Installing Apache SystemML on the IBM Cloud

To use the latest released version of Apache SystemML on the IBM Cloud, please install it using the following commands in the jupyter shell:

1. Install the latest version of SystemML (for example: 1.2.0):

!pip install systemml

 

2.. Please execute the following command in the notebook after installation:

!ln -s -f ~/user-libs/python3/systemml/systemml-java/systemml-1.2.0-extra.jar ~/user-libs/spark2/systemml-1.2.0-extra.jar
!ln -s -f ~/user-libs/python3/systemml/systemml-java/systemml-1.2.0.jar ~/user-libs/spark2/systemml-1.2.0.jar

 

3. Then restart the kernel.

 

4. check if the correct version was installed:

!pip show systemml

5. (Important) Finally, check if the correct version is being picked up:

from systemml import MLContext
ml = MLContext(spark)
ml.version()

Notes from the Micro-MBA course (Part 1)

In my previous blogposts 1 2 3, I summarized the notes from entrepreneurship course offered by Rice Center for Engineering Leadership. This blogpost will extend the previous blogposts for larger organization based on the notes from the Micro-MBA class at IBM Almaden Research Center. As a disclaimer: this blogpost should be viewed as my personal biased opinions based on limited understanding of the subject, rather than any official position of IBM or the instructor. Also, I will skip many topics for brevity.

The Micro-MBA course can divided into following three sub-topics:

1. Economics
2. Finance
3. Accounting

Economics

The fundamental assumption of economics is of scarcity: People have unlimited wants but limited resources, namely:

• Labor (human time and work)
• Natural resources (raw materials)
• Capital (man-made materials needed for the production of other goods such as buildins and machinery).

Hence, we have to chose how to use the limited resources to maximize our wants and needs. An economist studies the choices to following three fundamental questions:

• WHAT (goods and services) to produce ?
• HOW to produce them ?
• WHO will receive the goods and services produced ?

WHO will receive the goods and services produced ?

The answer to the third question depends on what are the economic policies of the country. In a country with centrally planned economy such as Cuba and North Korea (and Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991), the government decides how the goods and service produced be allocated. On the other hand, in market economy, the individuals/households/firms who are most willing and able to buy the goods and services receive them (i.e. based on principle of supply and demand). Note, most countries today follow mixed economy, where most economic decisions results from the interactions of the buyers and sellers in the market, but in which the government plays a significant role in the allocation of resources [1].

	Centrally planned economy	Market economy
Productive efficiency (produced at lowest cost)		Better
Allocative efficiency (reflects consumer preferences)		Better
Equity (fair distribution of goods and services)	Better
Freedom	Better for freedom from uncertainty	Better for freedom of choice
Main proponent	Karl Marx, who posited in Das Kapital that market competitions exploits labor and ultimately fosters monopolies.	Adam Smith, on the other hand claimed that competition and the self-interested pursuit of profit causes the firms and the individuals to behave in ways that are ultimately socially beneficial.

WHAT (goods and services) to produce and HOW to produce them ?

As described above, in a market economy, self-interested pursuit of profit motivates people to decide what goods and service to produce. The profit is high if the consumer is willing to buy the goods and service for higher price that the cost of goods and service.  Every economic decision that a consumer makes takes account of utility (the amount of benefit to the consumer) and comes with an opportunity cost [3]. Opportunity cost is the benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up in order to have something else.

Opportunity cost

Let's understand opportunity cost by examining the problem of whether I should have done PhD after my Masters. After my Masters, I had two options:

• Accept the job offer for Software Development Engineer (SDE) position in Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining team. The salary of this position is $ x per year.
• Do 5-year PhD program at Rice university. Rice University gives PhD students a stipend of $ y per year. After PhD, I got an offer from IBM Research with a salary of $ x + z per year. 

Assuming the compensation at Rice, Microsoft and IBM remain constant, the opportunity cost associated with doing a PhD after n years is $ x*n - (x + z)*(n - 5) - 5y. The below figure (generated by crude approximation) shows that it makes sense to do PhD if n > 10.5, where the opportunity cost becomes 0.

The above example ignores the rate of increase of compensation of a Masters vs PhD student and also the intangible costs such as experience at Microsoft, potential cutting-edge role at IBM, guidance under Chris, etc.

Specialization and Voluntary Trade

In the book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith highlights that two key points:

1. Workers produce more when they occupy specialized roles, so businesses can offer higher quality products at lower prices. 
2. Trade benefits both buyer and seller (i.e. lower opportunity cost for both of them). Note, this is only true iff  both the buyer and seller are engaged in the trade voluntarily and if both have complete information. The counter-examples for voluntary exchange are slavery, human trafficking and fraud, where government regulations are necessary.

To summarize, a corporation should attempt to:
Step 1: specialize such that it is the lowest cost provider
Step 2: apply opportunity cost in decision making, risk assessment (risk vs return) and pricing analysis (for example: if supply is high, price is $1 less than second cheapest seller and if supply is low, the price is $1 more than second highest bidder/buyer).
Step 3: exchange between two opportunity cost such that both parties are better off (i.e. producer sells to make profit and the consumer buys as it is more expensive to make it).

Monetary system

Except countries like Germany, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, etc, the government spends more than its revenues. The difference is called as deficit spending or budget deficit or simply deficit.

To pay for the deficit, the Treasury borrows the money from the banks by issuing them treasury bonds. Treasury bonds offer interests and promise by the government to pay the principal and hence are considered as safest investments. However, in recent times, countries like Ukraine, Argentina, Greece, Zimbabwe and Russia were either defaulted or had to restructure their debts (see wikipedia for the exhaustive list). The big three rating agencies - Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch - rate countries on their ability to pay interest, refinance and repay them.

Then through Open Market Operations (or OMO), the banks gets to sell the treasury bonds (or mortgage-backed securities) to the Federal Reserve (or Fed for short) at a profit. Interesting point to note here: Banks give Fed the treasury bonds and Fed adds "credit" to the bank reserves. As countries' central bank, Fed has unique power to create credit out of thin air without having money to back the credit up ... often referred to as "printing money".

Other than buying treasury bonds, Fed has another tool at its disposal: the reserve requirement (or cash reserve ratio or liquidity ratio), which refers to percentage of cash that must be kept at Fed or in the vault by a commercial. If a bank makes too many loans or if there is a sudden demand for withdrawals, then amount on money in the bank's vault falls below the reserve requirements. In this case, the bank first attempts to borrow money from other banks at the fed funds rate and then the remaining amount from the Fed at the discount rate. An equivalent interbank lending rate to feds funds rate in UK is LIBOR rate - the London Interbank Offered Rate (set by the British Banker's Association).

In practice, there is no standard fed funds rate, instead it is the weighted average of the interest rate banks charge each other overnight to meet the reserve requirements. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets eight times a year to set the target fed funds rate and then by buying/selling of treasury bonds, it attempts to achieve the target fed funds rate. The Fed funds rate affect the prime rate (for setting home equity lines of credit, auto loans, personal loans and credit card rates) and 11th District cost of funds index (for setting adjustable-rate mortgages).

	Jan 2018	Dec 2017	Jan 2017
Prime rate reported by the Wall Street Journal's bank survey	4.5	4.25	3.75
Discount rate	2	1.75	1.25
Fed funds rate	1.5	1.5	0.75
11th District cost of funds	0.746	0.737	0.603

Treasury then can use the money it received by selling the bonds to fund the deficit. Bank can use the credit it received from Fed and the money deposited by its customers minus the reserve requirements to make loans. This is called as fractional reserve lending and it works as follows. Let's assume that reserve requirements is 10% and X deposits $1000 in bank A. The bank A keeps $100 in its vault and lends remaining $900 to Y who needs it to fund her business. Y has an account in bank B and deposits $900 in her account which she intends to remove as and when needed. Bank B keeps $90 in its vault and lends remaining $810 to C who in turns deposits in bank W. Now, when A, B and C check their accounts in their respective banks, they will see that they have $1000, $900 and $810 respectively, that is the initial $1000 has grown to $2710 in the economy. This system fails if there is a mass panic and A, B and C all decide to remove the amount at once (commonly referred to as bank run).

Before we move ahead, it is a good idea to classify different types of banks:

1. Supranational banks:
1. The International Monetary Fun (IMF) ensures the stability of the international economic system and has 187 member countries.
2. World bank provides financial help to combat poverty, malnutrition and lack of communications and infrastructure to the developing countries.
2. Central banks such as Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Swiss National Bank and The People's Bank of China (PBC), set monetary policy described in the below section.
3. Commercial bank's business model is to charge higher interest rate for loan than they pay depositors.
4. Investment banks provide three functions: Merger and Acquisition (M&E) facility for corporations to raise debt or equity, Institutional Client Services which includes Fixed Income, Commodities and Currencies (FICC) and Asset/Wealth Management for high net worth clients.

Government intervention

The government keeps the economy growing (close to long-run trend rate of 2.5%), limits unemployment and keep inflation low (inflation target of 2%) by fiscal and monetary policies:

1. Fiscal policy: is set by the US Congress, the President and the Treasury Secretary, which involves changing government spending and taxation. 
2. Monetary policy: is set by the central bank (i.e. Federal Reserve in US), which involves influencing the demand and supply of money, primarily through the use of interest rates.

Inflation refers to a general increase in the price of goods and services and is caused by increase in the supply of money. Though it is hard to define/measure precisely, it is commonly measured by consumer price index (or CPI) which is weighted average change in the prices of consumer goods and services. Government love inflation but just to the right amount (~2%) as it makes debt cheaper (as dollar becomes cheaper), increases taxes (as prices increases) and increases exports. On the other hand, fixed income retirees and importers (such as oil) hate inflation.

A country is in recession when two successive quarters, or a six months, show a decrease in real GDP. Hence, during recession, we get a fall in the inflation rate. However, deflation is when we get a negative inflation rate i.e. falling prices. Since the second world war, recessions have not led to deflation – just a lower inflation rate. A depression is a severe recession.

			Fiscal Policy		Monetary Policy
		Set by:	US Congress, President and Treasury Secretary		Federal Reserve
		Measured by	Tax	Spending	Interest Rates	Treasury Bonds	Reserve requirements
Inflation	Prices ↑	Consumer Price Index (CPI)	↑	↓	↑	Sell	Increase
Recession	Low output and   unemployment	GDP/GNP, Unemployment rate	↓	↑	↓	Buy	Decrease

For example: to reduce inflationary pressures,

• a fiscal policy will involve higher taxes and lower spending. The advantage of using fiscal policy is that it will help to reduce the budget deficit, but is often difficult to implement due to political reasons.
• a monetary policy (in this case termed as tight monetary policy) will attempt to reduce the supply of money by raising the interest rates and borrowing rates among banks, selling government bonds (also called as "open market operations" or OMO) and by increasing the rate of minimum reserve to be kept by commercial banks towards central bank. 

Extreme situations:

• Buying too many treasury bonds: During extreme recession or to avoid deflation, Fed buys lots of government debt so as to inject more money into economy and encourage growth. This is called as Quantitative Easing as was pioneered by the Bank of Japan in 1990s. In 2009 financial crisis, Fed and Bank of England purchased over $2 trillion and $520 billions government debt respectively. 
• Comprehensive Financial Reform Acts: 
• After 1929 stock market crash, Glass Steagall Act was enacted which separated investment banking from commercial/retail banking to prevent bank run. This act was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowing the banks to invest depositors' funds in unregulated derivatives. This led to banks becoming too big to fail and requiring bailout in 2008-2009 to avoid another depression.
• After 2008-2009 housing crisis, Dodd-Frank Act was passed which increased regulations on unregulated derivatives trading and created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that took actions against predatory student lending practices and payday loan scams. Much of these regulations might be rolled back Financial CHOICE Act is enacted.
• Stagflation (= Inflation + Recession at the same time) is a condition of slow economic growth and relatively high unemployment accompanied by a rise in prices, or inflation. It occurs due to supply shock (such rapid increase in price of oil) and due to policies that harm industry while growing money supply too quickly. Venezuela is an example of stagflation where if you fix inflation, you create depression and if you fix recession, you create hyperinflation.
• When inflation rate increases by ~ 50% monthly, it is referred to as hyperinflation. Germany after Treaty of Versailles (322% inflation rate), Hungary in 1945 (19,000% inflation rate) and Zimbabwe in 2008 (230 million % inflation rate) had some of the examples of hyperinflation.

Economist track the economic growth, unemployment and inflation using the following three measurements:

1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP): is the value of all the finished goods and services (hence product) produced within a country's border (hence domestic) in a specific time period, usually a year.

- Since it is "gross", the depreciation in the capital asset is not deducted. If it where deducted, then it becomes "net".

- Since it is "domestic", it does not take into account the country's earning outside its geographical boundaries, or foreign remittances. Gross National Product (GNP) is  GDP + income earned by residents from overseas investments - income earned within the domestic economy by overseas residents.

- Since it is "product", the intermediate goods are not taken into account. For example, wheat sold for final consumption to consumers will be included into GDP, but not the amount of wheat sold to bakeries for the production of bread.

- GDP is commonly used as an indicator of the economic health of a country and can be computed in three principal ways: from total output, from income and from expenditure.

2. Unemployment rate: is the number of unemployed people is divided by the number of people in the labor force times 100. Note, it defines unemployed people as those who are willing and available to work, and who have actively sought work within the past four weeks. Hence, little kids don't count, neither do people who are unable to work due to their age or disability or who chose not to work. The below figure shows the unemployment rate per country in 2013:

3. Inflation rate: measured by consumer price index (or CPI).

Reference:

1. Economics - Hubbard and O'Brien.
2. https://www.investopedia.com/
3. The Book of Money - Conaghan and Smith.
4. Macroeconomics: Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8uTB5XorBw
5. The Monetary System Visually Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23DNe0cJhcU
6. https://www.thebalance.com/open-market-operations-3306121
7. https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/prime-rate.aspx
8. https://www.thebalance.com/dodd-frank-wall-street-reform-act-3305688

How to debug the unicode error in Py4J

Many Java-based big data systems such as SystemML, Spark's MLLib, CaffeOnSpark, etc that use the Py4J bridge in their Python APIs often throw a cryptic error instead of detailed Java stacktrace:

py4j.protocol.Py4JJavaError: < exception str() failed >

For more details on this issue, please refer to Python's unicode documentation.

Luckily, there is a very simple hack to extract the stack trace in such a situation. Let's assume that SystemML's MLContext is throwing the above Py4J error: ml.execute(script). In this case, simply wrap that code in the following try/except block:

Git notes for SystemML committers

Replace niketanpansare below with your git username:

1. Fork and then Clone the repository

https://github.com/niketanpansare/systemml.git

2. Update the configuration file: systemml/.git/config

[core]
symlinks = false
repositoryformatversion = 0
filemode = false
logallrefupdates = true
[remote "origin"]
url = https://github.com/niketanpansare/systemml.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = refs/heads/master
[remote "upstream"]
url = https://github.com/apache/systemml.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/*
[remote "apache"]
url = https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/systemml.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/apache/*

The above configuration states that: "origin" points to your fork and "upstream" points to the github mirror of the main repository, which is referred to as "apache".

Optional but recommended: Update the ~/.gitconfig file:

[user]
    name = Niketan Pansare
    email = npansar@us.ibm.com
[alias]
    systemml-pr = "!f() { git fetch ${2:-upstream} pull/$1/head:pr-$1 && git checkout pr-$1; }; f"

3. Now, let's you created a branch 'foo' with 3 commits. You can create a PR via github website

4. Once the PR is approved and if you are the committer, you can merge the PR:

git checkout foo
git reset --soft HEAD~3 && git commit
git pull --rebase apache master
git checkout master
git pull apache master
git merge foo
gitk
git log apache/master..
git commit --amend --date="$(date +%s)"
git push apache master

Let's discuss the above commands in more detail:
- git checkout foo: ensures that you are working on the right branch.
- git reset --soft HEAD~3 && git commit: squashes all your commits into one single commit in preparation for the merge.
- git pull --rebase apache master: rebases your local master branch with the apache.
- git checkout master: switch to the local master branch
- git merge foo: merge the branch foo with local master
- gitk: to double-check visually if local and remote branches are all in synch and if the commit is not creating weird loops.

- git log apache/master..: double-check if the log makes sense and if you have added "Closes #PR." at the end of the log and correct JIRA number as the header.
- git commit --amend --date="$(date +%s)": if not, allows you to modify your log message.
- git push apache master: go ahead and push your commit to apache :)

5. If you are a committer and want to merge a PR (let's assume PR 100), you need to create a local branch using the following command:

git systemml-pr 100
git checkout pr-100

Also, if you had to squash the commits as described above, please use the below command to amend the author:

git commit --amend --author="FirstName LastName <contributor@blah.com>"

6. If you have modified the docs/ folder, you can update the documentation:

git subtree push --prefix docs apache gh-pages

Before, updating the documentation, you can sanity test on your branch by:

git subtree push --prefix docs origin gh-pages

If the above command fails, you can delete the gh-pages branch and re-execute the command:

git push origin --delete gh-pages

Advanced commands:
1. Cherry-picking:

git log --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s" | grep Niketan
git checkout gpu
git cherry-pick

Notes from other committers:
Deron: https://gist.github.com/deroneriksson/e0d6d0634f3388f0df5e#integrate-pull-request-with-one-commit-into-apache-master
Mike: https://gist.github.com/dusenberrymw/78eb31b101c1b1b236e5

Using Google's TensorFlow for Kaggle competition

Recently, Google Brain team released their neural network library 'TensorFlow'. Since Google has a state-of-the-art Deep Learning system, I wanted to explore TensorFlow by trying it out for my first Kaggle submission (Digit Recognition) . After spending few hours getting to know their jargons/APIs, I modified their multilayer convolution neural network and came 140th (with 98.4% accuracy) ... not too shabby for my first submission :D.

If you are interested in outscoring me, apply cross-validation on the below python code or may be consider using ensembles:

from input_data import *
import pandas

class DataSets(object):
 pass

mnist = DataSets()
df = pandas.read_csv('train.csv')

train_images = numpy.multiply(df.drop('label', 1).values, 1.0 / 255.0)
train_labels = dense_to_one_hot(df['label'].values)

#Add MNIST data from Yan LeCun's website for better accuracy. We hold out test, just for accuracy sake, but could have easily added it :)

mnist2 = read_data_sets("/tmp/data/", one_hot=True)
train_images = numpy.concatenate((train_images, mnist2.train._images), axis=0)
train_labels = numpy.concatenate((train_labels, mnist2.train._labels), axis=0)

VALIDATION_SIZE = 5000
validation_images = train_images[:VALIDATION_SIZE]
validation_labels = train_labels[:VALIDATION_SIZE]
train_images = train_images[VALIDATION_SIZE:]
train_labels = train_labels[VALIDATION_SIZE:]

mnist.train = DataSet([], [], fake_data=True)
mnist.train._images = train_images
mnist.train._labels = train_labels

mnist.validation = DataSet([], [], fake_data=True)
mnist.validation._images = validation_images
mnist.validation._labels = validation_labels

df1 = pandas.read_csv('test.csv')
test_images = numpy.multiply(df1.values, 1.0 / 255.0)
numTest = df1.shape[0]
test_labels = dense_to_one_hot(numpy.repeat([1], numTest))
mnist.test = DataSet([], [], fake_data=True)
mnist.test._images = test_images
mnist.test._labels = test_labels

import tensorflow as tf
sess = tf.InteractiveSession()
x = tf.placeholder("float", [None, 784])   # x is input features
W = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([784,10]))           # weights 
b = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([10]))                    # bias
y_ = tf.placeholder("float", [None,10])   # y' is input labels
#Weight Initialization
def weight_variable(shape):
  initial = tf.truncated_normal(shape, stddev=0.1)
  return tf.Variable(initial)
  
def bias_variable(shape):
  initial = tf.constant(0.1, shape=shape)
  return tf.Variable(initial)
  
# Convolution and Pooling
def conv2d(x, W):
  return tf.nn.conv2d(x, W, strides=[1, 1, 1, 1], padding='SAME')

def max_pool_2x2(x):
  return tf.nn.max_pool(x, ksize=[1, 2, 2, 1], strides=[1, 2, 2, 1], padding='SAME')
  
# First Convolutional Layer
W_conv1 = weight_variable([5, 5, 1, 32])
b_conv1 = bias_variable([32])
x_image = tf.reshape(x, [-1,28,28,1])
h_conv1 = tf.nn.relu(conv2d(x_image, W_conv1) + b_conv1)
h_pool1 = max_pool_2x2(h_conv1)

# Second Convolutional Layer
W_conv2 = weight_variable([5, 5, 32, 64])
b_conv2 = bias_variable([64])
h_conv2 = tf.nn.relu(conv2d(h_pool1, W_conv2) + b_conv2)
h_pool2 = max_pool_2x2(h_conv2)

# Densely Connected Layer
W_fc1 = weight_variable([7 * 7 * 64, 1024])
b_fc1 = bias_variable([1024])
h_pool2_flat = tf.reshape(h_pool2, [-1, 7*7*64])
h_fc1 = tf.nn.relu(tf.matmul(h_pool2_flat, W_fc1) + b_fc1)

# Dropout
keep_prob = tf.placeholder("float")
h_fc1_drop = tf.nn.dropout(h_fc1, keep_prob)

# Readout Layer
W_fc2 = weight_variable([1024, 10])
b_fc2 = bias_variable([10])
y=tf.nn.softmax(tf.matmul(h_fc1_drop, W_fc2) + b_fc2)
cross_entropy = -tf.reduce_sum(y_*tf.log(y))

train_step = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(1e-4).minimize(cross_entropy)
tf.initialize_all_variables().run()
for i in range(20000):
 batch = mnist.train.next_batch(50)
 train_step.run(feed_dict={x: batch[0], y_: batch[1], keep_prob: 0.5})

correct_prediction = tf.equal(tf.argmax(y,1), tf.argmax(y_,1))
accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(correct_prediction, "float"))
print "test accuracy %g"%accuracy.eval(feed_dict={x: mnist2.test.images, y_: mnist2.test.labels, keep_prob: 1.0})
prediction = tf.argmax(y,1).eval(feed_dict={x: mnist.test.images, keep_prob: 1.0})

f=open('prediction.txt','w')
s1='\n'.join(str(x) for x in prediction)
f.write(s1)
f.close()

The above script assumes that you have downloaded train.csv and test.csv from Kaggle's website, input_data.py from TensorFlow's website and installed pandas/TensorFlow.

Here are few observations based on my experience playing with TensorFlow:

1. TensorFlow does not have an optimizer: 
1. TensorFlow statically maps an high-level expression (for example "matmul") to a predefined low-level operator (for example: matmul_op.h) based on whether you are using CPU or GPU enabled TensorFlow. On other hand, SystemML compiles a matrix multiplication expression (X %*% y) into one of many matrix-multiplication related physical operators using a sophisticated optimizer that adapts to the underlying data and cluster characteristics.
2. Other popular open-source neural network libraries are Caffe, Theano and Torch. 
2. TensorFlow is a parallel, but not a distributed system:
1. It does parallelize its computation (across CPU cores and also across GPUs):  
2. Google has released only the single-node version and kept distributed version in-house. This means that the open-sourced version does not have a parameter server. 
3. TensorFlow is easy to use, but difficult to debug:
1. I like TensorFlow's Python API and if the script/data/parameters are all correct, it works absolutely fine :)
2. But, if something fails, the error messages thrown by TensorFlow are difficult to decipher. This is because the error messages point to a generated physical operator (for example: tensorflow.python.framework.errors.InvalidArgumentError: ReluGrad input), not to the line of code in the Python program.
4. TensorFlow is slow to train and not yet robust enough:
1. Here are some initial numbers by Alex Smola comparing TensorFlow to other open-source deep learning systems:
   

Plotting as a useful debugging tool

While writing the code for bayesian modeling, you will have to test the distribution (prior, likelihood or posterior). Here are two common scenarios that you might encounter:

1. You want to test the function that generates random deviates. For example: you have derived a conjugate formula for a parameter of your model and want to test whether it is correct or not.
2. You want to test a probability density function. For example: likelihood or posterior function that you might want to run rejection sampler on.

In both these cases, you will start by making sure the property of the distribution (for example: range, mean, variance) are correct. For example: if the parameter you are sampling is variance, then you will have “assert(returnedVariance > 0)” in your code. Then, the next obvious test should be visual inspection (trust me, it has helped me catch more bugs than I would by traditional programming debugging techniques/tools). This means you will plot the distribution and see if the output of your code makes sense.
We will start by simplifying the above two cases by assuming standard normal distribution. So, in the first case, we have access to “rnorm” function and in second case, we have access to “dnorm” function of R.
Case 1: In this case, we first collect random deviates (in “vals”) and then use ggplot to plot them:

library(ggplot2)
vals = rnorm(10000, mean=0, sd=1)
df = data.frame(xVals=vals)
ggplot(df, aes(x=xVals)) + geom_density()

The output of above R script will look something like this:

Case 2: In this case, we have to assume a bounding box and sample inside that to get “x_vals” and “y_vals” (just like rejection sampling):

library(ggplot2)
x_vals=runif(10000,min=-4,max=4)
y_vals=dnorm(x_vals, mean=0, sd=1)
df = data.frame(xVals=x_vals, yVals=y_vals)
ggplot(df, aes(x=xVals, y=yVals)) + geom_line()

The output of above R script will look something like this:

Just as a teaser to a post that I will post later, we can use the script somewhat similar to that of case 1 to study the characteristics of a distribution:

How to setup “passwordless ssh” on Amazon EC2 cluster

Often for running distributed applications, you may want to setup a new cluster or tweak an existing one (running on Amazon EC2) to support passwordless ssh. For creating a new cluster from scratch, there are lot of cluster management tools (which is beyond the scope of this blogpost). However, if all you want to do is setup “passwordless ssh” between nodes, then this post might be worth your read.
The script below assumes that you have completed following three steps:

Step 1. Created RSA public keypair on each of the machine:

cd ~
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Do not enter any paraphrase, instead just press [enter].

Step 2. Suppressed warning flags in ssh-config file:

sudo vim /etc/ssh/ssh_config
StrictHostKeyChecking no
UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null

Step 3. Copied the key pair file “MyKeyPair.pem” to master’s home directory:

scp -i /local-path/MyKeyPair.pem /local-path/MyKeyPair.pem ubuntu@ec2-master-public-address.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~

Assuming that above three steps have been completed, run this script on the master to enable passwordless ssh between master-slave and/or slave-slave nodes:

    #!/bin/bash
    # Author: Niketan R. Pansare
     
    # Password-less ssh
    # Make sure you have transferred your key-pair to master
    if [ ! -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ]; then
      echo "Expects ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to be created. Run ssh-keygen -t rsa from home directory"
      exit
    fi
     
    if [ ! -f ~/MyKeyPair.pem ]; then
      echo "For enabling password-less ssh, transfer MyKeyPair.pem to master's home folder (e.g.: scp -i /local-path/MyKeyPair.pem /local-path/MyKeyPair.pem ubuntu@master_public_dns:~)"
      exit
    fi
     
    echo "Provide following ip-addresses"
    echo -n -e "${green}Public${endColor} dns address of master:"
    read MASTER_IP
    echo ""
     
    # Assumption here is that you want to create a small cluster ~ 10 nodes
    echo -n -e "${green}Public${endColor} dns addresses of slaves (separated by space):"
    read SLAVE_IPS
    echo "" 
     
    echo -n -e "Do you want to enable password-less ssh between ${green}master-slaves${endColor} (y/n):"
    read ENABLE_PASSWORDLESS_SSH
    echo ""
    if [ "$ENABLE_PASSWORDLESS_SSH" == "y" ]; then
      # Copy master's public key to itself
      #cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
     
      for SLAVE_IP in $SLAVE_IPS
      do
          echo "Checking passwordless ssh between master -> "$SLAVE_IP
        ssh -o PasswordAuthentication=no $SLAVE_IP /bin/true
        IS_PASSWORD_LESS="n"
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo "Passwordless ssh has been setup between master -> "$SLAVE_IP
            echo "Now checking passwordless ssh between "$SLAVE_IP" -> master"
     
          ssh $SLAVE_IP 'ssh -o PasswordAuthentication=no' $MASTER_IP '/bin/true'  
          if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
              echo "Passwordless ssh has been setup between "$SLAVE_IP" -> master"
            IS_PASSWORD_LESS="y"
          fi
        fi
     
        if [ "$IS_PASSWORD_LESS" == "n" ]; then
          # ssh-copy-id gave me lot of issues, so will use below commands instead
          echo "Enabling passwordless ssh between master and "$SLAVE_IP
     
          # Copy master's public key to slave
          cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh -i ~/MyKeyPair.pem "ubuntu@"$SLAVE_IP 'mkdir -p ~/.ssh ; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys' 
          # Copy slave's public key to master
          ssh -i ~/MyKeyPair.pem "ubuntu@"$SLAVE_IP 'cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
          # Copy slave's public key to itself
          ssh -i ~/MyKeyPair.pem "ubuntu@"$SLAVE_IP 'cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'
     
        fi    
      done
     
      echo ""
      echo "---------------------------------------------"
      echo "Testing password-less ssh on master -> slave"
      for SLAVE_IP in $SLAVE_IPS
      do
        ssh "ubuntu@"$SLAVE_IP  uname -a
      done
     
      echo ""
      echo "Testing password-less ssh on slave -> master"
      for SLAVE_IP in $SLAVE_IPS
      do
        ssh "ubuntu@"$SLAVE_IP 'ssh ' $MASTER_IP 'uname -a'
      done
      echo "---------------------------------------------"
      echo "Sorry, prefer to keep this check manual to avoid headache in Hadoop or any other distributed program."
      echo -n -e "Do you see error or something fishy in above block (y/n):"
      read IS_ERROR1
      echo ""
      if [ "$IS_ERROR1" == "y" ]; then
        echo "I am sorry to hear this script didn't work for you :("
        echo "Hint1: Its quite possible, slave doesnot contain ~/MyKeyPair.pem"
        echo "Hint2: sudo vim /etc/ssh/ssh_config and add StrictHostKeyChecking no and UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null to it"
        exit
      fi
    fi
     
    echo -n -e "Do you want to enable password-less ssh between ${green}slave-slave${endColor} (y/n):"
    read ENABLE_PASSWORDLESS_SSH1
    echo ""
    if [ "$ENABLE_PASSWORDLESS_SSH1" == "y" ]; then
      if [ "$ENABLE_PASSWORDLESS_SSH" == "n" ]; then
        echo -n -e "In this part, the key assumption is that password-less ssh between ${green}master-slave${endColor} is enabled. Do you still want to continue (y/n):"
        read ANS1
        if [ "$ANS1" == "n" ]; then 
          exit
        fi
        echo ""
     
      fi
      for SLAVE_IP1 in $SLAVE_IPS
      do
        for SLAVE_IP2 in $SLAVE_IPS
        do
          if [ "$SLAVE_IP1" != "$SLAVE_IP2" ]; then
            # Checking assumes passwordless ssh has already been setup between master and slaves
              echo "[Warning:] Skipping checking passwordless ssh between "$SLAVE_IP1" -> "$SLAVE_IP2
            IS_PASSWORDLESS_SSH_BETWEEN_SLAVE_SET="n"
     
            # This will be true because ssh $SLAVE_IP1 is true
            #ssh $SLAVE_IP1 ssh -o PasswordAuthentication=no $SLAVE_IP2 /bin/true
            #if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
     
     
            if [ "$IS_PASSWORDLESS_SSH_BETWEEN_SLAVE_SET" == "n" ]; then
              echo "Enabling passwordless ssh between "$SLAVE_IP1" and "$SLAVE_IP2
              # Note you are on master now, which we assume to have 
              ssh -i ~/MyKeyPair.pem $SLAVE_IP1 'cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub' | ssh -i ~/MyKeyPair.pem $SLAVE_IP2 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys' 
            else
              echo "Passwordless ssh has been setup between "$SLAVE_IP1" -> "$SLAVE_IP2
            fi
          fi
        done
     
      done
     
      echo "---------------------------------------------"
      echo "Testing password-less ssh on slave  slave"
      for SLAVE_IP1 in $SLAVE_IPS
      do
        for SLAVE_IP2 in $SLAVE_IPS
        do
          # Also, test password-less ssh on the current slave machine
          ssh $SLAVE_IP1 'ssh ' $SLAVE_IP2 'uname -a'
        done
      done
      echo "---------------------------------------------"
      echo "Sorry, prefer to keep this check manual to avoid headache in Hadoop or any other distributed program."
      echo -n -e "Do you see error or something fishy in above block (y/n):"
      read IS_ERROR1
      echo ""
      if [ "$IS_ERROR1" == "y" ]; then
        echo "I am sorry to hear this script didn't work for you :("
        echo "Hint1: Its quite possible, slave doesnot contain ~/MyKeyPair.pem"
        echo "Hint2: sudo vim /etc/ssh/ssh_config and add StrictHostKeyChecking no and UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null to it"
        exit
      fi
    fi

Here is a sample output obtained by running the above script (src code available via link):

ubuntu@ip-XXX:~$ ./enablePasswordlessSSH.sh
Provide following ip-addresses

Public dns address of master:ec2-XXX-29.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Public dns addresses of slaves (separated by space):ec2-XXX-191.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-XXX-240.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-XXX-215.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-XXX-192.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-XXX-197.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Do you want to enable password-less ssh between master-slaves (y/n):y

Checking passwordless ssh between master -> ec2-XXX-YYY.compute-1.amazonaws.com
bunch of warning and possibly few "Permission denied (publickey)." (Ignore this !!!)

---------------------------------------------
Testing password-less ssh on master -> slave
Don't ignore any error here !!!
---------------------------------------------
Sorry, prefer to keep this check manual to avoid headache in Hadoop or any other distributed program.
Do you see error or something fishy in above block (y/n):n

Do you want to enable password-less ssh between slave-slave (y/n):y

---------------------------------------------
Testing password-less ssh on slave <-> slave
Don't ignore any error here !!!
---------------------------------------------

Sorry, prefer to keep this check manual to avoid headache in Hadoop or any other distributed program.
Do you see error or something fishy in above block (y/n):n

Warning: The above code does not check for passwordless ssh for slave-slave configuration and sets it blindly even if passwordless ssh is already enabled. It might not be big deal if you call this script few times but won’t be ideal if the cluster needs to dynamically modified over and over again. Still, to modify this behavior, look at the line: IS_PASSWORDLESS_SSH_BETWEEN_SLAVE_SET=”n”

Notes on entrepreneurship (Part 3)

Few updates since the last time I wrote the blog:
1. At the end of the entrepreneurship course, the website and an iOS app was implemented and I got an A grade ... yaay !!!

2. Since I was out-of-country during the final presentation to judges (VCs, Startup founders, etc), I created a youtube video to motivate this project and my teammate explained the remaining logistics of our project [10].


3. Vigilant team won 3rd place in HackRice 2014 competition for developing Android version along with SVM classifier [3] to predict threat level based on location and time of the day. We used crime data from Houston PD for 5 years, so yes this feature only worked for Houston :(

4. I was lucky enough to get selected to participate in Ignite Conference 2014 [4]. To get the ball rolling on the first day, we were asked to build as tall structure as possible in given time frame with marshmallow on the top using noodle sticks, tape and thread [5]. The next day, we got to visit Khosla Ventures and Square (and few other startups). On last two days, we had talks from several guest entrepreneurs where they spoke about their entrepreneurship journey. Here are few of the lessons I learnt (directly/indirectly from this conference):
4.a What ideas/projects to work on ?
- One of the most common advice you will receive is "fail fast, fail often and fail cheap". However, I suggest not to take it verbatim and understand that the emphasis is not on failing but learning. So, you should not go with the mindset that if I am anyways planning to fail early, let me start with a dumb idea. In fact, the mindset should be "test early/cheaply; if you do fail, don't get hung over it, instead learn quickly why did you fail; and then adapt". Let me put this in much broader context in terms of one of the most important lesson I have learnt in research and entrepreneurship: though most people will judge you by your bank balance and your citations, you (as a researcher or entrepreneur) should try to evaluate yourself by your ability to keep failures small and useful.
- Don't hesitate or hold yourself back if you are passionate about an idea that appears to be "black swan". But makes sure you "know what you know and know what you don't know". Then, evaluate whether things you don't know will halt the project, if so, find an expert who can help you with that.
- Before you think of quitting your job and start a venture, make a list of non-glamorous/routine stuff about startup you will have to do. Though many of these might be solvable by capital, if you do intend to go the lean startup way, ask yourself: Are you mentally flexible to get over your ego and do these task if need be ?
4.b Building a team and network:
- Build team that is smarter than you. And make sure you give back and focus on their growth too, else you will soon face with talent retention problem.
- Here are some of the key points to build and keep great teams: Minimize unnecessary bureaucracy [14], exercise merit-based promotion strategy, treat others with respect and most importantly, with respect to improvement of your startup, encourage everyone to pitch-in their ideas rather than giving everyone list of to-do items [15].
- Hire a really good sales team you can find. This is especially true in internet technology though it has scalability challenges. Why? People would much rather prefer to deal with a sales person rather than internet widget when they are paying huge money for the given service. This also means don't wait until your product testing phase to hire a sales team. Rather start with integrated sales-development team and use sales part of the team as to validate/refine the hypothesis by communicating with customers during the product development phase. Best case scenario, the founder is that person ... that first assumes the role of salesman, talks to clients/customers, figures out requirements, then by himself or by hiring really good team develops the product, markets it, and then keeps on iterating the whole process again [8].
- Networking is extremely critical. It usually takes time, else it seems inauthentic/insincere. So, don't use the number of LinkedIn connections/visiting cards in your wallet as measure of networking, instead count number of people who genuinely want to help you and vice versa. Other way to put it: networking is not about how many people you are acquainted to but rather how many mentors, benefactors and friends you have.
4.c Managing yourself:
- It is extremely important to find ways to manage stress and take care of your health. Also, if your better-half and family understands the challenges of startups and supports/love you, the stress/difficulties reduces exponentially.
- Especially in software development phase, use productivity rather than hours worked as measure.
- Know the difference between persistence and stubbornness. Remember persistence (without stubbornness) requires learning and pivoting given new information/lessons, rather than doing same things over and over again expecting different results [6].
- When working in team, your idea is only good to the degree to which you can explain it. If your team doesn't understand it, you can almost be sure that your customer won't be able to understand it. This skill will probably require an entirely new blogpost (which I might write later), but for now here are three things you can do:
a. Read books about presentation/explanation/UI design: Design of everyday things, Don't make me think, Back of Napkin, Art of explanation, Whiteboard selling, slide:ology and 100 things every designer needs to know.
b. Learn empathy (i.e. relating to team/developers/sales and especially customers).
c. Be specific. If you don't break up tasks into smaller items and clarify the purpose/big picture, people (either your team or investor) might feel overwhelmed and can sometime get defensive. One particular thing that every member on your team needs to be very crystal clear about is "minimum viable product".

Let me recap the high-level steps [16] described until now in this blog series:

Step 0: Define your means: "what I know",  "what do I have" and "whom do I know".

Step 1: Ideation: See part 1 of this series for high-level tips.
Step 1.1: Being little more specific about step 1: Create/Refine 60 second elevator pitch: The key idea is if you meet a key investor/evangelist/strategic partner in an elevator and if he asks you what are you working on, you should be able to summarize your business idea before the elevator reaches certain floor and that person has to leave. Here are few suggestions about creating your elevator pitch:
- Sit down and write your elevator pitch without too much thinking. First iteration will always be awful.
- Iterate, rehearse, iterate again and then rehearse again (and keep doing this) until your elevator pitch becomes second nature to you.
- Talk to your customers and experts in that field and try to incorporate their feedback.
- Be honest and don't promise "world peace". Remember, your words represents your thoughts/character and the investor is investing in you as much as he/she is investing in the idea.
- There is no one way to do this, so learn-by-example; aka do youtube/google search for "elevator pitch" and listen to them [7].
- Use analogy to simplify the problem.
- If possible, explain how the problem affects you, your family or someone you know.
- The first and last sentence are extremely important and connecting them helps to create a more effective delivery.
Here is one of the iteration of my elevator pitch:

Studies show that in the US alone, one out of four women get sexually assaulted in their life-time. This number is much higher when they travel to developing countries like India. Though this problem is highly complex, we believe that a fraction of it can be solved by technology-based deterrents that act as first line of defense when in danger. We present one such solution: Vigilant. Vigilant is an affordable and hassle-free personal safety solution that connects you to friends, family and authorities during emergency with just a click of a button. The goal of Vigilant is to make everyones life safer with the help of smarter software and hardware.

Step 2: Opportunity evaluation:
Step 2.1: Use high-level checklist described in part 1 of this series.
Step 2.2: Create a business model canvas: Before you read anything further, you should definitely watch this 2 min video describing the business model canvas. Also, read the book Business Model Generation to understand why and how to create a business model canvas. If you don't have time to read through the book, here is few websites that allows you to create one by step-by-step instructions: zoomstra, launchpad central, turbostart, wordpress plugin, collaboration website. You can also go through following lectures/tutorials to learn how to create one: Steve Blank's udacity class,  Alex's blog.
Step 2.3: Early customer validation/requirement gathering using one or more of the feedback/analytics tools (some are applicable only at later stages): These tools help you quantify/find out: what people think they want, how much they think they want to pay and how much they will really pay.
- False buy page or dummy (but fully functional) e-commerce page for buying clickers [1].
- Contact form plugin in wordpress.
- Feedback button in app.
- Site Traffic widget/plugin in wordpress.
- Facebook likes.
- Google forms for suggestions from early adopters: Here are few suggestions for coming up with good questions (ones that I didn't know earlier): Kevin's blog, Stanford's videos for customer discovery, Learn startup customer development templates, Alex's blog, Steve's suggestions, Kaushik's suggestions.
- Other tools that you can use for market research are Google's customer survey tool, Amazon's mechanical turk, Qualtrics.
- Pamphlet with google url shortener[2] and QR codes across campus.
- Other tools that allow to do customer validation: validately, foundersuite.

Step 3: Build a great team !!!
- See suggestions given above in point 4.b and 4.c.
- There are few websites that help you find your founders: FoundersDating, CoFoundersLab or attend a meetup or hackthons or startup weekend.

Step 4 (or 5): Implementation, marketing, validation, refining business model canvas and keep on iterating.
This step requires above mentioned feedback/analytics tool as well as marketing/branding tools:
- Checkout fiverr for really cool and cheap marketing ideas.
- Make sure you install SEO plugin for your wordpress. I am using this plugin, but there are equally good plugins in the market.
- Create a marketing message/keywords based on above feedback tools or google trends or google keyword tool. Then keep refining it with respect to location based on google insights. Similarly, there are several analytics tools that will help you in marketing/branding like Google Analytics, Amazon Analytics, Heap Analytics, AppAnnie, Distimo, etc.
- Advertise on Google, Facebook, Bing or LinkedIn. If you prefer traditional marketing tools, you can look at srds.
- Read Art of explanation and make a user-friendly video about your product. You can use one of the following tools to create the video: Sparkol, Explainify, LooseKeys, Amazon's Elastic Transcoder, Camtasia.
For exhaustive list of tools, refer to Steve Blank's list, YCombinator's list, Startup Weekend's list, PBWork's list, HBS list.

Step 5 (or 4): Funding your startup:
Step 5.1: Research on which type of investor you want to approach: angel investors [12], venture capitalist, crowdsourcing or super angels. Also, be perfectly clear about amount of funding you need and valuation of your company as this will determine amount of equity (or other form of compensation) you will have to give to the investor. There are other parameters to consider as well like how much involvement you want from investor. Here is small figure to understand the startup funding lifecycle [11]:

Step 5.2: Now research on the specific investors you want to target and classify them as either "ideal/ambitious" or "can live with/moderate". Start with investor's website and understand their funding philosophy. Then look into ventures they have funded and see how they are doing [13].
Step 5.3: Prepare your pitch deck:
- See tips from from my previous blogpost about presentation.
- Here is a really good 2-min video about pitching from Guy Kawasaki. Note the 10 slides at 10min 4 seconds.
Step 5.4: Remember there are other things more important than just capital for your startup. Ask advice and hopefully gain a mentor or board of director. Sometimes they can also refer you to another funding agency.

Since this is often the most confusion aspect of startup for a techie, let me try my best to explain and emphasize the difference between validation and planning [8, 9]. Usually, planning involves deep thinking so as to perform forecasting, whereas validation starts with brainstorming the hypothesis and then validating it through rapid customer feedback loop. Planning which is associated with waterfall-like model, starts with defining the specific goal and then coming up with strategies and detailed steps to move towards that goal. Validation, on other hand, is often associated with agile development/effectuation/lean startup methodology and then involves pivoting the goal based on customer/market feedback. Planning assumes that you know precisely what customer requirements are beforehand, validation doesn't. Since customer requirements are known, planning is suitable for large-scale established companies where the emphasis is on "execution" of those requirements. On other hand, since precise customer requirements are unknown in startups, emphasis is on "searching" of the requirements through validation of hypothesis [8]. This is why many entrepreneurs prefer a short business model canvas (which is a hypothesis generating and validating tool) over more comprehensive business models.

Reference:
[1] Implementing e-commerce page on the wordpress took me no more than 30 minutes using the plugin WooCommerce. It allows you to track orders, generate reports, and even manage coupons.
[2] Google's url shortener (and many more similar free services) helps you track the traffic through the given link. Here is a useful hack: Have multiple shortened urls for your webpage and use different ones for pamphlets in different geographical areas. Then use the analytics to do much more targeted ad campaign :)
[3] For ML geeks, I must confess that the model suffers from selection bias as it only contains the data when crime occurred, not when the crime didn't occurred. Since you have to finish the project in a day according to rules of hackathon, most of which were spent on data gathering/cleaning, I had no time to work on this :(
[4] One thing that surprised me was that even though this conference was in Silicon Valley, I was the only Computer Science graduate student there, all others were either MBAs or MDs or MD-PhDs or BioTech students.
[5] My team came second and built the structure that was 26 inch tall. The idea is to start the first structure with marshmallow and keep building lower structure. Also, it is important to reinforce the structure (building supporting vertical sticks and choosing multiple sticks for lower pillars) so that it does not collapse. Most of the teams that failed started by building as tall structure as they could without marshmallow and then tried to put marshmallow on the top, which caused entire structure to collapse because of the weight. So the take-away point for entrepreneurs from this exercise is do bottom-up incremental iterations/updates with customer involvement so as to mitigate risk. Here is the pic of our structure:

[6] From Mark Otero, CEO & Co-founder, Klicknation.
[7] Daniel Pink in his book "To sell is human" suggest following template: "Once upon a time ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that ___. Because of that ___. Until finally ___".
[8] Read Steve Blank's blog for more detail.
[9] http://www.effectuation.org/learn/effectuation-101
[10] In the video, the clip where people have duck-tape on their mouth is from another youtube video about raising voice against sexual violence, i.e. it was not created by me and hence don't give me credit if you want to cite it. I used the clip because it resonates with the motivation of my project :)
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_round
[12] It might also be worthwhile to look into websites like angellist.
[13] Websites like CrunchBase and Techcrunch helps here. Other useful website you should definitely visit is Glassdoor to gauge the talent-retention ratio as well as willingness of upper-management to experiment new ideas. Why? It sometimes can be a metric to evaluate the founders and indirectly the investors. There are few ranking websites based on different criteria, one of them being Forbes Midas' list.
[14] For example: Rice Computer Science Graduate Student Association (CS GSA) is a flat organization and there are coordinators that have responsibilities/duties. Everyone can pitch in and help others, but when it comes to arbitration/point of contact/failure responsibility, the assigned coordinator is the one in-charge. For people outside the organization, that person is Overall coordinator, think of it as a President of the club and for the current year, that's me (thank you very much) :)
[15] Sure, some ideas might not align with the vision of the company and it may be dropped, but it has to be done in form of discussion rather than in an authoritative manner.
[16] Note, these are high-level steps, even though you might find the list of tools overwhelming. For detailed step-by-step instructions regarding startup process, please read one of several startup related books available on amazon or listen to startup lectures on udacity/coursera/youtube or better attend an incubator program near you.