Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Encounter with a Consilience theorist at IGIA

While waiting in line to pass through immigration at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, in Delhi, India, on my way home to Colombo, I met Marc Ragsdale, a fellow working on his version of TOE or on Consilience. He had spent 4 years in India traveling, learning, and working on his theory. A citizen from Oregon, USA and was returning home for christmas to surprise his parents. We exchanged some notes on our theoretical ideas in the cafe sipping on Coca Cola.

I had working experience with the Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner (SHOP), which uses the concepts of 'atoms' to define axioms, operations, and methods to construct a domain and uses states and tasks to construct a problem in the efforts to formulate and solve assignment problems. The concept of atoms extends to system of systems.

I was not able to get a clear picture of Marc's work, perhaps the paragraph below explains why. My thinking was - missing the element of applied experience and simply lingering in the purerist domain may be the dilemma.

Extract from an email he sent me - "As for my work, I am looking forward to getting together a general primer this upcoming year. Though I have been developing the core principles for the past six years they have led to such divergent conclusions that I was often at a loss as to consolidation. Even to this day the topics I touch upon range greatly, from systems organization to political science and physical theory, and though I know that someday they will aggregate into a common framework, it could be be some time before that happens. Nowadays I seem to be focusing more on social and political elements..."

Since then we've exchanged a few notes, I wish him well and success in his work.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

About Spot On Solutions

Order is fundamental to the process of measurement: representing objects by numbers presuppose we can arrange them in order - Peter J. Cameron

Spot on Solutions (Private) Limited (abbreviated as Spot-on) is a company incorporated under the Government of Sri Lanka Department of Registration of Companies Act no 17. Spot-on work initiated in April 2005 out of my home in Mount Lavinia. A lab was setup on December of 2005 in the Amsler building at No 25 Rotunda Gardens, Colombo 03 with 3 software engineers and myself doing the work. The lab was later shifted to 42 Deseram road, Mount Lavinia in March of 2006 and continued to function there for 14 months until May 2007. Now Spot On functions on the basis of a virtual organization working out of Kunming, China.

Spot-on aims to provide affordable technology solutions for progressive enterprises. Today's world requires organizations to be at the top of their game. Planning is one of the most vital aspects in keeping cost and wasted resources down.

The first work of Spot-on was developing an innovative optimization tool for the purpose services planning; hence the acronym SPOT - Service Plan Optimization Tool, which was absorbed in to the company's name. Moreover, planning solutions must be precisely on-the-dot, i.e. Spot-on: an age old Sinhales (Sri Lankan language) phrase insinuating the same - "thi-tha-ta we-de".

Spot-on has now diversified in to the arena of Information Communication Technology (ICT) with an aim of designing affordable ICT solutions, pilot testing the solutions, and conducting operations research analysis on the pilot system in collaboration with national and international partners for the purpose of public sector ICT policy research.