(Try To) Predict The World Cup With Monte Carlo Simulation

Who will win this world cup? Brazil without Neymar? Lionel Messi? Or are we going to see the Nederland making a big surprise?

If you like coding, statistics and problems that are not trivial… You found the right place. In this post, I will try to show an example to a way for solving this type of questions. For the readers that don’t remember what is Monte Carlo simulation (don’t be shy) – You might want to check a previous post that I wrote last summer and give you an intro to the world of Monte Carlo on Apps script and Google compute engine.

Monte Carlo experiments (simulations) are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. In most cases, we will run our simulations many times over in order to obtain the distribution of an unknown probabilistic entity.  This tool is often used in physical and mathematical problems and are most useful when it is difficult or impossible to obtain a closed-form expression, or infeasible to apply a deterministic algorithm.
In the real world, we see it being mainly used in three distinct problem classes:
* Optimization.
* Numerical integration.
* Generation of draws from a probability distribution.

 

OK, there is no time. The game starts in two days.

The Idea

Monte Carlo simulations tend to follow a particular pattern. Here is how we will use this tool:

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What’s New In Google Developers World

Here are my slides from a talk I gave last week on what’s new and available for you as a developer in Google’s world. This talk gives a high level overview on the main APIs. If you wish to dive deeper on some of them, you will find many links in the slides.

Google Cloud Storage Migration, Backup, and Archive

Today we covered Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Storage is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data objects on Google’s infrastructure. Few important features: Multiple layers of redundancy. All data replicated to multiple data centers. Objects can be terabytes in size, with resumable uploads and downloads, and range read support. If you wish to start with Google cloud storage, a good starting point will be to click on the image to the left. In my session, I’ve covered:

• Migrating Data to Cloud Storage
• Object Composition
• Durable Reduced Availability Storage

Google Cloud Platform Update

Yesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.

The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014!

Big Query And Google Spreadsheet Integration

There are many options to extend the powerful spreadsheets that Google offers. One of the cool, new ways to leverage its power is by using a spreadsheet as your ‘front-end’ to a big data processing power (=Big Query). In our world, there is a need to get results as fast as possible and since our data sources grow fast. It’s nice to have a tool that let us ‘see’ (and share) results quickly and easily.

What is BigQuery?

Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets. When we saying massive we are talking here on billions of rows (or more). It is a scalable and easy to use tool that gives developers and businesses an easy way into powerful data analytics on demand.

As for Google Docs and their powerful sharing capabilities – I guess we don’t need to elaborate here. So, let’s see what are the steps that will let us get data from BigQuery into our Google spreadsheet.

Integrate BigQuery To Google Spreadsheet

How to Install Spark on Google Compute Engine

What is Google Compute Engine?

Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service that lets you run your large-scale computing workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure. Btw, if you wish to have a new machine under your arms in less than 5 minutes – It can be done in 5 easy steps.

What is Spark?

Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing system that aims to make data analytics fast — both fast to run and fast to write. To run programs faster, Spark offers a general execution model that can optimize arbitrary operator graphs, and supports in-memory computing, which lets it query data faster than disk-based engines like Hadoop.

So in order to enjoy from both worlds, we can  leverage the great options of large-scale cloud that Compute engine offer us and install Spark on it. Here are the few steps you will need to follow in order to do it.

Installation steps

WebRTC Updates

In this week show on Google Developers live Israel we hosted Sam Dutton in order to hear what’s new in the land of WebRTC. What? Well, Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) is a collection of standards, protocols, and JavaScript APIs that enables peer-to-peer audio, video, and data sharing between browsers. We covered (with demos) the three primary APIs:

• MediaStream: acquisition of audio and video streams
• RTCPeerConnection: communication of audio and video data
• RTCDataChannel: communication of arbitrary application data

It was a fun 20min talk with some very impressive demos. Here are few demos that show the power of getUserMedia API:

HTML5 APIs To Use Today On Google Developers Live Israel

Last week, I meet with few startups to talk about their web apps. After few basic questions like: how do I save data on the client without cookies? or something like: “Can I get a video input from the browser?” I thought it might be a good idea to touch on some of the APIs that are out there today in most browsers and developers can use. The best part is that in most cases, you can start using these APIs with very little code. In this demo page  you can hack around some basic HTML5 features and see the code snippets that will let you do some cool things like: save information locally (local storage for the rescue here), Geo location, device orientration, Getting Video/Audio (with WebRTC), Visibility API etc’.

The slides from my #DevConTLV Talk