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BUILDING ZET UNIVERSE

Zet Universe and Next Steps

9/15/2018

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Several years ago I've got a privilege to give a TEDx talk, on Functional Illiteracy, in Moscow, Russia:
This talk was one of my opportunities to re-think what's the next step for Zet Universe, and to get me back to the roots.

Back To The Roots

My original passion for the industry was that in it, you can create what everyone else would have call magic. Isn't it magical that with a simple phone in late XIX century you could reach out to Europe from US? Yeah. Same goes for video calling today, when workers from Central Asia make calls via Viber from Moscow to their relatives left there, in their homelands.

Another thing that excited me about IT industry was the idea of augmenting us with technology. Like Archimedes once said: ​
Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes
The Archimedes's lever in the modern world is technology, and if you are in the industry, you have a chance to move the world as you please.

So, yeah, what I essentially wanted was to move the world. Why?

Since early days of my life, I've seen my grand pa building things. I've seen Russia being slowly disassembled to the pieces, and getting them sold, and then I've seen those who remade our country, and made parts of it (however small they could be) better.

It's so easy to destroy, and so hard to build. 

And those who build, those who leave clean emptiness with a meaning, are equal to Antique gods, in my imagination.

With that, and with technology, I want to see us, humans, to become gods. 

Gods capable of building entire worlds, capable of building anything we want.

Experiments: Building Better Worlds within Games

In childhood, I played Civ 2 and SimCity. Later - C&C, Transport Tycoon. Recently I've played Anno 2270, Surviving Mars, Aven Colony, Frostpunk, Fallout 4 (settlements mode), and other things. 

All of these games are sophisticated simulators of our world - or, at least, of some of the aspects of it, and of different scales.

In Fallout 4 you build settlements on a Boston Greater Area, in Frostpunk you work with a small city and a large territory around it. In C&C games you build a base on a large map. In SimCity you deal with entire city. In Transport Tycoon you deal with a greater area, where you not only build transportation systems, but also deal with making cities, too. In Surviving Mars and in Aven Colony you deal with colonies on the planet's surface. In Anno 2270 (one of the most economical simulators I've ever seen) you work at the scale of entire planet and its satellite, Moon. Finally, in Civilization, you deal with the planet, but scale of your operations is thousands of years (if you are lucky).

In all of these games, you get a chance to become a god. 

With wisdom (or cheats) you can grow your own worlds, with the given tools. You can enjoy the prosperity of your cities, share photos of your miniature settlements, cities, transportation systems, and other things.

But what you can't do is making changes to the real world. 

All of these games provide you with an immersion, however sophisticated, but an immersion. 

When you are out, the world around you haven't changed. 

There are still problems around the world. 

So if you didn't fix your house's roof, you'd still loose warmth of your home. And if you didn't buy food, your family would starve. 

So, to become a god, a real god, playing games won't help. The worlds you'll create there will be virtual.

You need to build real technology-based tools that would augment you into a god to build worlds.

With these thoughts, I've turned my head to IT industry.

From Microsoft and Google to Zet Universe

Microsoft and its founder, Bill Gates, captured my attention with Bill's dream of having a WinFS - an object-relational storage. Microsoft also used the idea of empowering people's potential that I've fallen in love with:
Your Potential. Our Passion.
Unlike Google of mid 2000-s, Microsoft communicated it's belief that computing should be local (on your PC), and that you could do so much with your computer.

Wow, so a big company wants to give everyone tools to realize their potentials? I'm interested. 

It believes these tools should be with them, be local, be private? I'm hooked.

To me, this idea of using a PC as a technology lever to augment us, humans, looked like a perfect reason to join Microsoft.

After joining it, I've asked a few folks from Windows, Office, and MCS to help me in advocating the importance of building such lever on top of the Microsoft client and cloud platforms.

We called this idea a "Windows Semantic Platform", and we wrote a ThinkWeek paper for BillG and other senior execs to read it. Yeah, this paper outlined a vision for a system that would span across both client and cloud, but I believed that client had to be rich, and that cloud would be a pipeline to connect those clients together when needed. I believed that both sides would mirror each other.

Long story short, after spending almost 4 years at Microsoft, organizing a SIG on Context-aware Computing, doing a seminar with Gordon Bell (who authored the book on Total Recall, or your digital memory) giving a closing talk, I've left the company, and spent about a year at Google.

Google seemed to be a place where people really wanted to build this digital memory of the world, and of every single person. But what I've found was that despite of this dream, Google solely wanted to make their system work only online, without any place left for client computing.

With my understanding of importance of keeping personal data personal, I couldn't stay. 

Also there, at Google, I've understood that I shall build this lever with my own hands, and thus the desire of starting Zet Universe was born.

Zet Universe

To build things, you need to understand a set of simple ideas called project management. Without it, without a plan in your head, you most probably won't build anything really big.

And I wanted to create tools to aid my users and me in building big things.

So, a project management aspect was essential. 

Second aspect was learning. You can go just that far with your passion. When provided with the necessary knowledge, you can do practically everything (as "Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne taught us).

Zet Universe, as I look at it today, was an opportunity to build a tool that would augment a human in learning and managing projects.


In my vision of the future, every human would have a wearable computer, always there, that would: 

* record everything its user sees and hears, and provide a digital memory to its user,
* be a place to organize user's thoughts and ideas in a structured form of the knowledge graph,
* be a passive tool that would aid user in her everyday activities, 
* be a system that would do activities on user's behalf, 
* be proactive and help user when the need for help arises, 
* protect user from the unnecessary interruptions,
* be a system that would encourage user to grow in her area of choice.

All in all, I wanted to have a technical lever that would augment each human in the world, and give him or her a chance to achieve more.

And one of the most important things here, I strongly believed that such a tool should be private, should be always with its user, and not be hosted in the cloud.

I've shipped two versions of Zet Universe, going from a rough prototype (~4GB, hard to download, hard to install, hard to get up and running), to a small (20mb) installation, running easily on x86 machines.

Zet Universe became an amazing tool for organizing user's thoughts and ideas about different problem spaces.

In Zet Universe, you can now create endless project spaces, add entities from Wikipedia (using Dandelion API), add your files and folders, add web pages, and create your own entities using either built-in kinds, or after expanding it with your own ones.

With these entities, you can define connections between them (either manually or by asking Dandelion API to extract them automatically from the documents and web pages added to the project space), and capture all of the knowledge graph you've created with the graph entities within the system.

In essence, Zet Universe became a tool to build your own knowledge graph, with an ability to connect it to the bigger knowledge graph based on WikiData/Wikipedia.

Till this very day, Zet Universe is a local application that runs entirely on your PC, and with the necessary plugins, it can extract information locally (but in order to connect them with Wikipedia/WikiData, it'd require some sophisticated work), without any need to be connected to the Internet.

Afterall, your personal knowledge graph should remain private.

After spending 5.5 years on Zet Universe, however, I thought it was a good time to take a pause, and do some stuff in the industry. And so I did.

Yandex

A lot had happened since that TEDx talk, and especially in the last year. Still being driven by the ideas of building AI-driven tools (see DARPA CALO and PAL projects), I've been invited to join Yandex's Mail team. And so I did.

It was a fantastic time at Yandex.

I've been busily building a continuous semantic indexing pipeline for Yandex.Mail, and working on a ToDos and Reminders scenario for Yandex's voice assistant, Alice.

​​
While the pipeline became a backbone for making such scenarios as reminding you about your flights and changes in them, ToDos and Reminders scenario became one of the foundational ones for Yandex's Alice. This project involved ~20 teams (Alice is hosted in several Yandex's mobile and desktop apps, and ToDos and Reminders involve 1 frontend and two backends; not mentioning all of the other stuff), required a lot of cooperation across those teams, and aligning them in order to ship this scenario to the public.


During this work on ToDos and Reminders, I've realized how standardized voice assistants are these days. They share a lot with Zet Universe, in that they have a pipeline for working with user requests, they extract information (slots) from those requests, they do the requested operations (when possible). 

In many ways, digital assistants are a perfect component of the earlier vision of that "human augmentation system" we've described in the Windows Semantic Platform ThinkWeek paper, and what was shown in the following it Productivity Future Vision (which I've referenced a few times in this blog before).

What's Next?

As I look back at what was accomplished with Zet Universe and Yandex's Alice, it's clear that integrating Zet Universe and a voice assistant to work on the same machine is the next big step for me.

You can do a lot of stuff with tools like IFTTT and digital assistants.

My requirement for such assistant is to make sure it can work offline, on-a-chip, without any need to access Internet.

Surprisingly, there is a such assistant.
Despite of the fact that Alice, Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant all need Internet connection to function, a brave Snips.AI team from Paris, France, just made it!

It's called Snips.

Read more about their technology here. E.g., Snips' take on NLU, their deep dive into ASR on the embedded system (also look at their paper), and so on. This is all a fascinating stuff, and I'm super excited about the work this team is doing.

One little thing I find especially cool is their approach to data generation. At Yandex, we used internal tools based on language rules to generate training texts automatically, but configuration was done by the engineer.

Snips offers the same functionality as a paid service where you can pick the number of samples, the way they are produced, and then, suddenly, you've dramatically increased the quality of your intents! 

As of me, I've spent a work week trying to get their tech to work.

By the end of it, I made it.

Snips platform works perfectly on my DIY voice assistant hardware kit:
If you want to learn more about setting it all up, read my step-by-step instructions here.

As of the other developments... 

​Stay tuned!

P.S. I'm in no way affiliated with Snips.AI.
P.P.S. Snips team is hiring!
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ANNOUNCING CHANGES TO INSIDER PREVIEW PROGRAM

2/8/2017

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It was almost two years ago when we've started the Zet Universe Insider Preview program. We've shipped more than 20 builds in the first year, between July 2015 and May 2016. We've received a lot of amazing feedback, thanks to you, and we've been encouraged to keep working on the product, all thanks to you, our Insiders!

​Our goal for the milestone we've started working on last Fall is to bring a reliable, high-quality version of Zet Universe for you. As you already have noticed, we've stopped shipping new builds since mid-2016. This time, however, we will disable the associated web services that support Insider Preview builds of Zet Universe.

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ZET UNIVERSE DEMOS - 2009-2014

12/10/2016

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Zet Universe originally was envisioned by our founder, Daniel Kornev, during the development of the Productivity Future Vision 2019 video made by Office Labs Envisioning Lab between 2007 and 2009.

First prototype was created in several May nights in 2009. It took 2.5 years for our founder to make a decision to leave corporate world and establish Zet Universe, Inc., as the company, to productize those original ideas, and since that time we've shipped several versions of the product. As we are moving forward with the new iteration of the product, we find it invaluable to look back at its history.

Today we are excited to share several product demos, never shared before, created between 2009 and late 2013.

2009 | ORIGINAL PROTOTYPE

2012 | ALPHA VERSION

2013 | PRE-BETA VERSION

Special thanks to Alexander Popov for his narration in this video.
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FIGHTING FOR UI PERFORMANCE - 2012-2013

12/9/2016

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When we started this journey almost 5 years ago, it wasn't clear to us just how long it could be. Building a product like Zet Universe means fighting with lots of challenges, and one of them is UI performance.

While we are hard at work making new milestone of Zet Universe faster than ever, we would like to share our progress in increasing performance of navigating in the infinite zoomable canvas, as it is seen in these two videos, made by the end of the first and by the end of the second year of this journey.

2012, DECEMBER - ALPHA

2013, DECEMBER - PRE-BETA

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SPATIAL UX: SOFTWARE & HARDWARE DECADE LATER

11/2/2016

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Update (2/20/2022): This blog post was updated in February 2022 to refresh links to two original Productivity Future Vision videos that were removed from the web by Microsoft sometimes in 2020-2022, as well as to share a screenshot of a Spatial Desk in reality built by our Founder in early 2021.
Today you know Zet Universe not only as a product, but also as a long journey towards creation of a true spatial user environment, designed to make work with large amounts of information intuitive and simple.

Originally, Zet Universe was inspired by our founder's previous work at Microsoft (2007-2010), made in collaboration with the Office Labs and Office Labs Envisioning teams.

Between 2007 and 2009, those teams worked on many aspects of the future of Productivity, including but not limited to new device form factors (be that new phones, tablets, walls, or big desktops), new kinds of team software (precursors to Slack and Yammer, spatial environments, etc.), and so on.

Some of those ideas were released by Office Labs via the (now defunct) website officelabs.com, and experiments like "Canvas for OneNote" became truly popular among the Office power users. But, certainly, the biggest visible outcome of that work was the Productivity Future Vision video itself, shown below.

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SCALING UP EFFORT

2/15/2016

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From the beginning, Zet Universe was envisioned as a knowledge management and analytic platform, that could be used to solve different problems, from organizing personal information, and learning new things in the spare time, to researching different topics, analyzing competitors, tracking work projects, and more.

One of the biggest values Zet Universe possesses is its ability to work in an offline mode, and work locally. It's different compared to other famous analytic platforms, such as Palantir Gotham, or Quid, and others, as these platforms typically require you to have a constant network connection and (except Palantir Gotham) require you to have a high speed connection to their cloud computing services.

Zet Universe, in contrast, allows you to have your projects data with you, residing on your computer, as you are on the go, riding on a car to your client, or getting to a new destination by train or a plane. Zet Universe contains a powerful semantic infrastructure that is capable of extracting and analyzing data from your own projects while working from your own machine.

In order to make this possible, Zet Universe requires some good hardware to work, ideally with no less than 4GB of RAM, Intel's Core processor, and SSD drive. But good hardware is only part of the equitation, as we also have to make Zet Universe's software tailored to its specific tasks.

As you, our Insiders, work with Zet Universe, we learn more and more about our current product design's strengths and weaknesses, and as you tell us more and more about your needs, we get better understanding of how we should improve the product to make it being more relevant for you.

This blog post is a story of our Scaling Up Effort, and in this series we will discuss two areas of this effort, Storage Layer and thumbnails cache.

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WELCOMING FLIGHT 20 OF ZET UNIVERSE

2/15/2016

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Hi everyone,

We're rolling out Zet Universe Insider Preview Build 5889.2386 right now to Zet Universe Insiders. As it was said in the previous blog post, since shipping the second (and last) January 2016 build of Zet Universe, we've changed our focus from the Dynamic Ontologies to our storage layer in our effort to scale up Zet Universe. And so, this new February build has a historical significance for us, as it is a first fruit of this effort.

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ANNOUNCING ZET UNIVERSE INSIDER PREVIEW BUILD 5866.39662

1/26/2016

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Hi all,

We are coming very fast to the end of January, and it means there's only one more build to share with you this month, and this build is available to you starting today.

Unlike the previous build which had only a change in the search syntax (albeit an important one!), in this build you'll have a unique chance to take a look at the behind-the-scenes of your projects information space - the ontology.

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JANUARY BUILD NOW AVAILABLE TO THE ZET UNIVERSE INSIDERS PROGRAM

1/13/2016

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UPDATE - grab an updated January 2016 build, 5857.11090, to restore Dropbox functionality in Zet Universe. See details below.

Hi everyone,

First of all, I'm very glad to wish you a Happy New Year! It's exactly 5 months now since we've started the program (July 13, 2015), and it was an amazing ride with you, Insiders. As people like to say, we are just getting started! As you might have noticed, we've been keeping silence since the very end of November 2015, and for a good reason. Our top priority goal was to restructure our underlying plugin platform, extract it into a separate package, and move all of our currently available plugins to our new platform.

Well, we've done that! We've also made a few improvements in this first build of 2016, build 5857.11090, though, and I can't wait to tell you about them.

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ANNOUNCING THE LAST FALL'15 BUILD OF ZET UNIVERSE

11/30/2015

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Hi everyone,

Today we are releasing Zet Universe Preview Build 5813.5130 to Zet Universe Insiders. Like the last few ones, this build is really focused on bug fixes and general improvements; at the same time we've made one colossal change to the product that we feel being really proud of, and we can't wait to share this change with you. What is that change? Oh, we've changed the entire way of... Wait. First things first.

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