The following are some of the thoughts that keep me awake at night. Not because I find it hard to sleep but because I sincerely believe they should be given attention. Some of these have the potential to change the world.
Computer Medical Peripherals
Recent medical breakthroughs have shown promise in tackling some of the world’s most intractable diseases. nevertheless, many still die from easily preventable deaths and are primarily from developing countries. The irony is that the new medical advances do not benefit most of the global population, who often lack access to essential medical services.
The ability to quickly make diagnoses and access the latest information on medications and treatments is more important to doctors in developing countries than the latest medical toys.
However, it takes years and a mountain of cash to move new medical equipment to develop countries, but computers, tablets, and mobile phones leap in months. Why can’t we have medical devices that can be used as computer peripherals or simple apps on phones and make them available to doctors in these countries? Why can’t peripherals be manufactured cheaply and so commonly that they cost nothing? Why can’t the devices be open-sourced? Why can’t these devices be easily upgradeable via software?
There are technological, financial, political, and medical challenges ahead, but I believe this is a direction to go.
Optical chips
Gordon Moore set his law some decades back, and we have been at it since. Near collisions aside, it has been a constant speed-doubling price-halving experience every 18 months since. But like most players in the industry will tell you, we are on borrowed time.
There are advances in optical chips, but an all-out optical chip from bus to register to memory promises performances that a trip on LSD can only match. My interest lies in massive parallel photo-computing using wave multiplexing.
Genetic Algorithm
A fancy method of solving what we call NP-Hard problems. These are problems so hard (maybe not to Einstein) that we can’t use deterministic methods to solve them. For example, the classic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSB) is an NP-Hard problem. You can’t just use brute force to solve it.
I’m currently working on an optimization project which uses GA ( a 11998 solution space), and I intend to give it some twist. My supervisor has argued that GA is analogous to real life and may not be as random as we expect. Still, my own opinion is if such a random approach (GA) is very effective, modeling it to be as near as real life might be much more promising. So part of what I’m doing is to find out if total chaos can produce order.
Other interests
- Renewable energy from deep geothermal sources
- Lean/compact government
- Performance management as a pillar of corporate governance