The why and how of nonnegative matrix factorization

The why and how of nonnegative matrix factorization Gillis, arXiv 2014 from: ‘Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines.’

Last week we looked at the paper ‘Beyond news content,’ which made heavy use of nonnegative matrix factorisation. Today we’ll be looking at that technique in a little more detail. As the name suggests, ‘The Why and How of Nonnegative matrix factorisation’ describes both why NMF is interesting (the intuition for how it works), and how to compute an NMF. I’m mostly interested in the intuition (and also out of my depth for some of the how!), but I’ll give you a sketch of the implementation approaches.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a widely used tool for the analysis of high dimensional data as it automatically extracts sparse and meaningful features from a set of nonnegative data vectors.

NMF was first introduced by Paatero andTapper in 1994, and popularised in a article by Lee and Seung in 1999. Since then, the number of publications referencing the technique has grown rapidly:

What is NMF?

NMF approximates a matrix \mathbf{X} with a low-rank matrix approximation such that \mathbf{X} \approx \mathbf{WH}.

For the discussion in this paper, we’ll assume that \mathbf{X} is set Continue reading

Connecting Python To Slack For Testing, Development, and Chat

Plugging Python Code Into Slack, Maybe For A Chatbot

The scripting language Python can retrieve information from or publish information to the messaging app Slack. This means you can write a chatbot that puts info into Slack for you, or accepts your queries using Slack as the interface. This is useful if you spend a lot of time in Slack, as I do.

The hard work of integrating Slack and Python has been done already. Slack offers an API, and there are at least two open source Python libraries that make leveraging these APIs in your Python code easy.

When searching for Slack projects using Python, most of the top hits are using Slack’s official python-slackclient. Github reveals that python-slackclient is an active project, with recent commits. In addition, most code examples I turned up are using python-slackclient. But it’s not a preference borne of experience. Maybe you’d prefer an alternate library like slacker.

Securing The Slack App Security Token

The slackclient library is security-conscious. Some other library sample code shows putting the Slack access token right in the source code as a static variable assignment, which is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Why? If you publish Continue reading

Cloud Notes: AWS S3

"Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance". At a high level S3 has the following characteristics: Object based storage for static files that do not change. EG: JPEG,...continue reading

Juniper AAA

Junos has a robust authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) system ensuring authenticated users have access to only the things their permissions allow. Authentication Junos supports two categories of user authentication. Local - On box user database Remote -...continue reading

Juniper OSPFv3

3 steps to configure OSPFv3. Create a router-id (optional) Assign OSPF neighbor facing interfaces to OSPF area Inject routes into OSPF via passive interfaces Configuration Create a router-id. cmd set routing-options router-id 10.255.1.1 Assign OSPF neighbor facing...continue reading

Juniper iBGP

8 steps to configure iBGP. Configure a router-id Configure an autonomous system number Configure transport routing protocol Configure a BGP group and define the peer type Configure a BGP group local address Add neighbors to the peer group Define a routing policy to...continue reading

Worth Reading: Blockchain and Trust

One of the rules of sane social media presence should be don’t ever engage with evangelists believing in a particular technology religion, more so if their funding depends on them spreading the gospel. I was called old-school networking guru from ivory tower when pointing out the drawbacks of TRILL, and clueless incompetent (in more polite words) when retweeting a tweet pointing out the realities of carbon footprint of proof-of-work technologies.

Interestingly, just a few days after that Bruce Schneier published a lengthy essay on blockchain and trust, and even the evangelists find it a bit hard to call him incompetent on security topics. Please read what he wrote every time someone comes along explaining how blockchains will save the world (or solve whatever networking problems like VTEP-to-MAC mappings).

The Week in Internet News: Researchers Develop AI Writing App but Worry about Fake News

Too easy to fake: OpenAI, a research institute in San Francisco, has developed an Artificial Intelligence program to write news articles, but has declined to release a full-featured version of it because of fears that the AI could easily produce fake news, the MIT Technology Review says. OpenAI, associated with AI skeptic Elon Musk, will make only a simplified version publicly available. The institute will publish a research paper outlining its work.

Secure your IoT: Eleven organizations, including the Internet Society and Mozilla, have asked retailers to stop selling Internet-connected devices that don’t meet minimum security and privacy requirements, Techbizweb reports. A letter from the organizations, sent to Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon, asks them to publicly endorse minimum security and privacy guidelines for Internet of Things devices.

Competing in AI: U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order meant to boost AI development in the country, The Hill reports. The order comes as some AI experts fear the U.S. is losing ground to China. Trump’s order directs federal agencies to prioritize and set aside funding for AI programs.

Broadband for all: Botetourt County in Virginia, where only about 70 percent of residents have access to Internet Continue reading

BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

Learn More about IXPs at the Middle East Network Operators Group

Internet Exchange Points are now considered to be an integral part of the Internet infrastructure worldwide. In very simple terms they are layer 2 switches that are used to route traffic that can be kept local instead of sending that traffic to the nearest major Internet node (usually located in Europe) and back. None of the countries of the Middle East contain enough globally-connected major Internet infrastructure so basically, all Internet traffic generated and terminated in the same country has to be routed through Europe. With well-implemented Internet Exchange Points, local Internet traffic stays local. Examples of local Internet traffic are financial transactions with your bank through online banking, requesting copies of your birth record from an e-government service, or any interaction with locally-hosted content.

Internet Exchange Points have three main benefits: lower latency, better cost efficiency, and control-of-traffic-sovereignty.

In the day and age of instant gratification and communications through social media and videos, latency, or the time it takes to fetch a web page, needs to be minimal and under 10ms as per industry standard (every 100km causes 1ms delay). In order to optimize the user experience, content providers have built their own global networks and spread their servers Continue reading

Introducing Cf-Terraforming

Ever since we implemented support for configuring Cloudflare via Terraform, we’ve been steadily expanding the set of features and services you can manage via this popular open-source tool.

If you're unfamiliar with how Terraform works with Cloudflare, check out our developer docs.

We are Terraform users ourselves, and we believe in the stability and reproducibility that can be achieved by defining your infrastructure as code.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to describe your infrastructure and cloud services (think virtual machines, servers, databases, network configurations, Cloudflare API resources, and more) as human-readable configurations.

Once you’ve done this, you can run the Terraform command-line tool and it will figure out the difference between your desired state and your current state, and make the API calls in the background necessary to reconcile the two.

Unlike other solutions, Terraform does not require you to run software on your hosts, and instead of spending time manually configuring machines, creating DNS records, and specifying Page Rules, you can simply run:

terraform apply

and the state described in your configuration files will be built for you.

Enter Cloudflare Terraforming

Terraform is a tremendous time-saver once you have your configuration files Continue reading

Weekend Reads 021519

How many tabs do you have open in your web browser right now? Be honest. A dozen? Two dozen? It’s okay, I’m no better. If you’re like me, you blame yourself for your horrible habit of leaving tabs open forever. —Luke Larsen

C-level executives often don’t have a clue when it comes to IT and application development. I’ve been analyzing survey data from IT end users for over 15 years, and responses received from business managers and even CIOs are often drastically different than what actual practitioners say. —Lawrence Hecht

If it’s now difficult to simply transport data from one place to the next, it’s humanly impossible to monitor and manage the data produced from distributed, hybrid, multicloud applications and environments. —Bhanu Singh

What could be more frightening than a service informing you that all your data is gone—every file and every backup servers are entirely wiped out? —Swati Khandelwal

The consolidation trend also has the potential to affect who participates in the IETF and how those in the industry view the value of standardization. Larger, more prosperous companies tend to have a greater ability to support standardization work, which is often paid for out of R&D or innovation budgets. Continue reading

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