GraphelThe Meaning of an Immutable World

Growth

Prelude

Conversation

Act I

Event Sourcing

• Widely recognized as A Good Thing

• Lambda Architecture, Kafka, Datomic

• Especially for purely functional data

• But how do we work with it in practice?

Inspiration

Is there anything we're already used to that:

• Coordinates interaction between entities

• Consists of a sequence of events

• Can't be altered once it's recorded

Speech Acts

• A conversation is a sequence of speech acts

• A speech act is inherently immutable

• We already use it to create our social world

• Well suited to modeling information exchange

Example: Landing PageHello! We sell widgets. Do you want to order now or read more?

I would like to read some more please.

We have widgets from A to Z. John and Mary also think it's good.

What did Mary say about it?

She said "They're great. Cheap, fast and good!" Should we perhaps call you for some personal advice on widgets?

Yeah sure.

Great? What's your name and phone number?

Example: Admin UIThese are the 50 most recently added widgets: .... You can add one, see the next 50 or pick one you want to change.

I would like to change that one

We currently have ... on file. Do you want to change price, name or stock, or forget about it for now.

I want to give it a different price.

What price do you want to give it?

€29,95

12:47:59 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:34 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:34 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:46 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:46 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:58 at 13 Nov 2014

Example: Admin UIThese are the 50 most recently added widgets: .... You can add one, see the next 50 or pick one you want to change.

I would like to change that one

We currently have ... on file. Do you want to change price, name or stock, or forget about it for now.

I want to give it a different price.

What price do you want to give it?

€29,95

12:47:59 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:34 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:34 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:46 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:46 at 13 Nov 2014

12:48:58 at 13 Nov 2014Datomic

Transactions

Speech Act Generator• Speech acts are communication devices that:

• transfer a model of the world

• narrow behavior to meaningful responses

• Every user interface is a speech act

• Every input lets users perform speech acts

System are just speech act generators

Performing Acts• Acts are inherently performative

• We need give those acts the best stage

• Create dedicated interfaces for types of acts

• Optimising for another kind of performance

• Designing for muscle-memory responses

• Auto-cueing teleprompter for video recordings

Human PerspectiveAs a speech act generator

you are in the middle of a conversation

and will decide what to say next

based on everything you already know

and that has been said until now.

Sounds familiar?

DrawbacksEven when all inputs are immutably the generator still depends on the entire VM, meaning they:

• always have to live server side

• aren't referentially transparent

• must store raw output data for history

(At least until EClj performantly support first class namespaces.)

Scripted

Act II

The Problem

We want to

• embed complex, conditional, layered interactions

• into a purely functional data structure

• with minimal amounts of purely referential code

allowing others to locally anticipate actions.

State of the Art

• Scripts & Forms

• Describe a sequence of events

• Branching/skipping based on responses

• Emails

• Free form pseudo-code description of anything

The Essence

We want to handle a sequence of events and

based on the received event and previous actions

choose from a number of pre-determined actions

State Machines

• Easily understood and represented visually

• Works on the level of granularity of speech acts

• Datomic can store it as a persistent data structure

• Allows responses to refer to a specific state/act

• States are good place for limited, versioned, logic

The Un/Redo Model Given a sequence with full event history

• Undo moves current pointer back in the sequence

• Redo moves the pointer forward

• Actions 'sideline' acts beyond current pointer

• Optionally rolling back their side effects

• Or just create a new version of the current act

Layered Hierarchies

Flat state machines quickly become unwieldy.

You can handle that by nesting state machines,

where each state can be it's own state machine,

allowing for a high degree of composability.

(If you squint you can even see objects there ;)

Reality

Act III

Neurology

We humans have a single focus which can:

• switch between contexts

• nest contexts inside other contexts

• maintain state (fuzzy history) per context

• narrow action, and perception, through context

The Web

States and Transitions• Each path in a website is a state

• Path fragments refer to hierarchical levels

/inbox/12/my-thread/73/third-response#reply-to-all

• Clicking a link (GET) is argument-less transition

• Submitting a form (POST) an argumented transition

• With redirects leading to a new state

HATEOAS built in

• The difficulty of HATEOAS lies in discoverability

• We can have tons of speech act types Yes/No, Multiple Choice, Forms, Video, Audio, Drawings, Payments, Social Shares, GPS, Weight

• But each act type has just a few well-defined exits

• Making discoverability not just feasible, but built in

Multi Service Support

• States are defined as write-once, read-many acts

• Any service can offer those same guarantees

• Enabling iFrame-based third party act types

• Even with seamless authentication using OAuth

History as a Sequence

• The browser history is the event history

• Clicking back is undo; forward redo.

• Same for scrolling past sections/paragraphs

• A vertically arranged sequence of acts

Mobile• Focused speech act UIs work well full screen

• History support through a rewind gesture or

• Swiping across a visual "sequence of acts"

• Automatically accommodates all aspect ratios

• Nested contexts as hide-on-scroll navigation bars

• Multi service with intents or protocol ping-pong

Notifications Lock Screens, Watches, Glass

• Key information can be summarized

• Simple response actions performed inline

• Single click resumes full operational state

• Voice recognition with restricted vocabulary

Email

Cross Device• Traditionally syncing across devices is hard

• Live Datalog queries on Datomic make it possible

• Offline viewing can be built in through e.g. Datascript

• Offline speculative operation possible through analysis:

• Conflict-free work through continuity of user memory

• Informed speculative work on branch prediction

• Natural conflict resolution schemes either way

Business

• Your interactions all have certain (shared) goals Persuading people, Collecting profiles, Losing weight

• Your success depends on your ability to help your customers achieve their goals

• You have access to a complete view on all of your customer interactions

So what do you do?

Going Meta• Query the collection of all your interactions

• Identify areas of improvementLost customers, Plateauing users, Losing engagement

• Design (experimental) corrective action

• Select affected customers and apply the action

• Automate the process if it ends up working

and changing an existing interaction?

Experimentation

Act IV

A Sense of History

Repeatability is key for a successful experiment.

Luckily, as long as we can display stored acts,

especially if they contain the creation process,

we can re-experience the entire user journey

and create transcripts/re-presentations from them.

Stay In Your FlowWe want to change interactions with users in them,

which used to be a prohibitively hard problem.

But it comes completely for free if we

• store state machine definitions in Datomic

• assign users to specific versions of them

• store the code used for branching

One Step At a TimeWe run experiments to learn from them

so we want only a single variable to change.

Single-act interfaces are great experimental units.

The sequence approach perfectly isolates them,

making it the perfect platform for A/B testing

(or any other type of sociological research.)

Machine Learning

Classical A/B testing is about teaching people things.

What if you care more about results than wisdom?

Let the machine do the learning!

Multi-armed bandit can optimise for you,

automatically choosing versions giving best results

Deploying Experiments

Isn't every deployment an experiment?

Just deploy new versions of (inter)act(ion)s

and migrate to them at your leisure

or even have a multi-armed-bandit

automagically phase out bad deploys

Learning Intelligence

And do you still remember this?

….

Learning Intelligence

"When using such a generator

you are in the middle of a conversation

and will decide what to say next

based on everything you already know

and that has happened until now."

The act generator is the perfect foundation

for bootstrapping machine intelligence

that works the same way humans do:

through interacting and experimenting;

but in a controlled, limited, fashion...

Learning Intelligence

Federation

Postlude

NSA-proofing

• So far we assumed everything runs on a server

• That means the NSA is, or can be, watching

• People will never speak freely if that’s the case

• Nor will companies share all their data with you

To Each Their Own• Each participant can control their own data

• And reference data used from other participants State machine definitions. Branching logic. User acts.

• Everyone gets a namespaced Datomic-style DB

• Work with live/pub-sub Datalog cross-DB querying

• Based on a.o. Nikitonsky’s Datomic as a Protocol

On A Need-to-Know Basis

• Encrypt and sign all your data with a personal key

• Share by encrypting with others' public signatures

• Share data, by context, on a need-to-know basis

• Have privacy correspond to cryptographical reality.

Signed, Identity• Identities are defined by serialization

• People can (temporarily) assume an identity

• Sign everything you created under that identity

• Retroactively revokable when compromised

• Publish publicly for a timestamped proof

• Enabling e.g. secure ad-hoc referendum voting

A New Paradigm

• Using materialized views on persistent databases

• You can create a view of all public information

• Including aggregations of private data

• And similar views of accessible data per recipient

• And encrypt those materialised views accordingly

A New Paradigm

Laying the foundation for a computing paradigm

in which you can communicate securely and

subscribe to, download and query

every piece of data you have access to

and not a single thing more.