Ever heard of the “Britney Spears problem“? Contrary to what it sounds like, it’s got nothing to do with the dalliances of the rich and famous. Rather, it’s a computing puzzle related to data tracking: Precisely tailoring a data-rich service, like a search engine or fiber internet connection, to individual users hypothetically requires tracking every packet sent to and from the service provider, which needless to say isn’t practical. To get around this, most companies leverage algorithms that make guesses about the frequency of data exchanged by hashing it (i.e., divvying it up into pieces). But this necessarily sacrifices nuance — telling patterns that emerge naturally in large data volumes fly under the radar.

Luckily, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe they’ve devised a viable alternative that relies on machine learning. In a newly published paper (“Learning-Based Frequency Estimation Algorithms“), they describe a system — dubbed LearnedSketch, because of the way it “sketches” data in a data stream — that predicts if specific data elements will appear more frequently than others and, if they in fact do, autonomously separates them from the rest of the hashed portions.

The paper’s authors say it’s the first machine learning-based approach not only for frequency estimation, but for streaming algorithms, a class of algorithms in which input data is presented as a sequence and can be examined only in a few passes. They’re popularly used in security systems and natural language processing pipelines, among many applications.

“[S]treaming algorithms typically assume generic data and do not leverage useful patterns or properties of their input,” the team explains. “For example, in text data, the word frequency is known to be inversely correlated with the length of the word. Analogously, in network data, certain applications tend to generate more traffic than others. If such properties can be harnessed, one could design frequency estimation algorithms that are much more efficient than the existing ones.”

In experiments, LearnedSketch showed an aptitude for detecting and isolating rich bits of data. For instance, trained on 210 million data packets from a Tier 1 ISP, it outperformed existing approaches for estimating the amount of internet traffic in a network, achieving upwards of 57 percent less error. And given 3.8 million unique AOL queries, it managed to estimate the number of queries for an internet search term with upwards of 71 percent less error.

Moreover, LearnedSketch was highly generalizable; the structures it learned could be applied to items it hadn’t seen before. In one experiment that tasked it with determining which internet connections had the most traffic, it clustered different connections by the prefix of their destination IP address, indicating an awareness of the rule that internet subscribers which generate large traffic tend to share a particular prefix.

The researchers believe that LearnedSketch (or an AI system like it) might someday be used to track trending topics on social media, or to identify troublesome spikes in web traffic and improve ecommerce sites’ product recommendations. But really, said PhD student and coauthor Chen-Yu Hsu, the sky’s the limit.

“These kinds of results show that machine learning is very much an approach that could be used alongside the classic algorithmic paradigms like ‘divide and conquer’ and dynamic programming,” Hsu added. “We combine the model with classical algorithms so that our algorithm inherits worst-case guarantees from the classical algorithms naturally.”

The research is scheduled to be presented in May at the International Conference on Learning in New Orleans.

I’ve interviewed so many amazing innovators that I decided it was time to collect some of the top tips I’ve heard from them in driving STEM innovation, that is, in science, technology, engineering and math.

Here are 9 key tips from just the past few months:

1. Have an audacious goal: The most extraordinary innovations come from setting extraordinary goals. Just ask NASA about landing a man on the moon (or their goal for Mars today). Or ask Elon Musk about SpaceX or Tesla's reinventing the automobile company and electric vehicles for mass adoption.  Or, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was bartending before she won her historic seat in Congress last November. Or, ask Ellen Stofan, the new head of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum about their massive $1 billion complete transformation of the museum underway today.

2. Define the outcome, not the process: What’s your endgame?  Is it a new product to fill a market need?  Or are you looking for a creative way to reuse materials you would otherwise be throwing away, to reduce your waste?  Is it a market need that your competitors are filling and you want to make sure you are competitive there? Be specific about the outcome, but let the process of getting there evolve.

3. Entertain outlier ideas: STEM people can be very analytical and seek to narrow the focus to reduce the number of things to investigate, but this is detrimental to innovation. You need to at least explore every idea, especially the “crazy” ones – those might be where the magic is, if not in that specific idea, in a derivative of it.

4. Hire the outliers: Bring people to the table who would not seem to know anything about the challenge. They will make you think differently and that’s a gift. Try to get customers there too!

5. Rotate people’s jobs: This enables people to shift their perspective and exercise mental muscles that have not been exercised before, which also strengthens their ability to think creatively. This is one of the secret sauces I’ve seen in women who have succeeded as innovators in STEM;  they’ve done different jobs, either in the same company or in different organizations.  Then they bring that new thinking to their problem-solving to come up with more effective solutions.

6. Caution teams to park their assumptions outside: We all have assumptions. Sometimes they are biases, sometimes they are just assumptions about how things work or get done.  But we need to be aware of them and leave them outside the door, so we can be open to those “crazy” ideas and accept ideas from unexpected people and sources. This is something Mary Snapp, Microsoft Philanthropies CEO emphasized.

7. 7. Have a diverse set of people at the table – diverse skills, experiences, genders, ethnicities, ages, role in the organization or in relation to the challenge at hand.  Each of them will bring a valuable perspective and together they will force the group to think differently and will surface new ways of approaching the challenge, as well as new ideas for solving it.

Access ideas from all levels and departments that touch the are you want to innovate, including and especially your customers.  They have a cool idea you haven’t thought of, or they’ll tell you something that triggers another idea.   Your customers’ wish lists are the most important, of course, but also tap customer service, since they hear the complaints first.

8. Try to solve a different problem:  Tackling sustainability initiatives, for example, often result in unearthing solutions to other challenges too, includes cost reductions or greater efficiencies, or better processes, or new technologies. You never know....

9. Frame “failure” into “practice”: Sure, you want an idea that hits a home run, or creates the next Amazon, or helps you create a new market for your products. But it’s a process to get there, and you can’t short-circuit the trial and error process, no matter how much market research you have. This is why the innovation programs for new entrepreneurs includes so much customer discovery. Even when you ask the market what they want, they don’t always know it until they see it (who knew we “needed” an iphone before Steve Jobs presented it?). Or, ask the women who fought for decades to win women the right to vote - including my great-great aunt, Miriam Michelson - which we commemorate the centennial of this year (the 19th Amendment),

If we call an experiment or a launch or a crisis a “failure,” we shut down the options for addressing it because we demoralize the people involved.  If we just see that it didn’t meet our expectations, we learned another way that didn’t work, which gets us closer to our goal.

As Thomas Edison famously said after he finally successfully invented the light bulb, in response to people who thought his previous attempts were failures, “I didn’t fail, I just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

It’s very easy to overlook the “clutter” created on your website because it’s in the digital space. Like the old saying goes: out of site, out of mind.

Think of it this way, if you had a brick-and-mortar business, and the backroom or sales floor was overflowing with old catalogs, sale product, empty boxes, and other clutter, you would address it immediately. Your website has to be treated the same way.

Customers give you about 90 seconds before they make up their mind about your product. For your website, assume you have less than a tenth of that time to get a user to click through. Most of the product’s initial impact is based on color and design, but there are other factors. If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, for example, you’ve already lost 53% of your mobile users.

Having a website that’s up to date is vital for continuous sales. But day-to-day operations are demanding, and often leave little room for tinkering with the website. Let’s look at five crucial aspects of your website that should be addressed periodically to keep your website in good operating order.

Give That Old Design Work A Makeover

If you’re using an old logo that needs some new life, or you want a more impactful brand look to improve your bounce rate, you can crowdsource your design work with crowdspring. You’ll get work submitted from 50 to 150 designers, and you buy the work you like. Using generic templates like Canva may be a good solution if you have no budget, but canned design work says nothing about your identity and will hurt you in the long run.

DIY visual design is usually not recommended. Professionals exist for a reason. But if you just want to add some fresh photos to your site and you’re not familiar with the nuances of photoshop, you can try online photo editors like piZap or PicMonkey. And for video, there are options such as PowToon to make snappy custom animations.

Review Webpages With Low Traffic

One look over your google analytics and you can identify which pages of your site are highly trafficked and which ones aren’t.

For the pages that don’t have enough traffic, you should invest some time in doing keyword research and once you have longtail keywords that you want to optimize for, rewrite the copy for low performing pages incorporating the new keywords. This will bring more traffic to those pages over time.

Hire Hackers To Test Your Website For Weaknesses

A stale, outdated website may deter customers, but it’s very attractive to hackers. You don’t have to do much to avoid being a target, just make sure all your security patches, firewalls, and other security features are up to date. Find a good, inexpensive SSL/TLS provider if you don’t already have one. And brush up on best practices (or mistakes to avoid) for managing your public key infrastructure.

When your security is in tact, enlist a penetration testing client such as Metasploit to assess your website for any vulnerabilities. The company evaluates your site from a hacker’s point of view, and equips you to stay a step ahead of current hacking technology. They offer an open source version as well as a commercial one, with online support for the learning curve.

Design A Website That’s Easy To Update In Real-Time

Running a website is difficult, and if you can’t be bothered with another task or an expensive web developer, consider a different way of managing your site and driving traffic. Having an updated website is crucial because majority of consumers are searching for local information online before making a buying decision. Millennials are more likely than any other generations to start with research, and whether they begin on social media or go directly to the local business website, up-to-date information is crucial.

Consider alternatives to a traditional small business website with apps like GoNation. A free local business page on the platform does pretty much everything a small business website does. One key benefit, aside from ease of use, is a feature that can transform an outdated static website into a fully mobile website, while maintaining full control over your digital footprint. With two taps on your phone, you can add events, make product or menu updates, add photos, update your business hours and more. Updated information shows up instantly on your website and is pushed out to other major platforms where your data lives, such as social media and community websites, saving business owners time.

“The goal of GoNation is to make local business information relevant across the internet and not to complicate its purpose anymore, which is to quickly and accurately educate the consumer,” says Chaz Tanase, GoNation’s CEO “GoNation is designed to be the solution for both sides.”

Keep Your Web Copy Clean

If you’re writing or editing your own web copy, make sure you’re using a plugin like Grammarly. Small grammar or spelling mistakes are easy to make and look unprofessional. Grammarly is a free extension for Chrome, but requires a signup to unlock all the features. As with visual design, it’s always a good idea to work with professionals.

Now that your visuals are touched up, your security is tight, you’re connecting to locals and your copy is clean, you can start to measure the positive sales impact on your e-commerce business.

Two months ago, I had a huge writer’s block as I was preparing the outline for my new book. To get me unstuck, my writing coach gave me an assignment in which I had to list out all the pet names I’ve ever been called, pick one, and write a short story about a memory associated with that name.

What started off as a fun writing exercise about a childhood nickname evolved into a dark and elaborate story about a few times when I was taken advantage of as a child, and the anger I harbored because of it. I was taken aback by my own story: I didn’t realize just how much this old memory was still affecting me until I put it down on paper. Not only was my resentment showing up in my personal life, but it was also influencing how I ran my business.

This made me wonder… what else was I hiding from myself?

An idea popped into my head.

Given that I’m a brand story coach and make a living out of helping entrepreneurs tell their story, I couldn’t sit with the suspicion that I was subconsciously hiding stories from myself that were affecting my mindset, emotions, and business.

I decided to tackle this by creating a challenge called 30 Days of Radical Rawness. For 30 days, I vowed to share the rawest, most vulnerable stories from my life that have inherently shaped who I am today on social media. I didn’t hold anything back: I wrote stories about molestation, death, heartbreaks, and life-changing memories that I hadn’t shared publicly before. I revealed the good and the bad, and for every story, I presented a lesson.

The purpose of sharing these stories was not self-victimization, but rather empowerment. I wanted to showcase how I’ve alchemized my pain into strength and used it as the bricks to lay down the foundation for a life that I’m excited to wake up to every single day.

I didn’t expect what happened next.

Almost immediately, I was inundated with hundreds of comments, private messages, and emails from clients, students, and followers responding to what I shared. These stories struck a chord with my audience.

Some had gone through similar experiences and thanked me for giving them courage and inspiration to face their own demons; even those who hadn’t could still relate to the emotions that I shared. Regardless of the actual content of each story, one simple realization rang true: our success is not only measured by our achievements, but also by the struggles we’ve gone through to get there.

My most popular story was about how an emotionally abusive relationship triggered long-term acne that scarred my face. I almost didn’t post it because I was so ashamed. But then, comments started flooding in of people thanking me for sharing because they, too, had gone through similar situations and now didn’t feel so alone. I even had a woman message me saying that the man from my story had hurt her in a similar way, and his best friend reached out apologizing for his friend’s actions. The experience was extremely cathartic: I released old pain and helped others do the same.

Seeing the responses from this challenge was worth the entire month of sitting in front of my laptop, sometimes with tears in my eyes, agonizing and wondering why I was sharing so much of myself for the sake of vulnerability.

On a personal front, I experienced a tremendous amount of healing. By opening up about stories I’d hardly spoken aloud before, I worked through unresolved feelings and gave myself much-needed closure. On a business front, bringing these stories into the light helped me identify how I was holding myself back from performing in my business. For example, I grew up with a deep-rooted fear of people taking advantage of me that no longer serves me in my work. I let go of limiting beliefs and formed a deeper connection of trust and loyalty with my audience in the process.

This 30 Days of Radical Rawness challenge was a much-needed cry for authenticity in an entrepreneurship industry that is increasingly focusing on promoting the millionaire laptop lifestyle, the amazingness of being an entrepreneur, and carelessly dropping buzzwords like “location-independent,” “freedom lifestyle,” and “make money online” like it’s everybody’s business.

What many of these entrepreneurs aren’t showing the public, however, is everything they’ve gone through to get to that point of success. The long hours working, the psychological and logistical struggles, the past traumas and issues that motivated them to carve out this path to begin with.

There’s not enough talk about how entrepreneurship tests one’s self-worth and identity (which is exactly what makes it extremely rewarding when it works out). We are not spending enough time revealing the hardships that lead us to choose entrepreneurship, the moments of failure and shame, or the stories that we may not even know are affecting us until we openly discuss them.

Entrepreneurship is challenging because you have to do the inner work. Even when it hurts. Even when you’re sitting in front of a pool with your laptop and sipping on a pina colada. You still can’t escape yourself, and if you attempt to, you’ll end up creating a business that consumes rather than fulfills you.

As a coach, it is my responsibility to go as deep as I take my clients, and that starts with facing my story in its entirety.

I’m not saying you should air out your dirty laundry to the internet. But it’s worth pondering: what are you keeping from yourself that others could learn from? How can you shift from only addressing your successes to giving your audience a more vulnerable — and as a result, realistic, authentic, and relatable — look into your life?

You may surprise yourself when the results not only heal and evolve you as a human being but also help you build a stronger, more profitable business that is rooted in your truth.

The answers are contained within your story. Take the time to open it up, look at it, and (dare I say) to share it. The healing and progress that results from this will change your life -- and that of others.