The Now Economy

After some internal conversations about our goals for Zocalo, CommerceNet has agreed that the Zocalo code will be released as Open Source under the MIT license (AKA the X11 license). The MIT license is short and simple and grants broad rights to use the code. It’s likely that other CommerceNet Lab projects will be released with the same license when they are ready. I’m quite pleased with this choice, since it means the broadest possible usability for the code. Anyone who finds interesting ideas or useful implementation details in the code will be free to use them in any way that makes sense to them.

We’re making good progress on building support for an experiment being planned at George Mason University by Ryan Oprea, Robin Hanson, and David Porter. They’d like to be running the experiment through most of April, and I’m working on getting it ready. I expect to spend 1-2 weeks cleaning up and organizing the code after the code is ready for them so I’ll feel comfortable publishing it. It won’t be done, but it’ll be presentable. From there, we’ll plan out next steps, and look for sensible projects for volunteers to help with. (Yes, we have some offers to help.)

For the moment, I only distracted myself from development long enough to change the copyright notice in all the source files, change the package name in all java files to net.commerce.zocalo, check it all in to our internal source control system, and write this blog entry. Now back to work.

Jeff Hawkins, as most of the digerati knows, has been developing his theory of human intelligence for a while now, and recently founded a non-profit research institute to pursue it with visiting researchers and sponsored graduate students. Redwood, in the Kepler’s Books building in Menlo Park, appears to remain quite separate from this venture, but the spinoff theme seems quite appropriate.

In related WSJ coverage, they report that Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark, a past backer, and Harry Saal, a past CommerceNet supporter, are on their board — less for the money, as one might imagine with Hawkins and Dubinsky involved, than for the connections and business development challenges that await them. I suspect they’re on the right track to conceive of this as a platform play that needs open developer support first and foremost. Good luck!

A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky will remain involved with what is now called PalmOne, but on Thursday they plan to announce the creation of Numenta, a technology development firm that will conduct research in an effort to extend Mr. Hawkins’s theories. Those ideas were initially sketched out last year in his book “On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines,” co-written with Sandra Blakeslee, who also writes for The New York Times. Dileep George, a Stanford University graduate student who has worked with Mr. Hawkins in translating his theory into software, is joining the firm as a co-founder. Mr. Hawkins has long been interested in research in the field of intelligence, and in 2002 he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. He now spends part of his time there while continuing to serve as chief technology officer of PalmOne. Artificial intelligence, which first attracted computer scientists in the 1960’s, was commercialized in the 1970’s and 1980’s in products like software that mimicked the thought process of a human expert in a particular field. But the initial excitement about machines that could see, hear and reason gave way to disappointment in the mid-1980’s, when artificial intelligence technology became widely viewed as a failure in the real world. In recent years, vision and listening systems have made steady progress, and Mr. Hawkins said that while he was uncomfortable with the term artificial intelligence, he believed that a renaissance in intelligent systems was possible. He said that he believed there would soon be a new wave of software based on new theoretical understanding of the brain’s operations. “Once you know how the brain works, you can describe it with math,” he said. Mr. Hawkins acknowledged, however, that full-scale applications of his theoretical approach had not yet been developed or proved . Mr. Hawkins is now demonstrating a pattern-recognition application using a version of his software. It allows a computer to correctly identify a line drawing of a dog from many different patterns. Commercial uses for the technology might include speech recognition for telephone customer service or vision systems for quality control in factories. Initially, the company will offer free licenses to the Numenta software to permit experimentation and help build a research community to develop the technology, Ms. Dubinsky said.

David Pennock’s fascinating dynamic pari-mutuel market mechanism has finally surfaced in a public prediction market, TechBuzz. It’s a tournament co-sponsored by O’Reilly & Associates to predict future share of search query terms across ~100 “geek buzzwords.”

It was launched during a session on “From the Labs” by YRL director Gary Flake (Ph.D., as he puts it :-). He described the mission of their 30+ staffers as a “hedged portfolio” of long/short, basic/applied, platform/prototype balancing while publishing and collaborating as openly as possible. He quickly summarized our mechanisms for calculating opinions:

1. asking a single person;
2. asking a single expert;
3. asking an aggregate of people (voting);
4. asking an aggregate of experts (electoral college/representative democracy);
5. and ultimately, aggregating prediction by performance: markets.

They’ve done a great job of working with NewsFutures to skin a custom version of their UI that looks very Yahoo!-style, clear and clean. I con only suppose the performance problems are due to the overloaded wireless at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech confab where this was launched today; and the fervent trading by the audience members. [I, for one, am up nearly $200 betting on my favorite technologies: Syndic8 and HDTivo, and one bargain-hunting bet on JOTS -- and already hammered out of the top-10 by folks with far more bradding rights like Zawodny and some thousand-aire named "plasticbag" :-]

Yahoo! Research Labs: The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you “put your play money where your mouth is.”

Example: 1. You’re bullish on podcasting; you buy shares of PODCAST stock 2. Britney announces her next single will be delivered exclusively via podcast 3. Curious tweens everywhere flood Yahoo! with searches about podcasting 4. Your shares skyrocket; you make a bundle

As a technology enthusiast, use the Tech Buzz Game as a window into community sentiment about the future of technology.

As CommerceNet’s latest hire, and Principal Investigator for a new project (”Zocalo”) within the lab, I wanted to introduce myself to the readers of this blog.

I have been interested in Prediction Markets (AKA Idea Futures) for quite a while. Over the last few years, I have been working with a handful of other people to find ways to promote this technology. As a software developer, I have built a couple of prototypes on my own to explore different directions.

When I heard late last year that CommerceNet was starting a lab to explore decentralization and ecommerce, I was very excited to find that they might be interested in including Prediction Markets as a part of the lab. After some preliminary discussions, CommerceNet agreed to fund the development of a more specific proposal and its presentation at the DIMACS workshop on Markets as Predictive Devices in February at Rutgers. The proposal has now been issued as CN-TR-05-02: Zocalo: An Open-Source Platform for Deploying Prediction Markets. The presentation I gave at the workshop is up on the DIMACS web site. And my job is to make it all happen.

The goal of the project is the development of an open source toolkit for creating Prediction Markets and of a community of interested users. Prediction Markets are markets based on financial securities that pay the holder an amount that depends on the outcome of particular events. Markets in these artificial commodities generate forecasts that have been shown to improve on other prediction methods (pundits, expert panels, polls, focus groups) whenever participants have relevant information about the likelihood of the events. These markets decentralize decision-making by creating reliable predictions based on wide-spread expertise from people who wouldn’t be consulted in any conventional forecasting procedure.

(more…)

Chris Masse continues to connect to interesting new people and events in Prediction Markets. I followed his pointer to “Mapping Strategy”, a Blog focusing on Prediction Markets written by Art Hutchinson that I hadn’t seen before. The newest entry there is a call for speakers for a panel on Prediction Markets at the Conference Board in NYC in late May.

The panel will focus on “prediction markets as a means to measure/assess the future market prospects of various innovations”. Art is looking for a few more “corporate speakers who have done something with PMs inside their organization.”