Four short links: 21 August 2018
Betting Market, Megaprojects, Object Detection, and Declining Research
- Intro to Augur — an open source, decentralized betting marketplace. Anyone can create markets and allow others to bet for or against it. The outcome is then verified by impartial observers who get a slice of the winnings. This can’t possibly go wrong. (Narrator: everything will go wrong)
- What You Should Know About Megaprojects — the “iron law of megaprojects” is laid out and documented: over budget, over time, over and over again. Moreover, the “break-fix model” of megaproject management is introduced as an explanation of the iron law. […] Sixth, it is shown how megaprojects are systematically subject to “survival of the unfittest,” explaining why the worst projects get built instead of the best. (via Dan Hon)
- Toward In-baggage Suspicious Object Detection Using Commodity WiFi — Extensive experiments are conducted with 15 metal and liquid objects and six types of bags in a six-month period. The results show that our system can detect over 95% of suspicious objects in different types of bags and successfully identify 90% of dangerous material types. In addition, our system can achieve the average errors of 16ml and 0.5cm when estimating the volume of liquid and shape (i.e., width and height) of metal objects, respectively.
- Winner’s Curse — we observe that the rate of empirical advancement may not have been matched by consistent increase in the level of empirical rigor across the field [of ML] as a whole. This short position paper highlights examples where progress has actually been slowed as a result, offers thoughts on incentive structures currently at play, and gives suggestions as seeds for discussions on productive change.
