Zoomi Technologists Explain the Power of Networks in New Book
Malvern, PA, January 3, 2017 (Newswire.com) - Zoomi, a performance optimization data analytics company, today announced the publication of a new book written by company co-founders, Dr. Christopher Brinton, and Dr. Mung Chiang. The Power of Networks is based on teaching Brinton and Chiang conducted at Princeton University, research on which ultimately evolved into the predictive and prescriptive analytics successfully employed by Zoomi today.
The Power of Networks introduces in laymen’s terms the technology that drives the networks we use and depend on every day. One of the major themes presented is the concept of a social learning network. While teaching a massive online networking course to thousands of students, the researchers observed a high dropout rate and realized that in a learning setting, one size does not fit all. It is important to encourage people to connect with others who are different and have different skill sets, unlike a social friendship network like Facebook, where people tend to cluster around who they know.
Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang offer an open and accessible pathway through the complexity of network design and deployment, and offer a readily understood, yet commendably deep, analysis of the technology and its operation.
John Gilbey, Times Higher Education
Along the way, the authors also talk with and share the special insights of renowned networking experts: Google’s Eric Schmidt, former Verizon Wireless CEO Dennis Strigl, and fathers of the Internet Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
In order to accommodate the large and diverse demographic of learners, many of whom did not have the math skills required to succeed in earlier versions of the networking course, Brinton and Chiang began to experiment with individualization. This resulted in the first prototype of the personalized learning system now successfully deployed as the artificial intelligence-based Zoomi engine that assesses, in real-time, how learners interact with information.
Anyone working with big data, including learning data, will find insightful explanations in The Power of Networks. Overall, the ideas presented in the book are organized around six fundamental principles of networking: accessing and sharing resources, ranking and ordering, the wisdom of crowds, the folly of crowds, and traffic routing and management. The book covers in depth a broad range of topics from how cellular phones work to cloud computing to the science behind Netflix movie recommendations, the latter of which is not unlike how Zoomi handles some of its own predictive analytics.
"Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang offer an open and accessible pathway through the complexity of network design and deployment, and offer a readily understood, yet commendably deep, analysis of the technology and its operation,” said John Gilbey of Times Higher Education. “In a world in which it is increasingly difficult to live without a profoundly intimate relationship with digital networks--whether you like it or not--the material presented in this text could usefully form a universal part of public education. . . . To describe this book as a course in digital citizenship would not be to overstate its importance.”
The Power of Networks is now available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Power-Networks-Principles-Connect-Lives/dp/0691170711) and in bookstores nationwide.
About the Authors
Christopher G. Brinton is the Head of Advanced Research at Zoomi Inc., where he works on big-data analytics, social learning networks, and personalized learning. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University. Dr. Mung Chiang is the Chief Technology Officer of Zoomi and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton, where he also serves as chairman of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council and director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. In 2013, he received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Since 2012, Brinton and Chiang have introduced networks to hundreds of thousands of people around the world through massive open online courses.
About Zoomi
Zoomi, a performance optimization data analytics company, brings together the disciplines of predictive and prescriptive analytics, machine learning and data mining to glean insights and intelligence about a learner’s behavior, cognitive and engagement preferences to synchronize learning with business outcomes. Zoomi’s first-to-market technology delivers measurable ROI for corporate training and education programs. The company was founded in January 2015 by a global team of industry-leading engineers, developers and designers. Zoomi’s headquarters are in Malvern, PA. For more information or to request a demo, visit www.zoomiinc.com.
Source: Zoomi