Almost four years ago I got it in my head that it would be fun to try to build a way to automatically detect breaking news. I thought of creating a predictive algorithm based on deviations of word usage across the internet - if usage of the word "pizza" suddenly deviated from its historical mean, something was going on with pizza! Looking back, it was a really silly idea, but it got me interested in working programmatically with natural language and eventually (somehow) morphed into Argos, the news automation service I started working on a little over a year ago. Since I recently got Argos to a fairly-well functioning tech demo stage, this seems like a good spot to reflect on what's been done so far.

The fundamental technical goal for Argos is to automatically apply structure to a chaotic news environment, to make news easier for computers to process and for people to understand.

When news pundits talk about the changing nature of news in the digital age, they often try to pinpoint the "atomic unit" of news. Stretching this analogy a bit far, Argos tries to break news into its "subatomic particles" and let others assemble them into whatever kind of atom they want. Argos can function as a service providing smaller pieces of news to readers, but also as a platform that other developers can build on.

The long-term vision for Argos is to contribute to what I believe is journalism's best function - to provide a simulacrum of the world beyond our individual experience. There are a lot of things standing in the way of that goal. This initial version of Argos focuses on the two biggest obstacles: information overload and complex stories that span long time periods.

At this point in development, Argos watches new sources for new articles and automatically groups them into events. It's then able to take these events and build stories out of them, presented as timelines. As an example, the grand jury announcing their verdict for Darren Wilson would be one event. Another event would be Darren Wilson's resignation, and another would be the protests which followed the grand jury verdict in Ferguson and across the country. Multiple publications reported on each of these events. A lot of that reporting might be redundant, so by collapsing these articles into one unity, Argos eliminates some noise and redundancy.

These events would all be grouped into the same story. The ongoing protests around Eric Garner's murder would also be an event but would not necessarily be part of the same story, even though the two are related thematically.

A five-point summary is generated for each event, cited from that event's source articles. Thus the timeline for a story functions as an automatically generated brief on everything that's happened up until the latest event. The main use case here is long-burning stories like Ferguson or the Ukraine conflict which often are difficult to follow if you haven't been following the story from the start.

Argos can also see what people, places, organizations, and other key terms are being discussed in an event, and instantaneously provide information about these terms to quickly inform or remind readers.

Finally, Argos calculates a "social (media) importance" score for each event to try and estimate what topics are trending. This is mainly to support a "day-in-brief" function (or "week-in-brief", etc), i.e. the top n most "important" (assuming talked about == important) events of today. Later it would be great to integrate discussions and other social signals happening around an event.

I've been testing Argos mainly with world and political news (under the assumption that those would be easier to work with for technical reasons). So far that has been working well, so I recently started trying some different news domains, though it's too early to say how that's working out.

The API is not yet public and I'm not sure when it will be officially released. At the moment can't devote a whole lot of time to the project (if you're interested in becoming involved, get in touch.
Argos does have an unreleased Android app (and an older version for iOS) which at this point is mainly just a tech demo for small-scale testing. Frankly, I don't know if Argos will work best as a consumer product or some intermediary technology powering some other consumer service.

(Later I'll write a post detailing the development of Argos up until now.)

I've wanted to make a video game for a while now, and I've finally started working on one in the past few months. It's called The Founder and it is a dystopian business simulator. In this game, you play an entrepreneur with your sights set on becoming the next disruptive innovator dreaming up a company that will bravely push the world into a new, brighter future.

Dystopian fiction is great. But so many of these works plop the reader in some ambiguously distant future and start things from there. The progression to that point, say, from our own historical moment, is far more interesting to me. It's more startling to see how our current systems, values, and ways of thinking which intuitively feel like they make sense gradually move us towards a world none of us would have ever conceded to.

Technosolutionism as a perspective has a lot of innate appeal to it - how nice would it be if our ills could be easily solved by a simple engineering feat or a new scientific breakthrough, neatly packaged into some product or service? Of course, such a perspective neglects the fact that, while technology is marvelous and certainly has the potential to solve many hard problems, not all problems can be solved by it, and even for those that it can solve, technology is only ever realized in a social context. Technology takes on the values of the environment in which it was nurtured: if developed under the logic of business interests, it comes with or flourishes as new modes of control. We've already seen in forms both technological - DRM and deep packet inspection, for instance - and legal - DMCA, SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality, for instance.

Those examples (I reckon) are universally acknowledged as bad ideas. Things get more interesting when you realize many lauded consumer products and services are just as nefarious, if not more so for their insidious nature.

As a few examples: Uber force workers to abide by unfair contracts under the guise of economic independence (among many of their other transgressions), AirBnB destabilize rent prices and undercut affordable housing while pumping an ad campaign to convince residents otherwise, and Google, Facebook, Twitter, Comcast, Time Warner, etc. are (of course) influencing government policy through lots and lots of lobbying, ostensibly for our benefit.

The Founder takes this world - our world - starting from a decade or two ago, and plots out a possible, if exaggerated, trajectory. How is the promise of technology captured and expressed when borne out of the businesses' relentlessly growth-oriented, profit-seeking logic? What does progress look like in a world obsessed with growth as measured by sheer economic output rather than metrics of well-being?

Like any good power-fantasy game, you are at the center of it! The Founder puts players into the shoes of someone who has bought into techno-capitalist logic and lets them loose in a fictional universe. The player will be instrumental in the progression to an unsavory future; a progression which will (ideally) feel disturbingly rational under the logic of the game. Winning in The Founder means shaping a world in which you are successful - at the expense of it being a dystopia for almost everyone else. It's not what you set out to do as the Founder, but that is what manifests from the definitions of short-term success within the game. Although The Founder brings it to levels of absurdity, I'm hoping the parallels between the preposterous world of The Founder and our own are clear.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... – Neuromancer, William Gibson

This weekend I played around in Unity and built an experimental 3d network traffic visualizer. It's very simple now but eventually I'd like to transform network topology into a virtual reality space which can be explored. Packets could be inspected as one would physical objects in the real world, servers would be enormous fortresses safeguarding precious data.

You'd be able to turn your local network topology into a game level for "hacking" and fighting against ICE. It would be awesome to see the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven icebreaker grow around you:

...that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems...

He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.

"Okay," he said, "we're on..."

"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline said, "take a look at this."

The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void.

"Big mother," the Flatline said.

The source is available on GitHub along with instructions for running it. The server code is based off of Jonathan Dahan's pagesounds project.