Puttypeg Home Page

This is the personal website of Dominic Widdows. It contains a range of music, poetry, science, historical and political ramblings, links to other information that I've found useful, and probably in the fullness of time, much more. Some of the material (papers in particular) was available for a long time on webpages at Stanford's CSLI, MAYA Design, and Google, and also on a weblog with very sporadic contributions over the years.

Professionally speaking I'm a mathematician / linguist / computer science sort of person, and so I work as a software engineer for the Microsoft Bing Local Search team. (It all makes sense, really.) Once upon a time, I thought that "Puttypeg" was a sweet name for an approach to life and learning that tried to grow as flexibly as possible. It's said that "you can't put a square peg in a round hole", and nowadays the challenges in the world are changing so fast, we will need some very adaptible people to fit into whatever gaps need attention. So, don't try and be a square peg or a round peg the whole time, try to learn to be a putty peg and look for ways to make yourself and your skills useful wherever you're needed most. Generally, I still like the idea.

Needless to say, none of the material you'll read on this website represents the official standpoint of Microsoft, Google, MAYA Design, Stanford, Oxford, Khafif, the BBC, the Church of England, Bourbaki, or anyone else with a shred of organizational clout.

Science

The work of the Quantum Informatics community made the front cover of New Scientist! Woohoo and thanks to all my wonderful collaborators in this field. Please check out the new Quantum Interaction website (and tell me to update it more diligently!).

Lots of contributions can be found in this reasonably complete list of papers. Not all as readable as I'd have liked!

Here's a new topic: Contextual Arithmetics. I'm becoming somewhat obsessed by this topic, though in spite of all the pratical, historical and even theoretical arguments in its favour, I suspect the whole thing will either be ignored for several decades or seen as utterly crackpot.

Often I prefer writing about science when I don't need to worry about reviewers and official publication at all. One early example was this animated introduction to the Theory of Relativity, one of the many things I'd love to complete one day. My most important scientific work to date is Geometry and Meaning. For once, I had the chance to please everyone, including myself — many general readers have written to me or reviewed the book saing they enjoyed it thoroughly, while several professionals reviewers praised the book in important journals.

Public Software

Sky Map for Android. The Android planetarium app is now open source project! You can still find out about the product on the Google Sky Map site. It's a free mobile application for the Android platform that uses your phone's sensors to display a map of the stars the phone is pointing at (even if your roof, clouds, or the earth is in the way!).

Semantic Vectors, a package for creating semantic models: learning the meanings of words and documents from reading lots of free text. created in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh. Now mature and prospering, with contributions from several individuals and institutions.

Infomap NLP package, a forerunner of Semantic Vectors created in conjunction with Stanford University.

Essays

A collection of a few essays on different topics, including healthcare, politics, and religion.

Music

You'll find a couple of songs and some useful guitar chord sheets.

Some musical fun I'm having at the moment is playing the trumpet with Khafif, a terrific Middle Eastern and Balkan music and dance group.

Another collaborator in Pittburgh is Brent Malin, who I've been playing a variety of folk and country with for a couple of years, including a guitar and mandolin duo at Club Cafe.

Arts and Crafts

Software development and academic research are enjoyable in their way, but there is nothing I find more satisfying than working with my hands. We're currently most of the way through restoring the ground floor of our Tudor style house in Squirrel Hill, and have made furniture, curtains, laid wood floor, panelled and finished the rooms. I always mean to take pictures of these projects before and during and after, and mean to post them online. But give me a circular saw to play with and I won't touch a computer all day.

One project I did keep a good record of was when Maryl and I made our wedding rings.

Poetry

Here are a couple of poems.

We've also recently started a Pittsburgh poetry group at work. It evolved accidentally into a collaborative process: the players contribute a topic idea each, and then we go off for a few days and write a poem, somehow including at least three or four of the topics. The challenge of combining other people's ideas into a new poem has brought out some great variety and creativity.

Weblog

I keep an occasional weblog for a couple of years called Home Brewed Bulletins, which you can read at puttypeg.blogspot.com.

Kit's Funeral, December 2007

My father Kit is still ever-present for many of us, and crops up unexectedly at times for many more. Information about the Funeral and Thanksgiving Service for the Life of Kit Widdows can be found at http://www.puttypeg.net/kit.

Contact

You can contact me with any feedback or suggestions by writing to dwiddows at gmail dot com.
(Please supply the usual symbols instead of the 'at' and 'dot' - the cryptic notation is just a token gesture to avoid getting the address harvested by spam engines.)