Landscape of the Mind

After all, I not only LOVE complex systems but also break them down to ‘simple solutions’.

I will never know whether I could have developed 3D Metrics if I had not ‘looked at myself’ as often as I have.

And thus I’ve always been fascinated by all interactions between inner and outer worlds – as the only way to make sense of what we are experiencing.

Landscape of the Mind will help anybody towards identifying their unique strengths and weaknesses and thus improve the abilities of themselves and their teams. I wish I could attend the launch on 29th June at 2.30 in the London School of Economics.

Related articles

• Minding the Mind (collectingyourself.wordpress.com)

To dish out money, it organises competitions. It may take the same time to produce a good video as filling in forms, but it felt less tedious, and I got to know new software.

So here are “Software Lenses” in six slides as a video on YouTube.

Or on the TSB site here.

Input: Bulrushes in and reflected by water

This photo was taken of bulrushes in water. The water surface breaks the light and thus changes the angle of the stems for our eye.

Our software uses the information of the intensities that the imaging technology produces and re-visualizes it in its unique way.

Output: Bulrushes in water re-visualized

The uniqueness is due to proprietary transformations that are not available in any maths software. Why not? Because they are all based on the mathematics as it developed from writing.

My thinking developed through programming. As a mature system analyst I revisited science and questioned everything there is to question, not only in mathematics.

That’s how the prototype got written, based on 25 Word documents. It “sees” the light that is embedded in the intensities produced by the microscope, camera or telescope. That’s how medical scales can be processed in the same way as astronomical ones.

The interpretation of what they eye sees and the brain thinks is due to “client domain expertise”. The software does what it is better at than most humans: “number acrobatics”.

The next level of “number acrobatics” is due when

• either investors ask “how much do you need?”
• or customers specify the length scale of their images, the number of images they’d like to see processed and the interpretation times they are hoping for.

The rest is verbal for measuring units, interpretation and decision support: client domain expertise gets embedded into vocabularies for menu options and user choices.

I was accepted as one of 21 ‘innovators’ for investors to consider. Please click on the image to enlarge it. More on image analysis on re-visualizing images and on www.3dm-images.net.  The text says:

Poster for Innovation Village

The Innovation:

“Software Lenses” are the result of using a highly generic prototype for the analysis and revisualization of digital images.

The analysis is a new approach to classifying images, characterising image components, recognizing patterns, and generally measuring on-screen, as a basis for making decisions.

The re-visualization gives added details and new perspectives of 3D structures.

Together, the methods form the basis for a decision support system, by incorporating the knowledge of experienced image analysts.

The underlying algorithms are so general, that

• calibration images could be used across different imaging technologies
• reference images could be used for quality control of production
• standardisation images could be used for establishing standards at nanoscale and below.

Depending on the application, user interfaces require tailoring for image tagging, expert interpretation and end user decisions. For minimum overhead and maximum client exposure, Software Lenses are to be offered as a ‘web service’, thus allowing income from private server installations as well as public subscriptions.

The original input image shows bulrushes in water and their reflections. The re-visualization output shows the water as a curved surface with the grass blades above and below.

A little booth in a small village

The back of the booth large enough for our A0 poster

In a nutshell, the 3d metric software offers:

1. On a metrological level

• The ability to quantify elements of images

This leads to attributing numerical values to qualities of physical, chemical and biological processes:

• the analysis of processes over any time scale
• and states of transition between image elements

2. On an image analysis level

a. For the human eye
• New “3D perspectives”
• More detail
• “Pixel accuracy”

b. For 3d metric “software vision”
• The ability to quantify images as a whole and image elements

This leads to being able to compare

• Images as a whole
• Image elements
• Image patterns

3. On a data visualization level (sample here)

The ability to position curves in vertical layers.
• This leads to being able to discover new correlations, dependencies and rankings.

Excel	3D Metrics

The added value is to be understood in an evolutionary context. First we put data into tables, then we learned to visualize them as curves which, as an image, immediately tell us more than a series of data.

Then spreadsheet programs like Excel perfected the process of visualizing data by offering different kinds of charts.

The value that the 3d metric approach adds, lies on the level of additional visual and metric information:

Additional visual and metric information provided by 3d metric screens:

• the height of individual frames
• the width of individual frames
• the diagonal distances between frames
• the slope and shape of the line that the bottom right corners of the frames create
• scope for further quantifications through other parameters.

This collection of visualizations is meant to illustrate the untapped power of 3d metric algorithms to turn dimensions, parameters or variables into vertical layers.

By juxtaposing the same data in Excel graphs and 3d metric screenshots, more can be seen:

• new visual comparisons
• surprising perspectives
• interesting correlations.

This leads to new insights, new understanding and new intelligence.

The challenge lies in data experts adding the verbal interpretations into menus for less trained users to process the new data visualizations.

These time series have been taken from the Interactive Statistics site of the Bank of England, relating to public debt.

This is the title of an article in the New York Times. It describes admirably the ‘problem’ that my software methods can help to ‘solve’. The article is actually the review of a book called The Fourth Paradigm.

The late Microsoft researcher Dr. Jim Gray said in a speech in January 2007 that the only way to cope with an “exaflood” of observational data was “to manage, visualize and analyse the data flood”. Well, my approach to visualizing multi-dimensional data offers exactly that!

Similarly, Dr. Eric Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher for Microsoft says: “My goal now is to develop a new kind of telescope or microscope.” Well, my “software lenses” are exactly that!

Offering a new instrument of observation means increasing our intelligence. Let’s hope that 2010 will be the year in which my three software methods will see the “online light” of a web service.

I consider it “interesting PR” or “PR with a difference”.

Here’s the document that I submitted: Innovation Village