The Future of AI Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI systems have made significant progress. Yet, arguably, no advancement in capabilities since then has made quite as much of an impression on the global public as that launch – and widespread productivity gains have yet to materialize. How will AI develop going forward and at what timescales? Will the real-world impact of AI…
Last week, I attended the IMA Workshop on Geometric and Enumerative Combinatorics which was, hands down, the best conference I have ever attended. The speaker lineup was simply amazing and I return brimming with ideas for future projects and collaborations. I felt, therefore, particularly honored to be invited to speak in front of this audience, given that so many of my personal "academic heroes",…
When you want to prepare your 3D visualizations for publication in print/PDF you typically want to convert them into a vector graphics format. Three.js is a JavaScript library for creating 3D graphics that can be easily used to create vector graphics images in SVG format from 3D visualizations. Here is an example of how to achieve this -- and you can modify the example right in your browser! The…
The potential of the comprehensive formalization of mathematics has fascinated me for quite some time - even though I am a working mathematician whose research is not part of the area conventionally known as “formal methods”. Last week, I took the opportunity to attend the QED+20 workshop which was part of the Vienna Summer of Logic and which celebrates anniversary of the original QED workshops…
It is amazing how quickly time can pass: I am already half a year at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in Linz, Austria. (Actually, RISC is in Hagenberg, but I am living in Linz.) I am working in Peter Paule 's Partition Analysis project, which is part of the SFB Algorithmic and Enumeratice Combinatorics , a joint special research program of Johannes Kepler University Linz, the…
"Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open." Panton Principles “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the…
Open textbooks and MOOCs are the way of the future. Yet, traditional business models, from donations to sales, do not suffice to make the full breadth of educational content open to everyone. Fund I/O is the business model to fill this gap. It is simple, really: the more people have access to an educational resource, the more can benefit from it . In an age where copying has almost zero cost and…
In the age of the Internet, it is difficult for websites, web services and software developers to monetize the value they create. Most customers are extremely price sensitive and try to pay as little as possible for software or web services provided through software. The prevalent business model is to provide a basic, ad-supported service for free and to charge for the full-featured service. Rates…
Fund I/O is a model for funding the production of any type of good with massive economies of scale. In its basic version, Fund I/O is intended to finance fixed costs that only apply once, such as the one-off cost of writing a book. (See here for an introduction.) However, many important goods and services incur fixed costs on a recurring basis. Examples include ongoing software development,…
Fund I/O can be extremely useful in funding projects with a social or environmental impact: producing vaccines, for example. One challenge of vaccine production is getting the market for a new vaccine to scale to the point where the vaccine becomes affordable. Because prospective buyers expect prices to drop, many will wait with their purchase, which may even prevent the market from reaching the…
I think we need more crowdfunding projects for open source software! And here is one, for example: Yorba , the guys behind Shotwell , are currently running an Indigogo campaign to fund the development of their open source email client Geary . As of this writing, they have raised about \$50,000 of their \$100,000 goal and the rush of the last 24 hours has just begun. So, please head over there now…
Throughout my conversations about Fund I/O over the past couple of weeks, one thing has become clear: Fund I/O implies a radically different way of thinking about business. What is the Fund I/O business model? Fund I/O is a business model for the production of goods with substantial economies of scale. In a nutshell: Financing is provided through presales made during a crowdfunding campaign. The…
Fair crowdfunding has a new home: Fund I/O . As you may have seen, I have been blogging recently about a new crowdfunding mechanism for public goods, the Average Cost Threshold Protocol . Since the last post on the topic, I have spent quite some time discussing this idea with people, and have decided to give this idea into a project dubbed Fund I/O with an own website fund-io.com and an own…
There are many beautiful geometric interpretations of the GCD and visualizations of the Euclidean algorithm out there, see for example here , here and here . I have written about this myself some time ago . But I find that some of the pictures become much clearer when lifted into the third dimension. [Note: I am using Sage Cells to produce the pictures in this post. This has the advantage that…
Can fair crowdfunding resolve the conflict over copyright? Or, as Cory Doctorow put it yesterday: Does the Average Cost Threshold Protocol incentivize content creators to "sue the Internet"? Very short answer: The incentive for creators to sue the Internet is very small (much smaller than usual) but not zero. Short answer: The Average Cost Threshold Protocol (ACTP) drastically reduces the…
We live in a wonderful age! So much that we value - music, movies, books, games, software, designs, research, art, ideas - can be stored in digital form. Once these digital goods are created, they could in principle be made available to everyone at virtually no extra cost. So why don't we? Why do we fight about copyright instead? The reason is a conflict of economic interests. On the one hand we…
Christopher Smy asked for a geometric proof of the identity $$1^3+\ldots+n^3 = (1+\ldots+n)^2.$$ Because I like that sort of thing, I couldn t resist drawing a picture: If you like that sort of thing, check out this video or these lecture notes .
A while ago , I started a series of posts on finding new ways to fund public goods. Crowd-funding platforms, which have been enormously successful in 2012, promise a new way of financing creative projects and many of them employ the Street Performer Protocol, which was originally invented with a view towards financing public goods such as open source software projects. However, a closer look at…
My latest math paper has hit the arXiv . It is called Enumerating Colorings, Tensions and Flows in Cell Complexes and it is joint work with Matthias Beck , Jeremy Martin and Logan Godkin. It has been great working with all of them. I am particularly pleased that this is my first joint paper with Matthias, the great guy who brought me to San Francisco! This paper is a continuation of the work that…
In this post, I kick off a series on the private provision of public goods, by taking a good look at Kickstarter and the Street Performer Protocol. Crowd funding really took off in 2012. From my personal perspective, the most visible embodiment of this trend was the emergence of Kickstarter as a means of funding game development projects. Double Fine Adventure was one of the first projects that…