Avalon AI @ Entrepreneur First Demo Day

After a busy 6 months of honey-badgering, we've seen the light of day at the Entrepreneur First Demo Day:

We've since been mentioned in Forbes and featured in the Huffington Post.

Now we are starting our fundraising round. Stay tuned!

Cooperative bank, why so uncooperative?

I've always been a proponent of ethical banks, so as I planned to move to the UK, I decided to apply to the main ethical bank in the UK, "The Cooperative Bank".

I applied online and just opened the 2 letters they sent me to the UK address I specified. The two letters are from consecutive days.

The first one is hopeful, asking me for proofs of identity/residence:

 The next one, dating on the next day is less so, saying that "after careful consideration", they won't open an account for me.

This lack of cooperation has certainly annoyed me. It only exacerbates the typical "catch 22s" in the industry, where immigrating workers are supposed to provide one or more proofs of address in the UK before having a bank account, complicating the entry of skilled workers into the country.

Then again, I should not be surprised, as I had once before tried to switch to them in my Cambridge days, only to be told that they cannot create an account for me because my "name is too long".

For those entrepreneurs amongst you with an eye on the financial sector, this "service industry" lacks service so much that it's clearly ripe for disruption. Any bank that can provide decent service and ease the process of creating a bank account by accepting more foreigner-friendly proofs of legitimacy (e.g. proofs of address, bills and bank statements from their home country), would get a lot of business.

Enterpreneur First: Unconference on "Beating Propaganda"

As some of you will know, I've been accepted to a startup program in London called Entrepreneur First. I thought I'd share the content of the presentation I made during the final interview stage, which included an "unconference" and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal blog.

The topic of propaganda is near and dear to my heart, and is so extensive and far spread, whether on the topic of Ukraine or on the "health benefits" of tobacco and the effect of burning unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels. As someone mentioned, I seem to care a lot about the Truth. Well, I do.

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Hi, I'm Sasha, and I'm originally from Ukraine. You've probably heard about my country. Back in the good old days, many people barely knew where my country was. Now everyone knows, because there is a war going on in the Eastern border regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, where my grandfather grew up.

This war, to a great extent, has been started and fuelled through the extensive use of propaganda. Propaganda has selected, distorted and even created fictitious information.

While the example I have given you is, I hope, compelling, it is not the only one. War has been waged with information and disinformation since long ago, and goes on today. The Cold War is a prime example. But to me, the Ukraine is closest to my heart, and the information war within it shocks me the most.

Perhaps the most disturbing story that circulated many of the main Russian channels was of a child in Sloviansk who was allegedly crucified by soldiers of the "evil Kiev junta". Other similar outright lies involved alleged promises to give two slaves and a piece of land to Ukrainian servicemen.

Not less harmful were news statements saying that the new government would ban the Russian language and arrest or kill infringers. And we should not be surprised that people who did not know better, that countless people in Kiev still speak Russian, would take arms to protect themselves from "fascists".

Less blatant, but even more effective has been the campaign of misinformation around the tragedy in Odessa on May the 2nd 2014. Kremlin media have effectively depicted the event as a murderous arson of the Trade Union’s building by “fascists” leading to the death of 40 people. These accounts generally ignore the preceding injuries and deaths of pro-Ukrainian activists by gunfire, and the passiveness or controversial acts of police tasked with upholding order. This distorted version of events has been a key catalyst in bringing Russian volunteers to fight in Eastern Ukraine.

So strong is the effect of propaganda that after the shooting down of the MH17, an educated friend of mine living in Russia shared a blog post, which wondered if the people on the plane might have been the corpses of the MH370 passengers, planted there by the CIA. A Dutch friend is convinced that the plane was shot down by an Su-25 fighter plane that can't operate at the height of a Boeing 777. Many other versions of events of varying fantasy circulated the web, each creating an alternative reality of the events.

All this disinformation comes from a wealth of channels. For Russian speakers, state-owned TV channels like Zvezda, Channel 1, LifeNews and paper and internet newspapers like Argumenty i Fakty or Pravda.ru. With viewerships in the millions, they influence most of Russia's public and adjacent states, like the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. For the wider world, online news and analysis resources like Russia Today, Sputnik International and the Centre for Research in Globalisation attempt to influence a wealth of Western readers. And closer to the physical realm, fake conferences and exhibitions like “Material Evidence” in New York.

These are but some of the many examples of lies and distortion that have kept this conflict alive and the volunteers, from both Ukraine and Russia, coming. This concept is not new of course, states always have demonised their enemies and appealed to their fear to make them fight. But the Internet has given the information war far greater power.

Just like the physical war, the information war is sustained by both volunteers and regular recruits. “Troll factories”, like the “Internet Research Agency” one recently exposed in St. Petersburg. The Agency, for instance, has some 40 rooms with professional “trolls” who post blogs and comment in support of the Kremlin, while posing as regular citizens of not only Russia, but also Western countries.

One of the greatest dangers of information wars, is that they are nearly invisible. On the one side, it does not cause direct physical damage as a mortar or a tank may do. On the other, their indirect impact makes defense more difficult, since one often does not realise he is being attacked. They divide people into parallel realities, breaking communication, and inciting fear and submission.

I could not help myself but be reminded of George Orwell's 1984, where rewriting of history is the norm, where thoughts are policed even more than actions, and war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. This is not the future I want to live in, and the simplest alternative, closing the internet, even if it were possible, would come at the expense of the freedom of speech, so how can one fight back and where?

So far, one of the better examples that I have seen in fighting propaganda has been the Ukrainian site StopFake. They have been analysing the largest sources of misinformation and debunking them. However their effort has relied on considerable manual analysis and fact checking, rendering it slow and selective.

Similar to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks in the West, some whistle blowers have attempted to expose the Kremlin's involvement in the East, by discovering or collecting information about the war. Lev Shlosberg who spoke of secret funerals of Russian servicemen. Boris Nemtsov, who gathered publicly available information into a report linking the Kremlin to the war in Ukraine. The trouble with such efforts is that they are not merely manual, but are also dangerous to perform. Snowden is a fugitive, Shlosberg was beaten by thugs and Nemtsov was murdered next to the Kremlin.

Another example has been a webapp called TrolleyBust, who try to block trolls on Facebook using crowdsourcing of opinions and the analysis of communication with known propagandists, leading to a sort of recursive clustering of trolls. However their platform does not appear to be very robust and only targets one social platform.

Despite the great volume of propaganda circulating the Internet, this medium, in contrast to radio, TV and paper press, has a distinct advantage: Availability. We can gather, analyse and react to a great wealth of data.

Also, given the volume of propaganda, it is difficult and expensive to fight it through pure human labour. Machine learning perhaps the main way forward, for surely, if we can accurately classify spam vs. non-spam, why should we not be able to classify propaganda?

But to do so, we will have to leverage a wealth of different information, ranging from social networks, news articles, maps, books and images. And then we must combine it all. Not to mention surmounting the defenses that propagandists hide behind, such as IP proxies.

This is a great challenge with currently few ready answers, but hopefully we can start asking the right questions.

MH17 to 1984

I am to this very day still amazed and bewildered at how many people (many Russians, yet some west Europeans also), actually believe in the propaganda that the MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian SU-25s.

While sites like Pravda.ru and RT have removed all mention of these news after the event, several official and/or government-owned Russian newspapers still contain the news of the "AN-26 transport plane" shot down over Torez by the separatists of the ДНР/DPR ("Donetsk People's Republic") around 16:00 local time (14:00 UTC). The same place, the same day, the same time that the MH17 fell.

Never again have we heard of this mysterious AN-26, nor have the news disappeared or been "corrected". For some examples, see and take the effort of at last google translating some of the following articles:

http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1325017

http://ria.ru/world/20140717/1016409306.html

And even in obviously pro-Russian blogs, even going to cite Strelkov's site in VKontakte (Russia's Facebook) writing "We warned you - don't fly in our skies", eventually removed from the site.

http://topwar.ru/54473-an-26-ukrainskih-vvs-sbit-bliz-toreza-opolchency-zayavlyayut-i-o-sbitoy-sushke.html

Other channels like LifeNews, has tried to change the time of the event to 17:30 local time,

http://lifenews.ru/news/136801

and removed the original video, which cites 17:00 Moscow time (16:00 in Ukraine), to be seen clearly here from approximately 0:47 (if need be, ask a Russian-speaking friend to translate):


Welcome to George Orwell's "1984", today. Where people are brainwashed to believe that chocolate rations double from 8 grams to 4 grams and 2 + 2 is 5. I will probably not prove anything to these very people, those who I wish would read and think, and that's the most frightful thing. That today's propaganda still works just as well as it did in Nazi Germany and Communist USSR, even when the truth is within such easy reach.

So why did I bother?

Because I am a naive idealist, who selfishly writes for his own peace of mind...

Meryl's Master's ceremony speech

I couldn't be there for my former Master's student graduation, so I wrote her a speech that was delivered today by her other supervisor, Branka. Wishing her a fantastic future wherever she may go :-)

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Meryl Varadinov is awesome.

A 5 minute speech will not do her justice, unfortunately, but we will have to make do.

By the way, I'm not her supervisor. Sasha, Meryl's supervisor, wrote this cheeky speech from the cold depths of Estonia, and he apologises profusely for not being able to be here to give it in person. Although, on second thought, he could have done it over Skype, especially since that company is from Estonia. Anyway, it probably would not have worked because of Murphy's first (and last) law - the toast always falls on the buttered side, and video-conferencing always breaks at the most crucial moment.

Anyway, back to Meryl. You now know she is awesome. However, some of you might not know why.

Meryl is awesome because she fiercely believes in great science. Great science is where it does not matter whether your p value is above or below 0.05, but what matters is the truth. Someone once said that in war, the first thing that dies is the truth. You could not substitute Meryl for war, because Meryl is too honest to compromise. You can tell from her sarcastic comments in the face of adversity, and in the face of her supervisors, like me (well, not me, but the guy in Estonia).

Meryl is awesome because she is greater than her work. She's not just a scientist, but she's also an activist for peace, democracy and all the things that matter in this world. Which means she's also an activist for lolcats. She's battled for truth in the streets of Sofia. That's in Bulgaria for those amongst you who are crap at geography, like her supervisor. If you are not crap at Latin as well, you will know that "sofia" means wisdom in Greek. And Meryl is wise beyond her years. She reads between the lines when she reads the news, and watches between the pixels when she watches TV.

Meryl is awesome because she keeps on getting better and better every day. By the end of this speech she will be uber-awesome. She's never stuck in one place, she absorbs knowledge and skills like a sea sponge absorbs sea water and water pollution. Except that knowledge and skills are good and sea pollution is bad. When she started her master's degree she could not program at all, but in a few months she learned to do it like a pro. She still has to earn the rest of the letters in "professional", but I'm certain she will be one of the most awesome programmers in the building by the end of her PhD.

Meryl is awesome because she managed to turn a bearded mad scientist project starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and analysis code filled with "mews", "woofs" and other animal sounds into a "great success". As Doge would say: Much Hippocampus activation. So Multiple Comparison Corrected. Wow. And that's even more amazing when you realise that Gwyneth Paltrow is on Meryl's most un-wanted list...

Meryl is awesome because of a 1001 more reasons. Yes, one thousand and one, not nine, as the speech is not written in binary, but in the decimal system. Anyway, you will have to make do with the above four reasons. Here's the abstract, which you always write at the end: Meryl is awesome because of her scientific integrity, her passion, her intelligence and her motivation.

Given how solemn and serious a graduation event is, her supervisor should have probably written a solemn and serious speech for her to "celebrate her merits and accomplishmens". Please read the bit between bunny ears with a posh British accent. Oi, you are not supposed to read this bit! Anyway, a serious and solment speech can't do Meryl justice, because she's not just well rounded and generally excellent. She's also awesome.

Now guys, what are you waiting for? Give her the applause she deserves.

Kill your dragons

Today I was back at my old school, the International School Hilversum. 10 years after my graduation I was to give a keynote for students who were graduating themselves.


Kill your dragons

Before I start, let me get this out of the way. I'm not the best person to give an inspirational speech to you. For one, I get awfully anxious in crowds. And especially because I see my life as more complicated than inspirational. Especially today.

You will surely understand what I mean when I tell you where I am from. I'm from Kiev, Ukraine. This last year has been tough on us. From the Euromaidan demonstrations last November to the current Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east, many innocent people have died. Holland has suffered too, since the atrocious downing of the MH17. Most of us know innocent people who have died. It would seem as if things can’t get any worse…

Uncertainty and change rule these days, and not only because of the mad things going on around the world. Many of you may feel lost, wondering what you will do with your diploma, your gap year, your career, your life. Some might be certain of where you want to go and how to get there. I hope I can speak to both of you.

You are probably wondering, how can this guy relate to us? He’s already finished university, has landed a job, he has it all figured out. I don’t now and I didn’t back then, when I was sitting where you are. So what can I give you then? All I can give you is my story.

I don’t come from money, though half my family are doctors. In the Soviet Union doctors earned rather little unless they took bribes. So my family were the poor kind of doctors. Growing up in Spain we became even poorer, up until I was 9 years old my parents and I slept together on a small mattress. I remember dreaming of going to University and saving my family, so I saved up my pocket change and gave it to my mother to put it in a savings account. I wish someone had told me to invest in Google then… My father, one hard step at a time, worked us out of poorness and things changed for the better, we then moved to Holland when I was 15. During my adolescence I had a myriad careers planned, from writer to doctor. Eventually I applied to Durham university to read Natural Sciences, since it was the broadest course I could do. But I also applied to Cambridge knowing I would not get in. Knowing this, I went to the interview wearing jeans, a leather jacket and sports shoes. I neither had a suit nor knew I should have had one, until I saw my elegant competitors. Surprisingly I got in, and doubted between doing cell biology and chemistry and psychology. Eventually, I stayed on for a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, might as well try and find out why my brain works the way it does. I didn’t. So I found work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre in Nijmegen. But I learned little about the brain, of which we truly know almost nothing. But I did learn that I did not want to be in academia, but rather to apply my knowledge. How, I don’t yet know…

Right now I’m where you are, at a huge crossroads. I might look stable, maybe even confident, but that is not how I feel. I feel vulnerable and that’s ok. I do not know my direction, but what I have learned gives me a compass. You have a compass too, and it should be your own.

Your compass has grown during these years of education. Hopefully you will have learned a great many things about languages, sciences and humanities. But much more importantly, hopefully you have learned to think better, to be critical of the world. To not take anything on face value, but to test if it is true. Philosophy, or “Theory of Knowledge” as they call it here is far more useful in the “real world” than any bit of knowledge. Because to learn facts is far easier than learning how to learn.

Today this is more important than ever, when everyone around you wants to convince you of something or get you to buy something. Every single thing a person says or writes sits on top of a fragile house of cards of assumptions and prejudices. My first advice to you, be *sceptics*. Be as critical of mainstream media as you are of conspiracy theories. Be as critical of the left as of the right. Be as critical of yourself as of others. Remember that we cannot touch the truth, and yet, we should try and get closer to it.

And getting closer to truth, you will start to reach to your true calling. This will be hard, it will be awfully painful and you will need to change to get there. Success is not an end, it’s a “path with a heart”, as Carlos Castneda once said. Don’t be afraid of the pain. It will reach you whether you like it or not. Joy, on the other hand, I have only experienced in the moments that I felt fearless.

Many of you will have seen or even participated in our Argentine Tango workshops some months ago. So you will know that my joy is dance. I found my joy when I was 23 years old at the behest of my best friend, and I had no idea of what it was like. The dance, the music, the embrace, the improvisation. I knew nothing of that, imagining exaggerated music and a rose in the mouth. Instead of cliches, what I found is a sort of “meditation”, a space without words or thoughts that is mine and mine alone that is simply present and feeling and love. I could have given in to the fear of looking ridiculous, feeling uncomfortable, I was so very shy I could barely ask a girl to dance. If fear had won, I would have never known this joy. A great composer, Anibal Troilo, once said “Tango awaits you”. Sometime you will find your joy, if it has not already found you. This is my second advice to you, find the *courage* to try new things, assume nothing, be brave enough to change your life for it.

And whatever you do, help those around you find their joys, whatever these are. Each one of you is different. You are privileged in experiencing so many people who are different from you, who hail from other countries, and have other beliefs or who feel differently. I told you to be sceptics, but this does not mean you should not be tolerant. I told you to not fear pain, but do not help create it. Don’t rush to judge a person by their skin, their wallet, their gender or their sexuality. I know what I speak of, one friend was called a liar and denied justice for being a woman, another friend in mind a man but in soul a woman hid her true nature, yet another’s friend skin made people say he was meant to pave roads rather than build dreams. My third advice then: *accept* and love them as they are, and accept and love yourself, even as you change.

Be tolerant, courageous sceptics, and you will change the world if you so wish. But remember, you can only do so when you embrace change yourselves. There is no other way to change the world than to change the world is to change ourselves. There is no shortcut…

Let me finish with a story from a Soviet film. The plot is simple, a descendent of Lancelot enters a town terrorised by a great three-headed dragon. As is usual for knights, he sets to rid the town of the dragon and save the girl. But the townspeople, instead of helping Lancelot, sabotage him. They give him a copper tray for a shield and a butter knife. They try to kill him with a poisoned knife. Against all odds, Lancelot obtains a sword, a balloon and a hat of invisibility from a handful of dissidents and slays the dragon. When he returns, the townsfolk excuse themselves before him. He tells them to kill the Dragon within themselves, to stand up for themselves. Instead they kneel before him. Frustrated, Lancelot walks into the snow, only to find the dragon alive and kicking, playing amongst the children. “Now the real fight begins” he says.

Kill your dragons.

Binary is for robots

I see a worrying trend online, of people who appear to see a binary world, where there are "goodies" fighting against "baddies". Naturally, it follows that if they classify one side as a "baddie", then the other side must be a "goodie". Let me take an example that is close to heart, given my roots, that of recent events in Ukraine.

Today this is most obvious when you see cultured people declare things like:

• "The United States is an imperialist warmonger [therefore] Russia is just defending its interests"
• "Western media is biased [therefore] I trust the Russian news more"

Both leading to...

• "The US and Western media say that the MH17 was downed by pro-Russian separatists [therefore] it must have been downed by the fascist NATO-led Ukrainian junta".

This does not compute.

I'm by no means a "supporter" of the foreign policy of the United States. But surely when two imperialist countries fight a cold war, it makes no sense that one of them must be "good and trustworthy" simply because the other is "bad and untrustworthy".

To put it in scientific terms, the two hypotheses (of "goodness") are not mutually exclusive. This logical fallacy comes from a false dilemma, a forced choice between two poles.

Similarly, when you see bias in mainstream media (yes, I'm looking at you, Fox News, Russia Today, etc.), why should you rush to poorly documented websites that are:

1. rife with conspiracy theories
2. have no credible sources
3. describe events in terms of "fascists",  "nazis", "juntas", etc.

Instead, perhaps try to find sources that are:

1. independent international agencies
2. bloggers who are on the ground at the events
3. in different languages if at all possible

And importantly, start asking yourself questions, some of these, for those who support Russia against the "annexation by NATO and the EU" are:

• Why is Russia's annexation of Crimea acceptable?
• How exactly were Russian people oppressed or hurt because of their language in Donetsk and Lugansk, or elsewhere?
• Why are the separatist leaders Girkin and Borodai Russian nationals, rather than Ukrainian, as well as many of their soldiers?
• Where do all the tanks, heavy artillery and rocket launchers that these men use come from?
• Why the noble Russian mainstream media post lies about crucified children, conspiracy planes filled with corpses (i.e. MH17) and spanish flight operators?

And a final note, this post does not mean that I approve of every decision made by either the EU, USA or Ukrainian governments, nor that I trust every Western media outlet. Nor does it mean I hate Russians (amongst whom I still have many friends), or any other nation.

All it means is that I oppose lies and imperialism in all its guises. It means that I believe Ukraine should decide its own fate, without the interference of any foreign power. It means I seek truth and peace.