Combining NLP with Machine Learning

SAS has published an interesting article titled - 'Your personal data scientist'.  I have always been a fan of virtual assistants such as Siri, Google Now and depend on them for most of my day-to-day task management. We have also built some cool use-cases around using NLP for self-service.

The idea of building an NLP wrapper on top of your Analytics engine is a cool one and can have a plethora of use-cases. For e.g. A business decision maker wants to know the top 10 sales talent; the sales in a particular geography last quarter, etc.

We need to build an NLP front-end that can intelligently convert natural language text to queries that can be executed against the machine learning engine.

Netty at Apple Inc.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that most of Apple's cloud services run on Netty.

Norman Maurer had posted an excellent presentation on how Netty is being used at Apple and how many of the extreme performance requirements were met.

There are more than 400 thousand instances of Netty at Apple; handling millions of requests/sec. Netty powers all popular cloud services such as iCloud, iTunes, Siri, Apple Maps, etc.

UX vs. UI

Found the following good articles that lay out the difference between UX and UI.

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2014/04/24/the-gap-between-ui-and-ux-design-know-the-difference/
http://www.helloerik.com/ux-is-not-ui

Snippet from the article -
"The intrigue is that a UX can exist and work very effectively having a poor UI. For example, you can have an application with a stunning design that is hairy to use (good UI, bad UX). You can also have an application that has a poor look and feel, but is very intuitive to use (poor UI, good UX)."

I have always been a fan of sketching and we often brainstorm on the whiteboard. The following link highlights the importance of sketching - http://uxmovement.com/wireframes/why-its-important-to-sketch-before-you-wireframe/

You can also download printer-friendly grid-based templates for mobile sketches - http://uxmovement.com/products/wireframe-sheets-sketch-your-user-interface-to-life/