Embedded Sense

The term “pattern recognition” always comes up when someone is discussing image mining, handwriting recognition and the related spaces. Basically, whenever there is an explicit requirement for discovering meaningful information after casting out the noise.

Recently ran into this word biomimesis, study of biological systems for engineering solutions for our “real world” problems. This seems to be an interesting discipline of searching for problems which are already solved in nature and then adapting it for our purpose! Prima facie this might seem trivial but imagine a case where a Morpho butterfly wings has inspired creation of MIRASOL display technology for consumer electronics. Now imagine how arduous it could be to explain the challenges involved in creating low power electronic displays to a biologist!

How can problem solving methods be abstracted enough to be applied across a myriad of domains? The big challenge here may not be bringing together a bunch of experts from widely different domains but it might be about successfully harnessing their understanding and also in finding ways to make them all talk in the same “language”.

Here is another article on a similar topic. Mentions how the guys at Wall Street and also software giants like IBM hire astrophysicists and theoretical mathematicians. When your area of expertise mandates abstract thinking, solving software technology problems and identifying patterns across financial data might be a walk in the park.