

Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence - marcus

I've developed a new machine learning algorithm that understands the relationship between its inputs better and outperforms existing algorithms on almost every test I've done, and I'm looking for new ideas as to how to monetize it.
Already working on trading commodities with it, which is progressing but still hasn't reached the point where its a money making scheme.
Also working on some CAD (computer assisted diagnosis) applications.<p>Any ideas?
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zyroth
I don't believe you.

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marcus
Challenge me. Select a dataset send me the training data and I'll send you my
results so you can verify it...

I don't mind being tested.

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lucindo
You can tell us your results with KDD data sets: <http://kdd.ics.uci.edu/>

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hhm
He says in some other comment:

"I've tested it on the data from the KDD 2006 cup a contest in the KDD
conference whose goal was to identify Pulmonary Embolism based on data
generated from CT scans and it out scored the cup winners by a 50% margin."

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johnrob
Build a public web API to use your technology for a fee. Make it dead simple
to incorporate AI into any application.

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henning
It's tempting to be a tool vendor, but unfortunately there are many
established tool people. You don't even know the names, most likely, of all
the little neural network toolkit companies that flopped in the early-mid 90s.

It's better to use a new technology to create a complete solution for people.

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marcus
The problem with building a complete solution is that it usually requires a
lot of investment and domain specific knowledge. Having a better algorithm
offsets a lot of it but I am not sure I could write a better CAD (computer
assisted diagnosis) software on my own in a reasonable time frame that will
outperform the market leaders even if using their data I can improve their
results by 50%.

There is just too much science involved in feature selection etc...

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yubrew
Subject matter expertise can be hired, as employees, or as advisors to your
company. For this type of start up, you not only need a team to build out the
product end users will ultimately use (an expensive endeavor in and of
itself), but you also need to gain credibility from experts and get published
before doctors will look at your stuff.

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marcus
I was hoping to avoid all the hassle by sticking to my core competency of
artificial intelligence doing a co-venture with some established players in
the fields and help them improve their results. I know that the Ralph Waldo
Emerson quote "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your
door" is not true but I was hoping that at least the world will meet me half
way...

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yubrew
I see. How about creating a public API (like someone else suggested) so we can
see what it does, and then have a couple guys shop it around for you as you
get validation studies going?

Then you give people enough to get enticed, but don't give everything away.
You can then pursue multiple applications with a parallel effort.

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ivankirigin
Investing. Look to Machine Insight in Cambridge, and the work they've done.
They're trying to train an AI system to be Warren Buffet in a box. You don't
hear much about this trend, because people are making way too much money to
talk about it openly.

I'll put it this way: if you can consistently beat the market by a few
percentage points, you can be a billionaire.

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pixcavator
>...people are making way too much money to talk about it openly.

Or maybe people are _wasting_ way too much money to talk about it openly.

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ivankirigin
Do you have any information at all to base your comment on?

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brent
Do you have any information of anyone algorithmically outperforming the market
enough to make them personally billionaires?

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neilc
Algorithmic trading is actually commonplace:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_Trading_Platforms>

[http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/23/business/trading.php?...](http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/23/business/trading.php?page=1)

Typically this is not a question of "find the secret strategy and make
billions!", but rather finding a good execution algorithm to break an order of
$billions down into a series of smaller orders for a good average price, or
finding and exploiting minute arbitrage opportunities, etc. Algorithmic
trading is responsible for many billions of dollars of trades daily; I don't
know offhand of particular people who have become billionaires off it, but
there are definitely lots of folks who have made a lot of money.

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brent
I know there are people who trade algorithmically (I'm one of them). I just
wanted evidence of one person who had made billions from it.

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ivankirigin
You've taken my comment on a personal level in that you think I'm talking
about an individual. I would form a company around the idea and target
investing.

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Retric
Patent and publish it. CAD is not limited by the algorithm so much as a lack
new problems. However, if you can generate a little buzz you can become a
consultant / start a consultant company.

PS: Many machine learning systems can trade off accuracy for efficiency so you
might look into increasing efficiency vs. accuracy for some existing
application.

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tx
This is what's wrong with our patent system. Imagine if all those great minds
who came up with theorems you had to learn in 4-6 years of college decided to
patent them.

Math should not be patentable. It's a crime.

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rms
At least patents are only 20 years, copyright is forever.

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marcus
Copyright isn't forever. It originally expired 17 years after the death of the
author. Unfortunately Disney pushed for extension of copyrights every time
their key copyrights (Micky mouse & friends) were about to expire and have
been able to push extending them quite unreasonably.

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rms
Right, Disney has effectively made copyright forever by making it last more
than a lifetime.

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aston
Here's a start: <http://www.netflixprize.com>

If you've got awesome prediction technology, that's an easy $50k, and maybe an
easy $1 million.

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pixcavator
How about _proving_ that the algorithm works first. Prove it on something
simple and verifiable like symbolic addition
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75439>. Here I go again with my own
agenda, sorry...

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marcus
This is a classic example of the saying "When the only tool you have is a
hammer, every problem looks like a nail" To a guy with a spam filter,
everything looks like mail to be filtered. (it was a cool & very interesting
experiment non the less )

Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as
the symbols don't have any relationships with each other which is exactly the
insight this algorithm adds, and which almost every other dataset has.

I've proven that the algorithm works to my complete satisfaction. I've tested
it almost every dataset in UCI machine learning repository and it outperforms
the best published results on almost all of them. I've tested it on the data
from the KDD 2006 cup a contest in the KDD conference whose goal was to
identify Pulmonary Embolism based on data generated from CT scans and it out
scored the cup winners by a 50% margin.

I know the algorithm works, I am just not sure how to monetize it...

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pixcavator
>Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as
the symbols don't have any relationships with each other...

That was my thinkng exactly. I am glad it is confirmed by an expert...

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basho
My team is currently in 5th in the Netflix Prize competition. The main part of
the method I'm using is pretty general (nothing specific to movies). If anyone
here thinks they might have a use for this kind of thing / wants to
collaborate on something, send me an email.

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yubrew
I am a tech commercialization consultant for some of the crazy stuff that
comes out of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Scientists
and engineers make all this cool stuff, but they don't really know what to do
with it, and how to package and sell it. That's where I come in.

E-mail me and maybe we can figure out what it would be good for. I'm thinking
you should patent the technology, show proof of concept comparison tests, and
shop application specific licenses around.

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jkush
I'd love to have a virtual clone of myself, i.e. something that has learned to
think like me. I would treat it as a virtual assistant. I'd like it to
prioritize and schedule my work. Tell me when it's time to call it quits or
when I need to be doing something else.

Essentially, it'd be the virtual embodiment of my conscience.

Going along those lines, let's say you're a brilliant CEO or hacker. You could
license copies of your wisdom to others who need guidance.

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neilc
<http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=40064>

Talks about some similar ideas -- applying ML techniques to make information
workers more productive. Cool stuff.

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mrtron
Dating site matching?

There are a zillion ways to monetize it. The real question is can you
successfully do so. What about selling an appliance similar to google search,
but instead is your predictive technology. Make a public api for people to
test it, and then sell the hardware option.

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pcowans
Can you give any specific examples (references to academic papers) you've
already tested it on and shown an improvement - no need to give details if you
don't feel you can, but it would be interesting to know which tests you've
done and against which existing algorithms.

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marcus
KDD 2006 cup <http://www.cs.unm.edu/kdd_cup_2006>

My algorithm scored 2.043 19 on tasks 1 & 2 Top 3 places 1: 1.35 1.28 1.27 Top
3 places 2: 13.58 13.56 13.44 Note these scores represent 5 different teams.

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greendestiny
No doubt the siemens medical solutions people would be interested in talking
with you further. The KDD 2006 training and results data have now been
released, so its not really a great demonstration.

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marcus
I had the same idea but I tried approaching them and couldn't get them to try
and test my algorithm. Cold calls in that industry are very difficult...

I don't want them to take my word for it, just supply me with more test data
and I could send them my results.

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greendestiny
Try the specific kdd people there as listed on this paper:
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1233321.1233326>

I'm sure an opportunity to prove your algorithm will pop up. Its the sort of
field where you can fool yourself sometimes by not being careful enough with
training and testing data, so random people off the internet generally don't
seem worth the trouble to an established researcher.

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paul
Ad targeting.

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marcus
Very interesting idea, do you have any idea where I can get a dataset for it?
I'd rather test it before I start pouring time & money to building an ad
network first

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richcollins
In response to the idea that your search algorithm is better than all others:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_opt...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)

In response to your question I say that it should be easy to monetize your
algorithm if it is truly good at solving some class problems. Just find
problems where the solutions are valuable to some group of people and sell the
solutions you create.

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marcus
Never said it was a search algorithm.

That is what I am trying to find in this thread ideas on where the solutions
are most valuable and how to pitch them.

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gnark
How do you use it to trade commodities? What do you trade?

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fauigerzigerk
You could try to find a good pilot customer who has valuable data and is
willing to work with you to adapt the algorithm to their particular problem.
What you want as an outcome is a story like this: "Math Whizzes Turbocharge An
Online Retailer's Sales"
([http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2...](http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202300174))

~~~
marcus
Working with a medical company to improve the results of their CAD software.
After it works (hopefully :) ) that can be a great way to drive the next
client.

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hhm
Who are you? Maybe you can't speak a lot about your discovering, but you can
at least tell what your name is and how you got to this?

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marcus
My name is Avi Marcus, I am a 29 year old, semi retired (sold my previous
startup ) hacker from Israel. Started programming at 8, started CS in college
when I was 13. Flunked out because I was bored at 15. Always been interested
in artificial intelligence, but a year and a half ago I read a book on the way
the human brain works and suddenly I had a vision of something programmers
missed in all of the machine learning algorithms they built, which is a basic
part of the human cognitive process, and I suddenly understood how to add it
to existing algorithms.

Anything else?

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jkush
We'll all look like fools if we cry "bullshit" and you happen to be right. But
we'd look like even bigger fools if we just took your word for it.

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hhm
I think we have to do neither; if he's clever (and if he's done what he
claims, he surely is) he's not trying for us to take his word for it, or for
us to say he's a great genius and all that. He's just looking for a way to
monetize his discovering, and I think it's right.

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marcus
From my experience genius isn't a boolean thing, people can be brilliant in
somethings and horrible in other things. I try to acknowledge my limitations
and ask for help in the things I suck at.

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jsb
I would use it in productivity software.

The users would input their to do list and the AI would suggest the best next
task for them to complete. You could have the user input some information
about their lifestyle - married? family? when do they work? etc - and the AI
would take into consideration these factors when determining the next best
task.

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euccastro
Very knowledge intensive, isn't it? Sounds as hard as passing the Turing test,
to me.

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jbf
Netflix challenge? No recurring revenue, but, hey, a million dollars. You'll
have to disclose the algorithm to accept the prize.

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marcus
Thats the problem disclosing the algorithm is something I'd rather avoid. I
don't mind sharing it with a company for a licensing fee as long as I don't
have to public domain it.

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Kaizyn
Then don't disclose the algorithm or collect the $1 million. If your algorithm
really is good, demonstrate it by 'winning the prize', but rather than
claiming the money and turning your algorithm over to Netflix sell it to
someone.

You're really wasting your time with the stock market though. Technical
analysis is just silly.

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scylla
> Technical analysis is just silly.

That was also my first reaction, but maybe the commodities market (which he's
targeting) is more inefficient than equities.

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chwolfe
Sports Betting

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imsteve
Nigerian scamming. Oh wait, you want something ethical?:)

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kkim
If it doesn't make money trading, then it isn't better than existing
algorithms, because that's what you're competing against.

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marcus
There are probably some AIs making money out there but they try to beat the
market by examining a variety of commodities at once and discovering their
interdependencies faster and better than humans can. I have far more hubris,
I'm trying to make it work with pure technical analysis on a single commodity.
Which is a bit harder.

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jdavid
win the "go" competition.

check out <http://evolvedmachines.com>

those guys might like to help you out.

also there is <http://www.numenta.com/>

that might be interested in some good algorithyms

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Hexayurt
License it to game dev companies to provide better opponent AI.

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marcus
I have no idea how game AIs work, I thought most of it was totally scripted to
just appear intelligent. I'll need to research the field a bit.

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curi
Some is scripted. They do a variety of other things too. For example, path
finding gets its own algorithm. And they have algorithms for getting multiple
guys to move around in formation. Sometimes there is some type of system with
goals (get 1000 wood, get an 80 food army, kill X base, etc) and then it picks
things to achieve those goals (build more wood harvesters, build more units,
attack). sometimes they use "learning" algorithms where they tweak parameters
by running the AI repeatedly and seeing which does better, and they can use
games with a human player to do that too (if it wins too badly, have it aim
less precisely). And lots of other one-off things.

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marcus
My algorithm won't replace A* as a path finding algorithm, and it wasn't
designed to do swarming ( although maybe I can adapt it to swarming ). And as
far as I know most of the rest is totally scripted... Again not exactly my
field so I need to read up on it before I can rule it out.

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bkmrkr
Yeh, do you have aim or any other way to contact you?

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bkmrkr
You could also email me at bkmrkr at yahoo.com

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sammyo
Oil futures?

