By Dr. Sam L. Savage
My Latest Album Will Drop at Risk Awareness Week
October 8, 2024
• Stochastic Data: Gateway to AI
• CHANCES* Consortium for Natural Hazards
• Taking the Chances out of AI
*Conveying Hazards And Catastrophes through Extracted Simulations
Like David Foster Wallace’s fish who had no clue what water was in spite of being immersed in it, many of us have a similar lack of awareness of being immersed in AI. And AI, in turn, is immersed in stochastic data, that is, uncertain data. But isn’t all data uncertain? Exactly. That’s my point. The discipline of probability management allows us to store this data and more importantly do math with it.
• AI is trained on Stochastic Data
• AI can output Stochastic Data if you have a place to store it and a way to use it.
• The Open SIPmath™ Standard offers both and is the only such standard of which I am aware.
My three videos stress that probability management is really about a new category of data, not new tools. I believe that data categories may be defined in terms of the operations which may be performed on it and the queries which may be made of it.
For example, Numeric Data may be operated on by the Arithmetic (accent on the third syllable when used in this context) operators +, -, * and /. The queries are >, < or = relative to some other piece of numeric data. Stochastic Data that obeys the principles of probability management may also be operated on with +, -, * and /, but instead of simple inequalities, it supports statistical queries such as the chance of a data element being greater or less than some target, or a percentile or statistical average.
As another example, Audio Data may be operated on with a mixer, to combine various tracks into a finished piece of music. The only query is Listen or not.
Speaking of Audio Data, my last album, which dropped in 1999, was called Exponential: Music from the Analog Age. For those who want to learn more, or execute the Listen query, read on.
Exponential Liner Notes
In the early 1970's after I had abandoned traditional Management Science, but before I had discovered spreadsheets, I tried unsuccessfully to be a folksinger in Chicago.
There were two things that dissuaded me from a career in music. First, there were a lot of people who were a lot better than I was, and second, they weren’t making it either. During this period, I did some recording on a Sony 4 track reel-to-reel tape deck with my stepbrother John Pearce (who is still an active musician).
I found the decades old tapes in my garage in 1999 and discovered to my amazement that there were still magnetic signals on them. All the recordings were between 15 and 20 years old at that time. Some pieces, like the patient who has been frozen in liquid nitrogen until a cure is found for his disease, awoke to a world in which they could be substantially improved. The tempo of the title track, Exponential, for example, was sped up digitally without changing the pitch. Click here to listen to the full album.
Sam Savage (left) and John Pearce in the early 1980s in Sun Valley, Idaho
Copyright © 2024 Sam L. Savage