VMworld 2018 Live Blog: Day 5

Welcome to the VMworld 2018 US Thursday General Session live blog!

Thursday General Session

Note: This was originally published as a live blog. In the course of migrating to a new hosting platform, the live blog entries have been converted to a list. Newer entries at the top, older entries at the bottom.

That wraps up the general sessions for this VMworld 2018 US.
Anil suggests that once we understand how we see the world, we can improve our understanding of each other and our place in natural and the world. That we are not apart from and are a part of the world around us.
The brain perceives self, the world, time, and reality itself as a set of controlled hallucinations. As the brain has such influence over these perceptions, everyone has their own individual reality.
In summary: How things seem is not how they are.
We perceive reality as things having objective persistence in the world. Lucid dreaming or de-realization are examples where people have an alternative perception of reality.
People experience time at many different time scales despite not have time sensors, or clocks, within the brain. The brain has to infer time.
Anil’s showing video of another study where participants were shown 3D renderings of their arm. If the rendered arm pulsed red gently in time with the participants heartbeat, it increased the perception that the virtual arm was part of their own physical body.
Interoception is the perception and control of the interior of the body.
Out of body experiences mean you brain has reached an unusual conclusion about the location of your physical body.
The study using these objects, showed participants one of the paint brushes touching the fake hand, while the participants actual hand is hidden and also being touched with a paint brush. After enough time, the body accepts the fake hand as part of itself.
Anil has a fake hand and two paint brushes on stage, which he says are all that are needed to study neuroscience.
Being associated with a body, Anil contends, is an important part of being a person. Whether we like it or not.
Hallucination could be explained as an uncontrolled perception, where our predictive processes are impaired. Based on this you could argue that what we perceive all the time is a controlled hallucination. This includes the sense of the self.
We don’t just passively perceive our worlds, but actively generate them via the predictive processes in our brains.
Anil plays an audio clip that sounds odd and out of sorts, like noisy whistling. Then he plays another clip of someone speaking. Playing the first audio clip again, the brain, given additional input, lets you hear words in the sounds.
A second optical illusion is shown where two squares among many look to be two different colours, but are in fact that same colour. The brain makes you think this as it uses queues from the rest of the image, such as an object appearing to cast a shadow.
Anil shows an optical illusion that causes your eyes to see a green disc amongst a field of pink ones. The green disc does not exist. Your brain, a predictive engine, conjured up the visual representation of the disc in response to the rest of the moving image.
Starting with vision, the eyes being the windows to the world, humans only perceive a thin slice of the visible spectrum.
Regarding how things seem, originally it seemed as though the galaxy orbited around the Earth. We now know differently.
Anil is taking about the experience of being you, and how you detect properties of the outside world which tell you that it’s there. That’s how things seem.
The final speaker today is Anil Seth, a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and co-author of 30-Second Brain.
Laurie hopes everyone will take on the challenge to incorporate these simple actions into their lives to improve their happiness.
This inspired Laurie to take the class global.
The New York Times covered the class as the "largest class at Yale".
The gratitude study found that the "bump" in happiness lasted for a month, slowly tapering over time.
Would the act of taking time to thank someone for something your grateful for help? A study tested this, and found that reaching out that thanking someone, especially in person, have a profound effect on both the recipient and the sender.
For example, jot down five things you’re grateful for daily, and it will enhance your happiness over the week.
Top Insight #4: Happy people experience gratefulness more.
Savor present experiences. This is something that can come with practice.
We need to find time to be in the present moment. Take time to breath and enjoy now.
People whose minds wander (which we do an estimated 46.9% of the time on average) have lower levels of happiness. Even pleasant mind wandering, like thinking about an upcoming vacation, can have a negative impact.
Top Insight #3: Happy people tend to spend time in the present moment.
People predicted that solitude would make people feel good, control would be moderate, and connection would have a negative impact. In fact, they found the opposite to be true. This applied to folks whether introverted or extroverted as well.
Can you get a social benefit from those that aren’t friends and family? A study was done on the Chicago subway, where participants were asked to interact with strangers on the trains under 3 conditions: connection, solitude and control.
A distinguishing item about general happy people is that they make time for others.
Top Insight #2: Make time to make connections.
You can become happier, but have to overcome what your mind and intuition are "telling" you.
Your mind lies about you motivation in seeking out what allegedly will make you happier. For example, pursuing a increased salary. While it may make people happier at a certain level, for example if it lifts someone out of poverty, it generally doesn’t increase peoples’ happiness. The impact of salary on your happiness levels off at about USD$75k.
Top Insight #1: Your mind lies to you about what will make you happy.
One out of every four students at Yale ended up taking the psychology of happiness class.
She thought of the inclusion of the science of practice about happiness as being similar to encouraging exercise. Knowing how people feel about exercise, she knew she had to be a little "sneaky".
Laurie’s happiness course was called "Psychology and the Good Life". It was about the psychology of happiness and included practices on how to accomplish this.
Positive psychology has been written about in major periodicals such as Time Magazine. It promotes behaviour change over time to improve happiness.
She was disappointed in what she was seeing on college campuses. Contrary to the stereotypical photos you see of smiling college students, a significant proportion of the student population across the country are stressed, unhappy, and depressed.
Laurie taught a class on happiness at Yale, and she’s going to tell us why.
Next up is Laurie Santos, who is a Professor of Psychology at Yale University and Primary Researcher at CapLab.
Raffaello’s parting thought is that technology is an amazing power that we have, and we should use it wisely.
Kiva worked on this problem, and engineered the machines to learn how to recover from failure as well as possible, so that it can safely land away from danger. Such a failure occurred with a Kiva drone on broadway, and the drone safely landed out of the way. From the audience perspective, this looked like a part of the show, and no one was injured.
With multi-rotor systems, if one blade fails, the drone will crash. Video demonstrating other people’s large drones failing in this manner is shown.
The flying machines weight less than 15 grams, and are therefore more inherently safe than large units. What could you do with them? Let them loose in an environment to collect measurements, check for security issues, etc.
These drone displays have "worked with" Cirque du Soleil, Metallica, and more. The client has control over how the drones perform. They’re now "on tour" with Drake.
Raffaello’s next startup company is responsible for some of those light-up, choreographed drone displays seen at various events.
A number of videos showing the autonomous flying robots manipulating objects, balancing things, and working in tandem are being shown. Quite impressive considering there isn’t a human with their hand on the wheel, so to speak.
Raffaello has also been working with autonomous flying machinery since 2008.
The acquisition of Kiva brought fully autonomous robots that could learn and adapt. These robots were deployed in Amazon’s warehouses to help move inventory.
Kiva Systems was formed in 2003, not long after the "big crash". They were bought by Amazon in 2012. At the time people weren’t sure about the acquisition, but in hindsight it was an opportune time to do that.
A second video of the robot games is being shown, from several years later, demonstrating that the robots had evolved significantly. No longer as random and chaotic, they now pass the ball and have a measure of ball control.
The robot games, at least the one being shown, had fully autonomous robots playing a version of soccer.
Raffaello was a professor at Cornell and worked with his students to go to the robot games in Japan.
Presenting, by the way, is Raffaello D’Andrea, founder of Verity Studios and co-founder of Kiva Systems.
"This is an interesting time for AI."
We’re being shown a cube device that has all sorts of sensors, which enable it to try to self-balance. Takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 3-4 minutes to figure out how to adapt.
Thursday’s General Session is kicking off, which is typically about interesting and innovative things (but not necessarily specifically VMware-related).