george tziralis thought log

The concept behind askmarkets

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:11:00 +0300

cross posted at “the official askmarkets blog”

Askmarkets is an internet-based service for prediction markets, which consists of virtual marketplaces for information trading. Now, while this sentence might seem like an accurate description to our biased eyes, we bet that you can find a much better pitch line and submit it in the comments below. Still, allow us for now, to shed some light on the concept behind askmarkets.

Our inspiration for askmarkets stems from several years of research on the topic of prediction markets, enabling us - hopefully - to separate the wheat from the chaff. The concept, at its very core, goes like this. Markets are institutions that are everywhere. From the stock market in New York to the fish market in Tokyo to the flower market in Amsterdam, markets exist and are used for a variety of purposes. But, while stock markets, for example, seem to be so different than betting, or fish and flower markets, in their core all those institutions are essentially the same: Markets bring people together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices.

Askmarkets intends to bring this functionality to the masses. We provide a tool with which anyone can create a virtual market or trade in markets created by others. In other words, we provide a tool which can aggregate the opinions and knowledge of the many and transform these into a meaningful result. Markets arise as the ideal tool to crowdsource cognitive tasks and arrive at consensus results which are typically proven to be more accurate or correct than the opinions of the few experts, as suggested by both theory, experiments and practice.

Practically speaking, the whole concept of markets as an information aggregation tool has a relatively short history of existence. Better captured by the term ‘prediction markets’, it is only during the last years that the rise of the Web has given an actual shape to the idea and its potential. Especially among companies, the promise of markets as a decision support tool has been put into practise and been used as an effective decision-making tool only during the second half of the running decade, while by now all of the following companies are reported to be using markets internally: Siemens, HP, Intel, General Electric, Google, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, Archelor, Nokia, Intercontinental, Best Buy, Electronic Arts, Swisscom, Cisco, Motorola, Qualcomm, InfoWorld, MGM, Chiron, Frito Lay, TNT, Yahoo, Corning, Masterfoods, Pfizer, Abbott, Chrysler, General Mills, O’Reilly and TNT (disclaimer: no, these are not our customers, yet). Typical uses of markets for enterprise decision support range - so far and we’re still counting - from planning and forecasting, project management and marketing to new product development and market research. As our product is suitable for and targets all these applications, we could say that we naturally serve these or any other enterprise needs for dynamic information aggregation. Stay tuned for specific details coming out real soon.

Another major field of use regards public applications of aggregating people’s choices, on elections, movies, products or anything else. Especially regarding election results, relevant markets have proven to be more reliable than polls and surveys, and - lately - are gaining extended coverage from media sources like Time, Wired, CNN, Economist, New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, Fortune, ABC, Science, Nature, New Scientist, Business Week, Wall Street Journal and others. Moreover, many of these outlets already use markets to tap into the collective intelligence of their audience, giving them the ability to directly shape public consensus to ultimately provide a better alternative than polls. We also address such emerging needs - including yours, too -, so bear with us to find out more or just contact us in case that you want to be among our enterprise product testers. And thank you for your fantastic feedback and support so far, you really stand as our most valuable of assets!

A Course by Blog, Lessons Learned

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:49:00 +0300

cross posted at ‘A Course by Blog’

This semester, as you may know, I was privileged enough to teach (or, to be academically correct, to provide teaching assistance, but I truly thank my professor for entrusting me and giving me full freedom to handle everything by myself) the course ‘Information Extraction Algorithms’ -pure Data Mining in practice- at the postgraduate program ‘Applied Mathematical Sciences‘ of theNational Technical University of Athens. And the whole course actually turned out to be a one-off experience, for both me and the 10 students who appeared to take it, by deciding to host the whole course process in a blog.

‘A Course by Blog’, a wordpress blog created on-the-fly during the first introductory lecture, finally concluded with 142 posts from 11 authors, 182 comments and 8,965 pageviews in total till today. We put everything related to the course online and publicly available, from the course’s syllabus and (optional) short CVs of its participants, to the lecture notes and videos (also, a livestream of the lectures was provided), to the weekly assignments, the final exam and grades, while in parallel a lot of more general posts -still relevant to the core machine learning topic- appeared (well, these are all in greek, apologies).

So, you may now follow the course’s proceedings in detail, or, if you are really determined to, watch on demand all lectures and study the relevant material, actually get the whole course’s juice at your convenience. Well, while this may be a pretty useful corollary effect, the main reason that triggered the whole decision was different. The focus was on enabling and fostering the conversation among the students, actually attempting to switch from a closed and locked status to an open and participative, yet competitive one. So, I’d like to add some rough thoughts on the experiences I gained through the whole implementation.

I might now say that the experiment was after all successful, actually a rather successful one. All of the students proved to be good recipients of the -novel to them- blogging platform and I’m positive that their exposure to each others’ assignments and questions resulted in a significantly improved learning experience. Plus, the recorded live streams of the lectures (16h of broadcasting time, available here) attracted 116 viewers, of 14m viewing time on average, while also resulted in some invaluable last-day-before-the-exam responses like “Hi Prof, I’m watching again all of your lectures and need to ask you a couple more things on…”.

At the end of the day, I need to confide that going open clearly demands your time, in a way secures the minimal commitment for both the teacher and the students, as nobody wants to spoil his public reputation. And I’m convinced that all of us spent a lot more time on the course, especially when you compare it to the typical offline version. But, most of this effort was made voluntarily and happily, following uncontrolled patters, while resulting in added value for all of the participants. Isn’t that what you ideally expect from an academic course?

An ode to Chicago

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:50:00 +0300

Presenting at the 3rd Workshop on Prediction Markets

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:50:00 +0300

I attended earlier today the 3rd Workshop on Prediction Markets, organized with the support of Yahoo Research at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Chicago. The event managed to gather top-notch researchers and practitioners of the field from Japan till, well, Greece, and I really enjoyed the focus and depth of all presentations.

What’s more, I had the chance to met up in person and chat with, among others “PM colleagues”, the Chicago-based Inkling guys -we owe them a lot at askmarkets-, Emile Servan-Schreiber of Newsfutures -he proved to be voluble and absolutely helpful on sharing experiences from many years of providing markets services-, as well as his own majesty and my very own prediction markets guru David Pennock; yes, he is such a geek but modest.

The presentation I gave for our late research attempts with Panos Ipeirotis entitled as ‘Detecting Important Events Using Prediction Markets, Text Mining and Volatility Modeling’ is attached hereby, while, as a work in progress, your comments are more than welcome.

| View | Upload your own

TechCrunch goes Open Coffee Greece

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:39:54 +0300

It’s true. It’s big. It’s awesome. After 22 Open Coffee events and hundred of participants around Greece this season, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ll cohost Open Coffee Athens XIII with Techcrunch. When? Tuesday, July 1st.

Close your mouth :), we are serious. The blog that brought the term start-up to the mainstream and is read by millions of people worldwide is on european tour and Mike Butcher, editor of Techcrunch UK, will join us to meet-up with you all and bring attention to the best and brightest of our attempts.

The setting goes like this: Take our very own entrepreneurs’ community. Add 10 Greek web start-ups, getting a 5′ chance to show and tell their story to the world. And all these with tons of karma and passion, in an uber cool-location (to be announced soon).

If you were dreaming about your start-up mentioned at Techcrunch, wake up and send us an email at opencoffee(dot)gr(at)gmail(dot)com. Or, if you would like your name among the sponsors, again email us. And, if you’d like to feel the love and passion that we Greeks share about start-ups and the web at large, just join us, we bet you will.

So, stay tuned for updates, save the date, spread the word and be there (or be square)!

cross-posted by OpenCoffee.gr

Attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:15:00 +0300

I’m attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008 (photos are flowing here, more stuff on twitter) organized by my friend Stefanos in the magnificent island of Ios. Attendance is not excessive in size, but mood and atmosphere are pretty excellent and today alone I had the chance and priviledge to share some ouzo with Boris and Patrick (the latter one is also a speaker to the forthcoming Open Coffee Athens Meeting XII, next Tuesday June 3rd), jog throughout the Mylopotas Beach with Tim Ferriss (I can assure you that his writings are truly real, the guy is awesome and has managed to learn tons of greek in half a day) and chat with his own majesty Matt Mullenweg on the experiences of A Course by Blog.

Among the talks that took place earlier today, greek blog/podfather Panayiotis Vryonis shared his humble story on the Web, but I was almost excited with the presentation of teh dutch guy Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. Through narrating his personal lifetime, Boris brought into surface an insightful parallelism. The fundamental properties of what we considered as of ‘god nature’, he argued, is being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and immortal. But, exactly these very properties are fully implemented by The Web! Boris’ delivery was excellent and I do confess my excitement on the thought of democratizing -at last- the concept of ‘G0d’ via the internet. Implications vary from practical to deeply philosophical levels, I may return to these thoughts of mine on a later post.

After Boris and Tim, sharing -as usual- some tips on efficient blogging policies, Matt went on stage to present -among others- some new features of the forthcoming WordPress 2.6. To my partial knowledge and short updates, some of these features weren’t announced anywhere else before (and Matt validated my feeling on a later discussion by the pool), so I think these new features would be of interest to you :) Here you are:

WP will support Google Gears, to bring your blog into the desktop and enable the offline WP experience. Moreover, you’ll never lose any data again when losing internet connection, etc.
A ‘Turbo’ button will be available to speed up page load by optimizing javascripts and css. Early data reveal a 6x increase in performance
WP 2.6 will get wiki capabilities!
New post categories ala Tumblr will be added (photo/quote/video, added to the current text default one)
bulk uploads of photos and collective tagging will be enabled

Moreover, Matt promised no other major redesign but small changes on administration user interface from now on, among them the categories box will be restored back in their older place, up in right column. He also demonstrated a home-grown feature of using WP as mail inbox, in a full-fledged talk that left nobody dissapointed (as far as I know, videos of the speech will soon be available on the camp’s website). And I do need to also describe his willingness to answer every single question with his ever-ending smile and fully humility… Respect and keep up Matt!

"We charge for our services, just to secure your attention."

Wed, 14 May 2008 08:16:53 +0300

“We charge for our services, just to secure your attention.”

- How would you receive such a selling argument?

"With the exception of advertising, the vast majority of Web 2.0 services are proven to remain viable..."

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:44:07 +0300

“With the exception of advertising, the vast majority of Web 2.0 services are proven to remain viable only under external funding, in exchange of prospects for future profitability, which often never comes.”

- please comment/correct/upgrade.

a short promo to askmarkets.com, more to be found at...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:06:42 +0300

a short promo to askmarkets.com, more to be found at the official blog :)

Comments and search added

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:01:00 +0300

While I’m definitely a fan of the uber-simplistic and sexy approach to blogging by tumblr, there clearly exist some basic functionalities that are missing and tumblr has been late to add. And, as I haven’t been serious enough to create a personal website including a Wordpress /blog yet, I’ve just added commenting using disqus and ajaxed search using this hack. So, all your comments are welcome by now (to the older posts, too!) :)

P.S: What about trackback? Any roundabouts?

kind-of twitter addict lately

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:41:00 +0300

kind-of twitter addict lately: according to Robert Scoble

lifestreaming today, part II:...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:09:38 +0200

lifestreaming today, part II: 18.30-…, Open Coffee Athens Meeting IX

lifestreaming today, part I: 12.00-14.00 teaching data mining,...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:08:00 +0200

lifestreaming today, part I: 12.00-14.00 teaching data mining, introductory lecture

update: cancelled, tune in next tuesday, same time and place

a Course by Blog

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:46:00 +0200

I’m teaching the course ‘Information Extraction Algorithms’ (well, pure data mining in practice) at the post-graduate program ’Applied Mathematical Sciences’ of NTUA’s School of Applied Mathematics and Physics.

I’m strongly considering the idea of employing a blog to serve at the core of the learning process. The class is held at a pc-lab, so it came somehow natural to me to create a blog where I admin and all students author.

The target? Except from posting lecture notes and publicizing assignments or announcements, I feel that a blog could evolve as the greatest of tools to foster conversation among students and finally enable a really educative experience, powered by the students themselves. The plan is to accept assignments by public posts, instead of filing them out of sight, and motivate each student to comment on the works of others, while learning by the comments received by herself. The concept looks simple and clear, however I have yet to find any similar references (any links would be really appreciated!). Let’s see how it all goes.

I also plan to stream live the whole course (it’s all in greek, though, apologies), while I’m looking for a wiki wordpress plugin to enable collaborative notes’ keeping during the lectures (any ideas?).

The feedback during the introductory lecture today, while we were creating the wordpress blog on the fly and assigning author rights to all students, was really hopeful: “It’s cool, it looks like facebook…”

cross-posted from a Course by Blog

Prediction Markets most popular topic in Collective...

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:39:00 +0200

Prediction Markets most popular topic in Collective Intelligence FooCamp, held a couple of days ago at Google, with an awesome list of attendees (coverage here and here)

"It is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken all..."

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:45:02 +0200

“It is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken all together, be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one supplied at one man’s expense. […]
There is this to be said for the many. Each of them by himself may not be of good quality; but when they all come together it is possible that they may surpass—collectively and as a body, although not individually—the quality of the few best. […]
Provided the mass of the people is not too slave-like, each individual will indeed be a worse judge than the experts, but collectively they will be better, or at any rate no worse.”

- Aristotle on Collective Intelligence, Politics, circa 334-23 BC.

a bunch of Aristotle quotes here, hat tip to Cass Sunstein

CSS Rounded Corners 101

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 15:48:00 +0200

Rounded corners are often a designers’ holy grail. They seem to provide a concrete user experience and a feeling of smoothness in navigation, while they are being selected recently for more and more web 2.0 designs.

Well, I’m not a designer, but need forced me to explore and implement some rounded magic. There exists a lot of available techniques, most of them claiming to be ‘purely css’. But, I finished up disappointed by nearly all of them.

What I actually needed was light, css-powered rounded corners, giving the ability to switch colors easily (aka create customizable by user web pages). Nifty corners arose as a great option, so I gave them a try, however some problems occurred with the javascript calls. For example, you need to put the nifty corners call last, which is not a rather likable feature, and I had some loading errors on my browser.

So, I ended up creating my own technique, which I’m posting here just in case that proves to be helpful for anyone, anytime. I need to declare also that Photoshop is one of few software applications that make me feel really uncomfortable, so I’m putting the guidelines here assuming that you also feel so and have no specific Photoshop skills. Enough, let’s move to the example.

Say you have a div of 600x50 pixels, a header for example, and you need to put some rounded corners on it.

Create a new Photoshop file, selecting ‘custom’ as preset and ‘transparent’ in background contents. You’ d better here create an image of size 3x or 4x the size of div (to make the final corners to be created smoother)
Select the rounded rectangle tool, define the radius and create a rectangle of size equal to your image (edges of rectangle to coincide with image’s limits
Right click on the rectangle and rasterize its layer
Now, use the magic wand tool to select the rectangle, then right click and ‘select inverse’
Pick up the paint bucket tool, define as color the site’s original background color and fill the corners (they are already selected by the magic wand)
After that, select the magic wand tool again and right click on the areas just filled with color to select ‘layer via cut’.
Then, delete the old layer (layers window, select ‘shape 1’ and right click to delete)
Finally select ‘save for web and devices’ from the file menu, scale down the image through image size selection box and save it as .png (transparency option ticked, file created is about 4KB in size)

That’s it! Now you have a transparent image to put it as background in your div, while you can define and change on demand the div’s color by css. For example, you could define in your css:

#this_is_my_div { background-image: url(/images/div_background.png); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: no-repeat; background: #abcdef; }

So, you end up creating a ‘wild card image’, of tiny size, no need for buggy javascript and color just defined by your css… Hope to be useful! :)

GIGO and prophets, tears and markets

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:31:00 +0200

Prediction markets failed to accurately predict the unexpected effect a few tears had on the New Hampshire primaries; and some analysts rushed to blame the tool and undermine its reliability and applicability. Let me restate some fundamentals and my view, in a snapshot:

Markets are not prophets, prophets do not exist.
A mechanism’s forecastability should not be judged against a virtual fool-proof prophet; we’d better compare it with other existing or widely-used mechanisms and -to my partial and context-bound knowledge- markets outperform all those.
Markets are the only tool that intrinsically suggests their probability of failure. If Obama’s stock is traded at 70 cents, this suggests that there is a 30% probability of Obama losing; I’d say markets are by character modest and no fanfare has any place in describing their suggestions.
Markets are primarily an aggregation/meta mechanism; as such, garbage-in-garbage-out effects are expected to happen, so we’d need to keep focus on minimizing garbage rather than blaming the market/compiler.
Maturity of the mechanism and its use, as long as trading volume (in real-money intrade for example), have not yet reached a fully efficient level (more on this to come soon), but these result in significant profit opportunities, so I expect things to just keep getting better.

For 25 posts/day coverage and links to relevant articles (including WSJ, ABC, NYT, FT, NBC, etc), check Midas Oracle.

A really hot year for prediction markets has just started

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:29:18 +0200

After the launch of Wall Street Journal’s Political Market (powered by intrade, coverage here and here) and CNN’s Political Market (powered by inkling), McCluskey and Hanson also debuted Presidential Decision Markets.

Today, Cowgill, Wolfers and Zitzewitz just released a full-fledged draft studying markets at Google, which is absolutely exceptional, definitely the most massive enterprise prediction markets application and study ever conducted! (coverage by the NY Times here.) I may return to comment further on this soon.

All of these in just 7 days. Who’s next? ;-)

Happy New Year and my best wishes to you all for 2008!

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:21:57 +0200

Happy New Year and my best wishes to you all for 2008!