FOR NOW, until circumstances change that I might be less indentured in servitude trapped and locked in confinement BONDED IN FULL BONDAGE WITH NO ACCESS TO FOOD, WATER, CLOTHES, MEDICAL OR HEALTH with no way out and police living three sides of my house:
I DECLARE MYSELF STATELESS AND AUSTRALIA NO LONGER AUSTRALIA.
I AM NOT PROPERTY OF THE STATE! I am HUMAN!!! AND HOMELESS!!! (N.B. Do not take my wallet, my passport and my draft will (from an expert that can appoint a librarian/curator so I can vest my rights back to a monarch or state or crown) from my house on Crown Land in the former nation state of Australia, so I can't leave the country and seek refuge on Crown Land somewhere I know well and can call home, like PARC grounds in Silicon Valley, either side of the Pacific Ocean)
As such, for the sake of clarity:
I DO NOT GRANT / VEST IN ANYONE ANY RIGHTS, TITLE OR INTEREST TO VIEW, USE, CONSUME, REUSE, MODIFY, DELETE, ALTER, EXTEND OR OTHERWISE BENEFIT FROM OR DESTROY ANY OF MY PAST, STOLEN/FORFEITED, EXPIRED, EXISTING, CURRENT, EMERGING OR FUTURE WORKS (Starting: 1 January 1996), PROPERTY OR RIGHTS INCLUDING MORAL, LEGAL, INTELLECTUAL, FIDUCIARY, MATERIAL, INTANGIBLE AND HUMAN; AND ALL ROYALTIES, PENALTIES, EXPENSES AND ALL FORMS OF DAMAGES TO BE PAID AND SETTLED ANNUALLY TO: Ghana 🇬🇭 IN PERPETUITY beginning on my death/disappearance.
On dates:
1-Jan-1996: This is when Mike Burgess raided AFP Computer Crime and caused it to rename to AFP CyberCrime (no space). See .....
Before 1-Jan-1996: This is when Mike Burgess & CIA burned down my house in Middle Brighton, took my school homework and a box of Intel Pentium "Last Gold Pin" chips and caused me to drop out of school. See ....
(NB: obviously ONLINE, OFFLINE, DIGITAL AND HARDCOPY and NOT RELATING TO THE POSTING OF THIS ON BLOGGER, FACEBOOK, LINKEDIN OR TWEETERS/X PLATFORM)
And NEVER EVER forever TRANSFER, ASSIGN, EXCLUDE!! (Because this is contrary to legal doctrine / you can’t chop out and own a piece of my head, numbats.)
THIS INCLUDES SOURCE, BINARY, DERIVATIVE, STORED OR INTERMEDIARY WORKS/VERSIONS/REVISIONS INCLUDING. IN USE/IN TRANSIT/AT REST.
THIS INCLUDES ALL COMPANIES, ENTITIES, PROJECTS, WORKS, ASSOCIATIONS, ASSOCIATES AND MONARCHS (Aka “Firms” Et. Al.) (Incl. any related, present or listening) I AM/HAVE BEEN/WORKED FOR/LISTENED TO/ADVISED BY, in this and all neighbouring stellar systems for the entirety of The Virgo Supercluster (INCL EARTH!!).
Whether acquired recovered or otherwise directly or otherwise. (Aka “ALL” which includes “ANY”, and obviously without exceeding the limits of “Greek” / 0th order logic ie, “GAAP” or Good Business Conduct, Id Est: “Non-Unconscionable”).
Further I have not consented to and will not consent to surveillance, privacy violation, recording, broadcast or viewing of me or anything in my life (digitally and physically), and never will without first being able to consult at least with my Publicist and related agents (You know who you are xxx. Ask Bettina Liano or Studio).
ALSO: I DEMAND DOMO STOP USING MY IP, PROVIDE MY “AP TIME DIM” code (modified and un modified) to Clemenger BBDO, Omnicom and Stanford GSB with a full report on its application/applicability to whatever they are doing and possible use in Omnicom/elsewhere if possible, STOP USING VENDOR BACKDOORS, STEALING IP, MASS SURVEILLANCE and DESTROY ALL GRINDR DATA AS REQUESTED BY CASTRO AND GAY COMMUNITY DECADES AGO!!!
NB: All others retain their rights (but not my rights in others’ derived works)
AND ANY AND ALL POWERS OF ATTORNEY ARE NOT GRANTED/NEVER GRANTED/WITHDRAWN, including: MY MOTHER HAS HAD HER SIGNATURE REMOVED FROM MY CHILDHOOD BANK ACCOUNT MANY TIMES OVER ALREADY, do not be dickheads ATO, Westpac or anyone purportedly being “family” or “society”.
Survivability: this obviously survives and will not be dealt with my/through succession.
EOT
PS. Please stop trying to destroy #InternetCommerce.
Do you not remember what The Brits always say? The thing about STONE and BLOOD?
Commerce really is the best way. It’s great, I do love it ❤️
Q) So how long does a book last anyway?
A) Assume 100 years.
#BookMasters on #Digital.
Best Wishes, Godspeed to all and goodwill to all women.
Andrew (AP) Prendergast
ex-Australiana (Royal) Computer Scientist / Systems Analyst
Alia. Sgt. Maj. Gen. Fuck You Fuck Off Get Fucked (Circa 1993)
Fvk Vous InfoRec/Fvk Vous Space
Australian (Royal) Computer Scientist
Head of Information Warfare for Commonwealth and allied nations
IGIS Inspector General AP (acting)
Classification Labels: Internet COMMERCE, FUTURE PROPRIETARY and NEVER TO BE MISCONSTRUED OR CONSTRAINED BY/AS INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, MILITARY OR “TOP SECRET” (unfortunately senior CS transcends those)
ON XEROX PARC
I am from #Xerox #PARC.
In my beating soul,
is innovation's spark.
A thousand years of heritage,
an unbridled education,
I'm where the future of #proprietary lives.
In my beating heart.
Stolen bits bytes notes and rights,
is always better with me.
Because I'm from #XeroxPark / #Xerox #PARC.
ON HELPING HUMANITY
Being from Xerox PARC,
Rest assured:
All I have ever done is help humanity.
But everyone in my life
treats me like cattle -
It gives me insanity.
#PrahranPolice won’t let me out
I can’t even find a new home.
Where are my keys and wallet?
There is no AP.
Please like Dead AP
QED
S.T. I'M A DISABLED PENSIONER NOW
PS. #VictoriaPolice Victoria Police please stop smashing windows.
I can’t afford this,
I’m a disabled pensioner.
I did do our #COVID
#ComputationalEpidemiology strategy.
So you can all be alive today
Know You Know.
#SiliconValley #SV #brighton
Brighton Grammar School
#Royal #CompSci
#SystemAnalyst
AP
N.B: #Y2K / #Y2K38#time_t#timepocalypse is a thing. And it starts NOW. IT STARTS NOW. We really did have this problem licked, back in the 90s.
And don't try to be a hero by entering onto PARC #CrownLand land (owned by King Charles no less) - you will just trigger #DeadManSwitches and destroy all possibility of us ever helping. The right way is to re-inflate Xerox & PARC, is with money.
This is my current view of Vertical Information Retrieval & Large Scale Search Engines (NB. they are somewhat different!)
My Background
I first learned about local co-occurrence and traversing sorted & inverted indices as a kid at Brighton Grammar School whilst being shown how to use a proper multi-part thesaurus in the 90s, well after I had already started coding algorithms in C. So, I have been doing this Information Retrieval thing for quite a while.
In my teens I had my account banned for two weeks at RMIT University for doing too much #InfoRec experiments on Minyos. At the time everyone else was getting their accounts banned for SunOS 4.1 haxing in the Xterm labs on Yallara -- it was quite a funny situation.
Since then I've done the full postgraduate degree at RMIT on #InfoRec under the watchful eye of Professor Balbin, back when it was at its absolute peak and it was time to upgrade the world's fastest sorting/searching/filesystem algorithm (Burst Tries/HAT-Tries) again. I was yelling down the halls to Ranjan about it when he was working on it - the whole school knew what was going on, and Ranjan and I would talk regularly about the incremental improvements. I even did my own Bayesian version on the side called p̂-Tries which is 2x faster again (and which you may see someday if I feel like the world needs it).
I might have also seen some of the #InfoRec course from Stanford while I was in #SV, but that's for us to know and you to never find out ;) Their course was more focused on Search Engines than Information Retrieval, so it's nice when one gets exposed to both views.
Anyways, I do know Information Retrieval, and Search Engines, and #InfoRec; and my credentials are well established. So, this is what I currently think about #InfoRec.
Re: The ACM SIGIR Conference happening in Melbourne
I do have much to say about the NeuroPhysIIR Workshop at ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2025 conference at RMIT in Melbourne - none of the big researchers from Melbourne #InfoRec or RMIT CS&IT (RIP) are going to be there. If we aren't there is it a real conference? Is 'RMIT Computing' even a valid CS school, atm?
I certainly don't think the topics are appropriate for the current era, nor do I think it's safe for #InfoRec practitioners to be in Melbourne right now.
Please see this LinkedIn Post for more info from me on the matter.
I am unable to attend because I am trapped in my home bonded in full bondage in indentured servitude by the local police, but attendees are welcome to contact me during the conference:
I'm @CompSciFutures.888 on Signal Messenger or
ap@andrewprendergast.com if you don't care about opsec
as long as it's about #InfoRec algorithmics and not our foreign interference problem.
I am safe in the short term, but I am a little bit stuck.
As in locked in a cage stuck,
possibly in domestic + cyber imprisonment for 20 years without being told?
Anyways, I would enjoy a good chat about #InfoRec.
But don't use the normal telephony network,
because it will probably get blocked.
Edit 24-Mar-25:
I received a note from Falk (who is awsm). I don't think it changes anything I've said here, but I'm doing the right thing and posting it.
I'm yet to get confirmation of attendance by researchers of significance from Melbourne InfoRec (NB. IR = InfoRec):
Thanks for your message.
You’ll be happy to know that there are in fact many senior researchers, both local and
international, at the CHIIR conference today 😉
And just to clarify, you seem to be conflating the ACM SIGIR Conference, the ACM CHIIR
conference, and the NeuroPhysIIR workshop in your comments — these are three different
things, and not the same. (Just highlighting this since I'm sure you want to convey
correct information via your blog!)
Regards,
Falk.
——
Falk Scholer
Professor of Information Access and Retrieval Technologies
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
"The Ode to 10 Blue Links":
Having worked on more than a couple large major search engines in my life (in Silicon Valley, e.g., Google & AltaVista), and having helped deal with the '98% generative' problem more than one time, I do know a thing or two about Information Retrieval, including how to do vertical search and 'Search Without a Search Box' with all the magic of Google First Page Results but without the PageRank Ergodic Markov Chain bit.
To that end, here is a little ditty, a little something I wrote about #InfoRec and ACM TREC competitions:
I am telling you this
Just so that you know.
We spiked the crap out of The Internets,
long long ago.
What you think is secret,
We already know.
Through your little input box,
We can find out anything
There is to know.
About your darkest secrets,
all of you.
LLMs, search engines,
Retrieval systems.
Anything with an inverted index,
Our tricks work better than you know.
We are only interested in
Relative metrics,
Not causing a Punch and Judy show.
Just look after your users,
And we will go with the flow.
definitely do not psyop,
and we let almost anything else go.
Do you think we want to adjudicate,
The competition blow by blow?
Through that little search box,
We can see well into your house,
Every detailed piece of execution flow.
But we also know how to keep secret,
Whatever there is to know.
#InfoRec only talks to InfoRec
When there is something
Important to know.
Like who is able to handle
Case sensitive nouns!
That’s something that we will show,
To our inner circle of inforec friends --
The rest of the world is not to know.
We really do love indices & InfoRec
And are much much more nerdy
About it.
Thank you could ever possibly
Know.
We do know what we are getting into,
how much governments want the SQLs and SQRs,
those 'innermost thoughts and desires - fleeting',
is what governments want to know.
We do know what proprietary information is,
we don't ever inappropriately tell what we know.
We always do the right thing,
and stay well out of the punch and judy show.
But please pay us properly,
AND leave us, our families, our algorithms and our universities,
well well alone.
THEN we really really will,
just go with the flow.
The very very best of our algorithms,
you are yet to know.
And please never steal from us,
or the curse of 1000 years,
will soon flow.
And please do not tarnish,
or interrupt user flow.
We are telling you all of this,
because we do still know:
Users really do like to love,
the operators of the day
of their 10 blue links.
From #InfoRec, in the style of Dr. Seuss by Dr. Loose! Or is it? Ya know?
Contemporary Practical Application of #InfoRec:
And here is how it is done - with the generalised form of the Information Retrieval Equation: 50% classical, 50% probabilistic. Just add Causality and Information Theory, for first page result like performance, just for fun:
runs every possible subcube through the above Information Retrieval Equation for ranking:
This is Humanizing Data. Welcome to “the data point you need to know right now”, “when a metric goes critical” and “causality so dense, it almost rips holes in walls”. See my blog for more info. Or this: https://t.co/Knf4PClgol
— Ä̷̬͖̽͗P̷̭̳͔͇̊ on CompSciFutures (∀/∃/acc) (@CompSciFutures) June 6, 2025
You do need that 'Causality So Dense ...' bit in your expert system embedded in the P(relevance|x1,...,xn) piece to give it that uniquely Google First Page Results feel so that it always tells you about the datapoint you need to know about right now. For that, you are going to need a damn good Bayesian Analyst, otherwise it'll feel quite average.
Here is the showreel:
I built this for Australia Post. It was quite amazing. The socials/NPS stuff was a bit average/off (because it's hard to get the data without doing single customer view so the requirements are a bit of a moving target), but the EBIT related & paid advertising stuff was mind blowingly good. Forget data hygiene, just #InfoRec and vizualise your way through whatever you've got at the time seemed to be the outcome! It was so good, one very senior advertising executive from AdLand was on their knees begging to have it for themselves.
On Social and Economic Networks
Something to consider if you are doing non-law of large numbers, 'we live in a long tail universe' social/economic graph analysis:
𝗪.𝗥.𝗧. 𝗦𝗢𝗖𝗜𝗔𝗟 𝗚𝗥𝗔𝗣𝗛 𝗫𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗦 If your transformation over a social graph loses fidelity, expressiveness or parsimony as you pass your representation through a #flowers 𝒫 first, then it's probably useless - or it's very usefully mid data. Do you know? .\ 𝒫 https://t.co/BjdSeqqOuz
— Ä̷̬͖̽͗P̷̭̳͔͇̊ on CompSciFutures (∀/acc) (@CompSciFutures) March 23, 2025
On Search Query Logs
And just a reminder, on the topic of search queries (i.e., what we call SQLs & SQRs), they do contain your 'innermost thoughts and desires - fleeting'. Do we really need to keep them anymore? Why can't we absorb them into a properly privacy preserving generative model with no user IDs, then throw the logs out? That is all we need, and it will go faster!
Those SQLs & SQRs logs are the main thing governments keep targeting search engines for. If we don't have them - they should leave us alone. It's extremely expensive to run a system that keeps those logs anyway. Every government wants them, and they do end up getting them, by force if they have to. These days, their spooks, their cyber espionage and their vendor backdoors are just too hard to fight against AND get anything else done, hence why these SQLs and SQRs are now so damn expensive to keep.
We also can't ensure any guarantees that they will use them ethically in their analyses (e.g., by using loess regression) or ensure adherence to basic controls like data privacy or destruction. And then there is the matter of #InfoRec computer scientists suddenly losing family members in diabolical but oddly consistent ways -- I know a few myself personally, and have lost a father to this problem. Do we really want to be involved in that anymore?
Once upon a time Google was filled with people of the calibre that they simply wouldn't see user data when we looked at systems and we could stop governments from getting them. To us, it just wasn't there. When we see user data, what is in it, we really don't care. I really do love doing #InfoRec, and I do care about serving our users and looking after their data - always. In the most privacy preserving of ways. I say we get rid of the Search Query Logs at least - that is the one they REALLY want. Anyways, this is as close as I would ever get to them:
If I could work on anything I want to, it would be vertical search. I am so damn #InfoRec, I can’t stop making weird quirky inverted indices + my AI + visualisation.
I’d probably be running the “yellow box” department at #HeyGoogle@Google by now.
— Ä̷̬͖̽͗P̷̭̳͔͇̊ on CompSciFutures (∀/acc) (@CompSciFutures) March 21, 2025
Banks aggregate their data at the merchant transaction and not the product level for similar reasons -- we should follow their lead. Product level transactions are even worse because they aren't 'fleeting', they are 'with conviction'.
The next Turing Award should go to 'Melbourne InfoRec'
Being identified as a significant contributor to Information Retrieval can be quite treachrous these days, and many of us have not been paid at all for our work, ranging from the fastest and most amazing algorithms in the world, to all of that work it takes to run ACM TREC competitions. We can't even safely have #InfoRec group lunches anymore.
Just to run a TREC competition requires a full university sized CS lab, filled with #InfoRec PhDs or equivalent + trained in everything from linguistics and lexicography to all the other things we need to know, including a bit of computational neuroscience here and there! Then we have a 48 hour long pizza party in the lab where we carefully class label documents, then send off the eval & held out test sets to the search engines so they can run the results. And then AFTER the competition, some more sneaky InfoRec PhD level brainiacs come in and sometimes do qualitative or quantitative forensic Information Retrieval to re-run the metrics ourselves and find out whats going on, e.g. by comparing held out test data. It is a rather large effort for all involved.
To have Search Engines not take the last one seriously is frankly, offensive. I think the last competition is possibly the last.
We really have contributed a lot and very few of us have ever been paid. There is not a chance in hell that we will ever provide a list of names. Just the existence of such a list is gravely dangerous.
To that end, I think The Association For Computing Machinery (ACM) should award the next ACM Turing Award to Melbourne InfoRec, just for being awesome. Rachel Griffiths and Cyrus should accept it on behalf of all of us. Cyrus did get his mum killed by CIA and his character smeared for detecting the inforec problem in AltaVista. The rest of us would like to stay unidentified thanks.
The award can go into the Gold Lions cupboard at Clemenger BBDO and I think Clems knows why; they do have a few job numbers that were opened up because ACM referred them to information retrievalists in the past, and they did do quite a smashing job in record time, as usual.
InfoRec Tutelage
I think once we start teaching proper Melbourne InfoRec again, after the Hardlands Era is over, I propose some changes, specifically that:
we focus the major on Linquistics and other majors, and make the splay tree assignment into a whole subjet where we find non-linear linguistic features,
all research students must contribute to a nation-scale search engine in the spirit of AltaVista, but with all the cheater detection and more of Google.
I do know what the next version of PageRank was supposed to look like before McKinsey took over, and it was very much about Xerox PARC style mini on-linear models embedded in
the massive Ergodic Markov Chain calculation,
we focus on nation state level regionalisation and semi-commercialise the engine for other APAC countries to use. This is the Baidu problem X [however many countries we have on this side of the planet],
for Algorithms and Data structures we choose algorithms from [2], and that our standard texts are as follows: [1] is the RMIT University book (aka MIR or Baeza-Yates), [2] is the book Stanford teaches from (the “Search” book vs Vertical InfoRec) and [3] is a uniquely different algorithms and data structures book, and
We modify the classical TREC competition so that:
We shame the big LLMs into providing responses to "Format your results as 10 blue links" and include them in the competition
We provide to select in-crowd CEOs via group list long running timeseries "ratio analyses" compatible with MBA studies. The TREC metrics are actually compatible - I can provide the guidance on how to do this as a dashboard.
Long live Melbourne InfoRec!
I do love #InfoRec. And advertising. And traffic. And vizualisation. Separately. And together.
But the one thing I yearn for the most for isn't a Nobel, a Fields or a Turing: It's a *hushed tone* Gold Lion.
That's the one you really want. I know I do!
That and one free BBQ per week!! Long live RMIT CS&IT. Long live Melbourne #InfoRec.
.\𝒫
Banking clearance last updated 2023.
PS. Follow @CompSciFutures on 𝕏 to keep up-to-date on the wildest of computer science wizardry. Computer science of the ages for the ages from the ages. For ages. And more. Pass it on.
Citations:
[1] Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro, B. de A. N., & Baeza-Yates-Ribeiro-Neto. (1999). Modern information retrieval Ricardo Baeza-Yates; Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. Pearson, Addison-Wesley.
[2] Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2009). An introduction to information retrieval. Cambridge University Press.
[3] Flamig, B. (1995). Practical algorithms in C++. Wiley.
I've just had a Marketing Science paper accepted to a conference that is happening later this year.
Abstract is:
Predicting the Performance of Digital Advertising
Andrew Prendergast
Ex. Google, Nielsen//NetRatings, BBDO.
A first principles exploration of ethically sound, privacy-preserving simulation, prediction and evaluation of campaign optimization in a digital advertising setting, including publication and description of a number of anonymised paid advertising datasets from search and display campaigns across a multitude of clients.
We analysed the practical application of performance marketing by a digital media buying team in a large advertising agency and explored challenges faced by the business school graduate level campaign analysts in predicting performance of digital advertising transacted in Vickery, silent bid and private deal settings, and explored the utility of truthful and non-truthful bidding WRT risk preferences. Our study focuses on micro-conversion based ROI optimization of direct-response search and display activity, but found that the techniques developed are also applicable to “above the line” branding focused digital campaigns. We then rigorously executed several multi-million dollar search campaigns using the developed techniques and validated the Vickery hypothesis that accurate assessment of placement valuations and truthful bidding maximises long run expected utility and campaign optimization stability.
The techniques presented include a practical approach to placement valuation & bidding which uses a simple Bayesian prior and can be calculated in Excel. We compare it’s predictive performance to more exotic models using a “poor-mans-simulation” ML model evaluation technique and find the results are competitive. The evaluation technique is presented and we demonstrate its apriori simulation of future campaign performance from past ad-server data collected aposteriori. A selection of datasets to aid in replication and improvement of our experimental results are also provided.
If you are paying attention close enough, you might have noticed that in the background of this blog is a very simple and strightforward wave simulation using GLSL or WebGL. It has specifically been written in accordance with the OpenGL Shading Language, Second Edition [1,2] text in mind so it is compatible with every single WebGL implementation ever conceived, and is almost completely decoupled from the browser. It has some intentional 'glitch' in it, which is a reference to the analog days of Sutherland's work.
Specifically, the simulation uses a textbook implementation of GLSL, as follows:
GLSL 1.2
OpenGL ES 2.0
WebGL 1.0
The only coupling to the browser is the opening of a GL context, and if one clicks on the animation in the right place, an "un-project" operation that unwinds the Z-division takes place so that the fragment that underlies the mouse cursor can be calculated and the scene can be rotated using a very primitive rotation scheme which includes gimble lock (no quarternions here!). Both are extrordinarilly simple 3D graphics operations that should not affect rendering at all and is the absolute minimum level of coupling one might expect. In short, it is the perfect test of the most basic of WebGL capability.
The un-project operation is written with the minimal amount of code required and uses a little linear algebra trick to do it very efficiently. Feel free to inspect the code to see how it's done.
Current State
Update 26-Jun-23: After much trial and error, and testing on many many devices, I now have successfully isolated three separate WebGL bugs. Now that I have the three bugs properly isolated, I'm starting the writeup and hope to submit the following bug reports in the next week or two, as follows:
Incorrect rendering of WebGL 1.0 scene in Google Chrome
WebGL rendering heisenbug causes GL context to crash in Chrome after handling some N fragments
WebGL rendering heisenbug causes GL context to incorrectly render scene after handling some N fragments
TBC...
The current state as at 14-March-2023 is that Chrome and other browsers are not able to run this animation for more than 24 hours without crashing, and on the latest versions of Chrome released early March, the animation has now slowed down to ridiculous FPS levels. Previously the animation ran at well over 30 FPS on most devices, but would crash after 24 hours.
This animation will quite happily run on an old iPad running Safari, however Chrome currently seems to be struggling. The number of vertices and the the number of sin() operations that it needs to calculate is well within the capabilities of all modern processors, including those found in i-devices such as phones and tablets on which one can play a typical game.
Example of correct rendering on all modern browsers including Safari on iPad
Example of incorrect rendering on Chrome 111.0.5563.111 (64-bit) as at 23-Mar-23
Brave Browser (based on Chromium) renders correctly, but is horrendously slow in the GA branch (Beta currently works fine). I'm not sure if this is a Linux vs. Windows issue or discrete vs. embedded GPU at this stage, will investigate further when I have time.
NB. As at 14-March-2023, on Brave Browser 1.49.120 on Windows with a Discrete GPU the simulation struggles to render 5 FPS, and on Brave Browser 1.50.85 (beta) on Linux with an embedded GPU it works OK, but I can point to other vizualisation artefacts elsewhere that 1.50.85 cannot handle (but which previous versions of Brave/Chrome could), for example, on the homepage of vizdynamics.com, the Humanized Data Robot should gently move around the screen with a slight parallax effect if one moves the mouse over it. Why is the rendering engine in Chrome suddenly regressing, and why is it not using the GPU? This wave simulation should be able to run in it's entirety on SIMD architecture and the Humanized Data Robot used to be rendering flawlessly. What is going on?
At 30 FPS, the wave simulation requires around 75 MFLOPS of processing power. To put that into perspective, the first Sun Microsystems SPARC Station released in 1989 was able to calculate 16.2 MIPS (similar to MFLOPS), and the SPARC Station 2 (released 1991) could calculate nearly 30 MIPS. That was over 30 years ago, and a SPARC Station 2 machine had enough compute power that it could happily calculate the same wave simulation at around 10-15 FPS without vizualising it, but actually at 2-5 FPS once one implements a GPU pipeline (thank god SGI bought out IRIS GL).
I still have my copy of the original OpenGL Programming Guide (1st edition, 6th printing) that came with my Silicon Graphics Indy workstation. It was a curious book, and I implemented my first OpenGL version of these wave simulations in 1996 according to it, so I'm quite familiar with what to expect. An Indy could handle this - with a bit of careful tuning - quite well. The hardness of this vizualisation is the tremendous number of sin() operations, and the cosine()s used to take their derivative, so it really does test the compute power of a graphics pipeline quite well - if the machine or the implementation isn't up to it, these calculations will bring it to it's knees quite quickly.
Fast-forward to 2023, and a basic i7 cannot run the simulation at 30FPS! To put things into perspective, a 2010 era Intel i7 980 XE is capable of over 100 GFLOPS (about 1000x more processing power than whats required to do 75 MFLOPS), and that's without engaging any discrete or integrated SIMD GPU cores. Simply put, the animation in the background of this blog should be trivial for any computing device available today, and should run without interruption.
Lets see how well things progress through March and if things improve.
Update 30-Jan-24: Adding an FFT to make the wave simulation faster makes the problem go away, or potentially causes it to take longer to crash. Dunno.
Have asked the Brave team to look into it:
I have isolated the long-standing bug with long running WebGL memory leaking till the browser crashes in Chromium on some GPUs. #SIGGRAPH@siggraph
More info here - please submit to the Chromium team, I…
— AP on CompSciFutures (∀/acc) (@CompSciFutures) January 29, 2024
References
[1] Rost, Randi J., and John M. Kessenich. OpenGL Shading Language. 2nd ed. Addison-Wesley, 2006. OpenGL 2.0 + GLSL 1.10
[2] Shreiner, Dave. OpenGL Programming Guide the Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ u.a: Addison-Wesley, 2006.
I love Urban Dictionary - watch out for my @CompSciFutures updates. Here's one I posted today:
This is actually a commentary on attack surfaces, specifically that back in the day, one's lead architect knew the entirety of a system's attack surface and would secure it appropriately. Today, systems are so complex, that no single man knows the entire intricacies of the attack surface for even just a small web application with an accompanying mobile app. The security implications of this are profound, hence the reason why I am writing a textbook on the topic.
Link to more Urban Dictionary posts in the footer.
My apologies to everyone I was supposed to follow up with in January - I've been writing a textbook. I'll get back to you late February/early March, I'm locking down and getting this done so we can address the systemic roots of this ridicuous cyber security problem we have all found ourselves in.
The book is called:
The Software Engineering Manual of Style, 3rd Edition A secure by design, secure by default perspective for technical and business stakeholders alike.
The textbook is 120 pages of expansion on a coding style guide I have maintained for over 20 years and which I hand to every engineer I manage. The previous version was about 25 pages, so this edition is a bit of a jump!
Secure-by-design, secure-by-default software engineering. The handbook.
It covers the entirety of software engineering at a very high level, but has intricate details of information security baked into it, including how and why things should be done a certain way to avoid building insecure technology that is vulnerable to attack. Not just tactical things, like avoiding 50% of buffer overruns or most SQL injection attacks (and leaving the rest of the input validation attacks unaddressed). This textbook redefines the entire process of software engineering, from start to finish, with security in mind from page 1 to page 120.
Safe coding and secure programming are not enough to save the world. We need to start building technology according to a secure-by-design, secure-by-default software engineering approach, and the world needs a good reference manual on what that is.
EDIT 22-Mar-23: Proof showing that usability testing is no longer considered non-functional testing (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23515.03368)
EDIT 22-Mar-23: The Pillars of Information Security, The attack surface kill-switch riddle + The elements of authenticity & authentication (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12609.84321)
I'm trying to write it so it's processes and methodologies:
Can be baked into a firm by CXOs using strategic management principles; or
embraced directly by engineers and their team leaders without the CEOs shiny teeth and meddlesome hands getting involved.
Writing about very technical matters for both audiences is hard and time consuming, but I think I'm getting the hang of it!
Abstract from the cover page
The foreword/abstract from the first page of the text reads as follows:
"The audience of this textbook is engineering based, degree qualified computer science professionals looking to perfect their art and standardise their methodologies and the business stakeholders that manage them. This book is not a guide from which to learn software engineering, but rather, offers best practices canonical guidance to existing software engineers and computer scientists on how to exercise their expertise and training with integrity, class and style.
This text covers a vast array of topics at a very high level, from coding & ethical standards, to machine learning, software engineering and most importantly information security best practices.
It also provides basic MBA-level introductory material relating to business matters, such as line, traffic & strategic management, as well as advice on how to handle estimation, financial statements, budgeting, forecasting, cost recovery and GRC assessments.
Should a reader find any of the topics in this text of interest, they are encouraged to investigate them further by consulting the relevant literature. References have been carefully curated, and specific sections are cited where possible."
The book is looking pretty good: it is thus far what it is advertised to be.
Helping out and donating
The following link will take you to a LinkedIn article that I am publishing various pre-print extracts (some are also published above).
If you are in the field of computer science or software engineering, you might be able to help by providing some peer-review. If not, there is a link to an Amazon booklist that you can also contribute to this piece of work by donating a book or two.
And feel free just to take a look and see where we're going and what's being done to ensure that moving forward, we stop engineering such terribly insecure software. Any support to that end would be most appreciated.
VizDynamics has halted trading, and VizLab 2.0 is now closed. The lack of attention to 'cybersecurity' [sic] by state actors, big tech and cloud operators globally made it impossibly difficult to continue operating an advanced computer science lab with a rotating schedule of 6-12 of Melbourne's best computer scientists supporting corporate Australia. We could have continued, but we saw this perfect storm of cyber security coming and decided to dial down VizLab starting in 2017. Given recent cyber disasters, it is clear we made the right decision.
State actors, cloud operators and big tech need to be careful with “vendor backdoor” legislation such as key escrow of encryption, because this form of 'friendly fire' hides the initial attack vector and the intial point of network contact when trying to forensically analyse and close down real attacks. Whilst that sort of legislation is in place without apporpriate access controls, audit controls, detective controls, cross-border controls, kill switches and transparency reporting, it is not commercially viable for us to operate a high powered CS lab, because all the use cases corporate Australia want us to solve involve cloud-based PII, for example, ‘Prediction Lakes’.
A CS Lab designed for paired programming
Part MIT Media lab, part CMU Autonlab, part vizualistion lab, part paired-programming heaven: this was VizLab 2.0.
VizLab doorway with ingress & egress Sipher readers, Inner Range high frequency monitoring & enterprise class CCTV. A secure site in a secure site.
A BSOD in The Lab: The struggles of vendor backdoors + WebGL and 3D everywhere.
Note the 3-screen 4k workstation in the foreground designed
for paired local + remote programming.
The Lab - Part vizualisation, part data immersion. VizLab 2.0. Note the Eames at the end of the centre aisle and the Tom Dixon in the foreground.
Everything we did was powered by UML, and fully compatible with #SWE and Systems Engineering 2.0.
Each workstation was setup for paired programming but with a vibe like it's an ad agency studio. 6 workstations w/ 6-9 fully traffic managed engineers in rotation, where you could plug in 2 keyboards, 2 mice, 2 chairs side-by-side and enough room so that you weren't breathing on eachother with returns either side big enough for a plethora of academic texts, client specs and all the notes you could want. With 2 HDMI cables hung from the roof linking to projectors on opposing walls that could reach any workstation at any moment, this was an environment for working on hard things; collaboratively, together.
Note the lack of client seating. They would have to perch on the edge of a desk and see everything, or an Eames lounge at the end of the room and try to see everything, or a White real leather Space Furniture couch next to a Tom Dixon and see nothing - we took host to management teams from a plurality of ASX200s, and the first thing that struck them — we didn't have seating for them, because the next few hours they were going to be moving around and staring at walls, computers, the ceiling — there simply was nowhere to sit, when a team of computer scientists, trained in computer graphics and very deft with data science were taking them on a journey into Data.
The now: VizLab 3.0 – The future: VizLab 4.0
AP is still around and is spending the most part of 2023 writing a textbook on secure software engineering, and we've setup a smaller two-man VizLab 3.0 for cyber defence research mainly around GRC assessment and computer science education both at a secondary and a tertiary level. AP is currently doing research in that field so we can hopefully reduce cyber-risk down to a level that is acceptable to coprorate Australia by increasing the mathematical and cyber-security awareness and literacy of computer science students as they enter into university and then industry.
If we can help to create that environment, then VizLab 4.0 may materialise and will be bigger and better, but because we dialed back our insurances (it's not practical to be paying $25K pa while we're doing research), we aren't in a position to provide direct consultation services at the moment. VizDynamics is still a trading entity, and a new visualisation based Information Security brand might be launched somewhere in 2024 based on the “Humanizing Data” vizualisation thesis (perhaps through academia or government – we’re not sure yet). Fixes are happening to WebGL rendering engines, and slowly cyber security awareness is rising to the top of the agenda, so our work is slowly shifting the needle and we’re moving in the right direction.
2025 Edit - Updates re Vendor Backdoors & UN No-Touch Cyber Torture of Computer Scientists in Australia
Update April 2024: I have revealed on 𝕏 some concrete evidence of vendor backdoors Microsoft E365 being misused by state police. These backdoors have to go - computers are deterministic in nature, and we can't have them doing things for no reason. It is not possible to run a heavy duty computer science lab whilst this is a problem.
— Ä̷̬͖̽͗P̷̭̳͔͇̊ on CompSciFutures (∀/∃/acc) (@CompSciFutures) November 4, 2025
I'm not currently able to work on anything much as Victoria Police have found some success in a mass-surveillance startup (which I'm vehemently opposed to) using their special powers to steal Intellectual Property from VIZLAB and have now stepped up their UN No-Touch Cyber Torture campaign against me.
Two of the ring-leaders are B. Ellison and Mooney at Prahran & Malvern Police stations -- please do let me know if you get a call from them.
If you feel like you could possibly be a persecuted computer scientist, please get in touch with me by email then we can talk on Signal Messenger about how to properly document the events as a legal brief in a way that makes sense and doesn't come across the wrong way. It's a bit of work, but one can do alot with PowerPoint and UML :)
On Signal Messenger & No Riff-Raff Secure Communications
P.S. This 𝕏 thread explains why you should use Signal to talk to Computer Science. That is the one that Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering and even the US Department of Defence uses, and is the one that has unlimited funding forever from Silicon Valley. That is the one you want too!
WhatsApp and Telegram are kind of okay, but Signal Messenger is the no riff-raff encrypted messaging & secure communications app with no advertising hooks, good provenance and good governance.
— Ä̷̬͖̽͗P̷̭̳͔͇̊ on CompSciFutures (∀/∃/acc) (@CompSciFutures) November 14, 2025
Many of the problems we've had at VIZLAB wouldn't have happened or at least would have been significantly reduced if we all used properly encrypted communications for everything we do, not just for secure client data storage & transport. We do now know that phone calls to and from a CS lab need to be kept secure as well.
By way of illustration: The USA has now released a joint statement with CISA, FBI, and the ACSC in Australia, Canada and NZ admitting our SS7 telecommunications networks are stuffed and urgently recommends the use of Signal Messenger or other end-to-end encryption ASAP. I expect in time the AFP will make a similar announcement to all Australians. In the meantime, this is the US announcement:
FBI & CISA urges all Americans to use Signal because Ericsson SS7 phone exchanges are insecureable.
Here is an example of why we need to use Signal
Being a computer scientist trained in Number Theory (#NumThe), This is a standard computer science conversation that I have with people all the time – this is a prototypical exemplar of why all our convsations are monitored and why you do need to talk to us with Signal. This is a normal conversation in my world:
An example #CompSci conversation with a #SIGINT geek: totally harmless #CS #EE talk, but does attract attention when said in cleartext.
If you interact with us, please understand - we (#compSci, #SWE and #EE) aren't part of intelligence, but now that computers control everything, we are required to interact with the like of NSA, so compulsory secure communiations with everyone is now a part of our world.
"It is not safe to talk to computer scientists on insecure channels" -- AP from #SiliconValley & #SignalsDirectorateKids. Ex-Xerox #PARC, ex-#Omnicom Chief Scientist, ex-#Intel Semiconductor, ex #Xoogler.
Please use Signal when talking to us - for your safety, and ours.It's the no-riff-raff option.
Recommender systems are huge outside of Australia and USA such that most marketing managers now consider their optimisation as important as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I can't believe we have totally missed the ball on this one, and nobody on the other side of planet, from Dubai to London has bothered to tell us!
Anwyays, here's the original seminal paper that Andreas Wiegend (ex Stanford, market genius and inventor of Prediction Markets and The BRIC Bank, Chief Scientist Emeritus of Amazon.com and inventor of recommender systems) directed and promoted this paper. It's based on proper West Coast Silicon Valley AI, with a quality discussion about a number of related techologies and market related effects that impact recommender systems.
I've been playing with building a Swarm Intelligence simulator based on a fourier domain discretisation to schedule the placement of drones in 3D space and cars in 2D space. Here's a little video demo of it's basic structure in action, on top of this is some differential equations to capture the displacement field, then drone position coords:
LinkedIn post with a video demo of the simulator in structural mode. You need to be logged into LinkedIn to see the post.
If you want to have a play with this class of sine wave, you might notice a simpler simulation in the background of this blog. It has a few extra features not normally seen of these types of simulation: instead of a single point being able to move along one axis (usually the Y-axis), every point in my simulation can move anywhere along the X, Y or Z axis. Take a look yourself, left-click and drag the mouse on the background (where the 3D simulation is happening) to rotate the simulation in realtime. Look below the surface to see the mesh, above it and you get a flat view.
For best effect, try full-screen browser, remove all content and view just the background wave simulation.
How Google used vizualisation to become one of the worlds most valuable companies
At VizDynamics we have done a lot of 'viz'-ualisation,
so I’ve seen more than several life-times worth of dashboards, reports, KPIs, models,
metrics, insights and all manner of presentation and interaction approaches thereof.
Yet one Viz has always stuck in my mind.
More than a decade ago when I was post start-up exit and sitting out a competitive-restraint clause, I entertained myself
by travelling the world in search of every significant thought leader and publication about probabilistic
reasoning that I could find. Some were very contemporary; others were mostancient. I
tried to read them all.
A much younger me @ the first Googleplex (circa 2002)
Some of this travelling included regular
visits to Googleplex 1.0, back before they floated and well before anyone knew
just how much damn cash they were making. As part of these regular visits, I
came across a viz at the original ‘Plex that blew me away. It sat in a darkened
hall in a room full of engineers on a small table at the end of a row of cubicles.
On this little IBM screen was an at-the-time closely guarded viz:
The "Live Queries" vizualisation @ Googleplex 1.0
Notice the green data points on the map?
They are monetised searches. Notice the icons next to the search phrases? More “$”
symbols meant better monetisation. This was pre-NPS, but the goal was the same –
link $ to :) then lay it bare for all to see.
What makes this unassuming viz so good?
It's purpose.
Guided by Schmidt’s steady hand, Larry & Sergey (L&S) had amassed
the brainpower of 300+ world leading engineers, then unleashed them by allowing them
to work independently. They now needed a way for them to self-govern and -optimise
their continual improvements to product & revenue whilst keeping everyone
aligned to Google's users-first mantra.
The solution was straightforward: use vizualisation to bring the users into the building
for everyone to see, provide a visceral checkpoint of their mission and progress,
and do it in a humanely digestible manner.
Simple in form & embracing of Tufteism,
the bottom third of the screen scrolled through user searches as they occurred,
whilst the top area was dedicated to a simple map projection showing where the
last N searches had originated from. An impressively unpretentious viz that let
the Data talk to one’s inner mind. The pictograph in the top section was for visual
and spatially aware thinkers, under that was tabular Data for the more quantitative
types. And there wasn’t a single number or metric in sight (well not directly
anyway). Three obviously intentional design principles executed well.
More than just a Viz, this was a software solution to a plurality of organizational problems.
To properly understand the impact, imagine yourself for a moment as a Googler, briskly walking through
the Googleplex towards your next meeting or snack or whatever. You alter your route slightly so you can pass by
a small screen on your way through. The viz on the screen:
instantly and unobtrusively brought you closer to your users,
persistently reminded you and the rest of the (easily distracted) engineers to stay focused on the core product,
provided constant feedback on financial performance of recent product refinements, and
inspired new ideas
before you continued down the hall.
The best vizualisations humanise difficult data in a visceral way
This was visual perfection because it was relevant to everyone, from L&S down to
the most junior of interns. Every pixel served a purpose, coming together into an elegantly
simple view of Google's current state. Data made so effortlessly digestible that it spoke to
one’s subconscious mind with only a passing glance. A viz so powerful that it helped Google
to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. This was a portal into people's innermost
thoughts and desires as they were typing them into Google. All this... on one tiny little IBM screen, at the
end of a row of cubicles.
Acland Street is the result of two years of research. As well as extended archival and social media research, more than 150 people who had lived, worked, and played in Acland Street were interviewed to reveal its unique social, cultural, architectural, and economic history.
Of course we got a mention on page 133:
Note the special mention under 'The Technology', page 133. Circa 1995, published 2017.
Here's a quick one to make the files available online from today's AI lecture at RMIT University. Much thanks to Lawrence Cavedon for making it happen.
It's always good to give a little something back, so each year I do some guest lecturing on data warehousing to RMIT's CS Masters students.
We usually pull a data warehouse box out of our compute cloud for the session so I can walk through the whole end-to-end stack from the hardware through to the dashboards. The session is quite useful and always well received by students.
This year the delightful Jenny Zhang and I showed the students MDX Runner, an abstraction used at VizDynamics on a daily basis to access our data warehouses. As powerful as MDX is, it has a steep learning curve and the result sets it returns can be bewildering to access programmatically. MDX Runner eases this pain by abstracting out the task of building and consuming MDX queries.
Given that it has usefulness far beyond what we do at VizDynamics, I have made arrangements for MDX Runner to be open-sourced. If you are running analysis services or any other MDX-compatible data warehousing environment, take a look at mdxrunner.org - you will certainly find it useful.
Do reach out with updates if you test it against any of the other BI platforms. Hopefully over time we can start building out a nice generalised interface into Oracle, Teradata, SAP HANA and SSAS.
Lecture Notes
Course/grade/intelligence plate model example
Same burgular HMM in Excel