A new week has dawned, and our BT Business Broadband connection has had a lot of use today.  Fortunately it stood up to the strain much better than it did last Monday. Following that fiasco BT Wholesale still haven’t got back to us with an explanation of what went wrong, after almost a week of asking.

On a (wholly unrelated?) topic, the Stanford University online courses in both Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning started today. I’ve signed up for both of them, whilst Kasia is doing just the AI one. In something of a departure from the usual syllabus, we’ve also simultaneously signed up to become involved in an “Artistic Intelligence” project!

Take a quick look at the Stanford AI Class “Intro to AI” video 1.4:

As you can see “financial trading agents” are the first example that Stanford offer of a “real world” use of artificial intelligence. According to Sebastian Thun, one of the joint course leaders:

There’s a huge number of applications of artificial intelligence in finance, very often in the shape of making trading decisions, in which case the agent is called a “trading agent”.

As luck would have it I’ve been prattling on about such things for a while now over at the Trading Gurus.  If you take a look at the video in that link you will note that at around 2:30 Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol states that:

Managing the hot air in a data centre is a huge problem. When a Computer Room Air Conditioning Unit fails everything gets very hot, very quickly. You have about 3 minutes before the motherboards physically melt.

One can’t help but wonder at this juncture if British Telecom might not be able to benefit from using similar technology to prevent their broadband network from suffering meltdown every once in a while?