpretation part consists of two components : a semantic module that helps us distinguish between similar sounding but contextually different words, eg bus as in vehicle and bus as in a communication channel, and natural language processor that can do a bi-directional context sensitive translation between human phrases and a computer query and reporting language.

So if I were to say "What trees grow in the Amazon ?", the natural language processor (NLP) should be able to convert it into a search command, pass it to the search engine (SE). The SE should retrieve information and pass it to the semantic interpreter (SI) that would eliminate information about both Amazon, the retailer and amazon, the female warriors, leaving only information about the Amazon rain-forest. Finally, the NLP would should be able to repackage this information into a neat list of trees that grow in the Amazon and show it on the screen with URLs pointing to more information in Wikipedia !

Is this Utopian ? Not really.

Google has a powerful search engine and Wikipedia provides a great information base to start with -- so the SE is certainly in place. Natural language processing is well established branch of study and if combined with the advances made in language translation there is a good probability that a near human like dialogue can be achieved without too much effort. What is clearly missing is the ability to introduce semantic interpretation and this is where we enter the realms of artificial intelligence -- a cliched phrase that I have been trying to avoid for quite some time.

How does the system distinguish between Amazon the retailer and Amazon the jungle ? and between Bengal, the state and Bengal, the iconic tiger of a football team ? Of course one way would be to learn by observation. If I were to search for Bengal and then follow the links toward Bengal the state, then in my case, and only in my case, Bengal means the state. But if someone in Cincinnati were to search for Bengal and then follows the links for the football team then in his case, and only in his case, Bengal maps to the iconic tiger. How on earth would the the semantic interpreter distinguish between the two of us ?

An obvious answer would be to first identify us, say through our Google loginid, but that would compromise privacy. Instead, can we use a clever combination of a history of past searches on the word Bengal ( or Amazon for that matter ) and establish some probability figures for Bengal => State vs Bengal => Tiger which can then be refined and or otherwise tested through a dialogue established by the natural language processor ( for example, Did you mean tiger or the state ? ). Difficult but certainly not impossible considering the number of AI style chatbots that are available. In fact techniques like market basket analysis from the world of data mining can be tailored to identify concepts that are more closely related.

Basically what we are looking for is a bolt-on product that will sit on top of Google search engine and act as an interface between the human world and the world of digital information. Its main job would be reduce the information that is available on the web, identify and isolate the relevant portions and pass it on to the curious human who triggered the search ( or "thought" ? )

Would that be a new product from Google ?  Google DoPe ? Google Doors of Perception ?

July 02, 2010

Shikshajaal:21 - the education network for the 21st century

Affordability and Quality




Physical Infrastructure




Human Resources



Software Environment






Management Structure


Financial Model





The ascent of man



[ written for the The Economist-Innocentive Ideation Challenge ]

About This Blog

  © Blogger template 'External' by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP