Using Whatsapp on your PC

I have never been a huge fan of cell phones. I am one of those people who think that a phone is just a phone, you use it to speak to others and keep in touch, but not to carry Youtube with you all around.

However, my buddies have started to go into silent mode from me and the reason is that they only use Whatsapp now, so no matter where they are they agree to meet or to do anything on short notice. This leaves me in a very miserable position.

What I did is the following:

1. I instaled the Android SDK that comes with an emulator.
2. In the AVG Manager, in the image I created to emulate a Smartphone, I added the property hw.keyboard with the value yes so I could use my PC keyboard to write into the virtual phone. You can also edit your confil.ini that is located under your user directory ~\.android\avd\device.avd\, and add hw.keyboard=yes .
3. I downloaded Whatsapp from the virtual device.
4. I installed the app (believe it or not it was the most difficult part for me, finding out how to reach the downloaded files, I downloaded it three times).
5. During the first execution, it asked me for my real phone number and they sent a regular SMS to my (physical) phone.
6. I then added my friends' phones to my contact in Android and it automatically marked them as using Whatsapp.
7. Then one of them added me to the groups they were using to meet.

Plot classification regions in an SVM

I've been really busy. I can't really claim to be an SVM expert since my postgraduate work up to now did not deal very much with machine learning, though since late I've been working with SVM's and kernels.

In fact I have a very advanced technique that really boost the SVM performance, but that will be left until the paper is published.

One of the test I ran dealt with a modified XOR data problem. The problem consist of four groups drawn from bivariate normal distributions. They are assign two classes such that the groups of the same class are always separated from each other by some group of another class.

y=mvrnorm(50,c(3,5),Sigma=diag(c(0.5,1.5)))
y=rbind(y,mvrnorm(50,c(15,13),Sigma=diag(c(1.5,0.5))))
y=rbind(y,mvrnorm(50,c(7,5),Sigma=diag(c(0.5,1.5))))
y=rbind(y,mvrnorm(50,c(15,17),Sigma=diag(c(1.5,0.5))))
labels=c(rep(1,100),rep(-1,100))

I put the figure here so that the problem is clear, the explanation of how to get it follows.

K.svm=svm(Phi, labels, type="C", kernel="linear",probability=T)
X=as.matrix(expand.grid(list(x = seq(0, 20, length.out=100), y = seq(0, 20, length.out=100))))
# compute the kernel on X here
im=predict(K.svm, PhiX,scale=F)
im=matrix(as.numeric(im),nrow=100,byrow=F)
image(seq(0, 20, length.out=100),seq(0, 20, length.out=100),im,xlab="",ylab="",col=c("#FFFCCCFF","#FFF000FF"))#heat.colors(2))
points(y)

We see that we first train the SVM with the kernel features as explained in the previous post.
Then we create a grid spanning all the points of the region we are interested in painting and evaluate the trained SVM it there. Then we recompose the grid of classified points into a 2D plane and plot it along with the original points.

Fun with Mensa puzzles

If you like to do puzzles regularly or occasionally, or simply feel curious about your IQ, Mensa Denmark has left a good Flash applet for you to do it
http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swf

Mensa is an international organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test and, according to its Wikipedia entry, the oldest IQ-related organization.

They also publish puzzle collections at a cheap price. Have a look at this listing from Amazon UK.

It is very likely that you will have a branch close to you. For you to join Mensa, you will need to score properly in a test for which a small fee is required. Google Mensa <your country> or go to its main address.