Happy New Year

Hello everyone. I want to wish everyone a happy new year and say a few things about what I expect for the new year.

I believe that one of the most important issues facing "first world" countries like the USA and England are the issues of Internet security and privacy. The news this morning of the umbrage of US congress people to the news that NSA is monitoring of their communications with people in the Israeli government is laughable: let us be clear about this: these people don't care about the privacy of US citizens but they do care about their own privacy and the privacy of leaders of another country. This stinks, and badly.

While privacy is important I believe that a bigger issue security. I would like to see my government (USA) conduct a multi-year "going to the moon" type project for strengthening our information infrastructures to the benefit of people, companies, and governments. This means that there can be no encryption back doors installed in any software and hardware systems. If governments have universal decryption keys then eventually these keys will leak to organized crime, terrorists, and other governments. Imagine the scenario of everyone waking up some morning to emptied bank accounts - that is a possible scenario if 'back doors' are installed in public infrastructure.

On a happier note, the will of the people in my country regarding labeling of GMO foods has won out, at least for now. I believe that 90% of people in the USA poll in favor of accurate labeling of foods. When you consider the power of the food corporation lobbying block, with their paid for politicians (Hillary Clinton and most of the republican presidential candidates, as well as most of Congress) this is a surprising but good victory. Yay!

Despite environmental and political corruption problems I remain very optimistic about the future.

I expect scientific advances in clean energy, artificial intelligence and robotics, and medical breakthroughs to continue at a rapid pace and yield benefits for most people on earth.

In my field (artificial intelligence) we have seen enormous progress in development of useful systems based on deep learning. That said, I don't believe that deep learning is the path to general artificial intelligence. Deep learning is an elegant hack (for training many layer neural networks) but we need a formal model for true AI.

On personal technology: I have spent an enormous amount of time (very enjoyable time) studying and using Haskell, Clojure, Scala, and other languages on projects. While I will always allocate time for learning and practicing with new languages and technologies, for 2016 I have made a news years resolution to "just use Java 8" and "get stuff done." I will continue to mostly use Ruby when I need a scripting language. My decision is to spend more time on artificial intelligence research and projects and Java 8 is usually a practical enough language for this work.

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