Hide Null Value in Filter But Keep in Calculation (Tableau)

 

Business Request:  Hide Null value in filter 'Downtime Type' but still keep it in calculation and show only 'Planned' and 'Unplanned'.  The reason is having Null value in the filter might be confusing for the users.

Solution:

    1)  Create a fake field to assign Null a different value that exists in the data set for field 'Downtime Type'.

        @Fake Field

        CASE [Downtime Type]

        When null then 'Planned'

        Else [Downtime Type]

        END

    2)  From this 'Fake Field', create a set 'Fake Field Set'

    3)  Create a 'Fake Field Set Filter' to be used as a filter

        @Fake Field Set Filter

        CASE [Downtime Type]

        When null then True

        Else [Downtime Type] in [Fake Field Set]

    4)  Drag @Fake Field Set Filter to filter shelf and select 'True'.  Use 'Fake Field Set' as a filter which should have only 2 values 'Planned' and 'Unplanned'.

Many thanks to Diego Martinez for help with the solution.

ServiceNow Sales and Order Management (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow Sales and Order Management (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow's Sales and Order Management (SOM) enables organizations to create one continuous value stream by managing the lead to renewal lifecycle on a single platform.  SOM helps teams to define new products, services, and catalog-driven fulfillment policies quickly, automates sales and order fulfillment processes, and empowers service staff to manage post-sale activities.  The results:  Organizations can bring offerings to market faster, accelerate and boost revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer experience.

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of world-class products, now supercharged with AI agents.

ServiceNow Manufacturing Commercial Operations (Podcast)

    

ServiceNow Manufacturing Commercial Operations (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow's Manufacturing Commercial Operations platform is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline sales, service, and support operations for manufacturing businesses. The platform offers a suite of applications and capabilities, including AI-powered workflows and tools for order management, customer service, and channel partner engagement, all built on the ServiceNow AI Platform. It provides various packages to suit different business needs and scales with growth, aiming to improve revenue, reduce costs, and enhance customer experiences.

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of premium products, now supercharged with AI agents.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (Podcast)

     

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow's Customer Service Management (CSM) enhances every aspect of the customer lifecycle.  CSM accelerates self-service resolution capabilities, automates customer operations processes across organization, and empowers agents with real-time intelligence and productivity tools. The platform harnesses the power of the whole organization and leverages AI and automation to improve customer service, reduce costs, and enhance agent productivity. 

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of superlative products, now supercharged with AI agents.

ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric (Podcast)

     

ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric is a new foundation designed to unify enterprise data from disparate systems, granting both employees and AI agents real-time, secure, and governed access.  This capability enables organizations to connect, understand, and act on any data to power workflows and solve complex business challenges.  By eliminating the need to duplicate or transfer data, the platform facilitates faster integration, lower costs, and continuous process improvement.  Ultimately, Workflow Data Fabric aims to transform business operations by bringing data, AI, and workflows together on a single platform.

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of industry-defining products, now supercharged with AI agents.

Qubits, Physical & Logical (Podcast)

 

   

Qubits, Physical & Logical (Podcast)

   

In quantum computing, a qubit is the fundamental unit of information, analogous to a bit (binary digit) in classical computing, but capable of representing 0, 1, or a superposition of both.

A physical qubit is a real, physical system (like a trapped ion or a superconducting circuit) that can exist in a superposition of states.

A logical qubit is a collection of multiple physical qubits to achieve greater stability and error correction.  It's not a physical entity, but a redundant encoding of qubit's quantum state using multiple physical qubits.

Listen to the podcast for detail explanation.

NVIDIA GTC 2025 (Podcast)

 

   

NVIDIA GTC 2025 (Podcast)

   

NVIDIA GTC 2025 in San Jose has concluded with a big fanfare and what an amazing conference it was.  This developers’ conference was the destination for all things AI and more, an incredible place to explore and exchange grand ideas from agentic AI to humanoid robots to quantum computing.

Quantum Computing

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang with CEOs of quantum computing companies D-Wave, IonQ, Pasqal, Rigetti, QuEra, Quantinuum, SEEQC, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Alice & Bob, Quantum Circuits

GTC 2025 debuted Quantum Day, showcasing the rapidly progressing field of quantum computing where the impact will be far-reaching.  This next-generation field will push the technological boundary with extremely fast computing that's beyond today's fastest supercomputers.  Foreseeable future will have QPUs, GPUs, and CPUs working together to extend classical computing.  

The challenges of quantum computing are scalability, fidelity, error correction, coherent time, and latency.  New methods and algorithms will have to be created in order to apply quantum computing to real-world problems (trillion-dollars business idea here).

Strategic Partnership  

ServiceNow expanded NVIDIA partnership to collaborate on Agentic AI capabilities that allow corporate customers to assess AI Agent performance on the powerful ServiceNow Platform.

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of next-level products, now supercharged with AI agents.

Matryoshka Embedding (Podcast)

 

   

Matryoshka Embedding (Podcast)

   

Matryoshka embeddings are an advanced concept in machine learning, particularly in the field of natural language processing (NLP).  The term is inspired by the Russian Matryoshka dolls, which are a series of nested dolls that fit inside one another.  In the context of embeddings, this nesting idea is extended to create hierarchical relationships between different levels of information.  Let’s break down the concept in detail:

What are Embeddings?

Embeddings are vector representations of items like words, sentences, or images, which enable the capture of contextual relationships between those items.  These representations allow complex data like text to be used in machine learning models.  In language models, word embeddings like Word2Vec, GloVe, or BERT convert words into numerical vectors that capture meaning and semantic relationships between words.

Matryoshka Embeddings - Concept

Matryoshka embeddings leverage the idea of nesting to represent different levels of information within a single structure.  This approach enables a hierarchical understanding of data, where the representations capture details at multiple resolutions or granularities.

Hierarchy & Nesting in Matryoshka Embeddings

• Nested Hierarchy:  Matryoshka embeddings are designed to represent entities at multiple levels of abstraction in a hierarchical manner.  For example, in a language model, we could have word-level embeddings, sentence-level embeddings, and document-level embeddings all represented within the same framework.

• Shared Information:  The embeddings at a higher level (e.g., a document) contain the information of lower levels (e.g., sentences and words) in a nested manner, just like a Matryoshka doll containing smaller dolls.  This allows for different granularity of information to be available depending on the specific requirement.

• Multi-resolution Understanding:  These embeddings allow a multi-resolution understanding of data, meaning you can look at the data in broad strokes (e.g., document-level) or zoom into specific details (e.g., word-level).  This flexibility is useful in various machine learning tasks, such as information retrieval, text classification, or semantic similarity.

Technical Implementation

Matryoshka embeddings are often constructed using transformer-based architectures, where attention mechanisms play a key role in allowing the model to learn the hierarchical relationships.  Here's how it generally works:

• Context Aggregation:  Starting with word embeddings, the context for each word is aggregated at the sentence level to create a sentence embedding.  This process continues to aggregate context at the paragraph level, and eventually at the document level.

• Attention Mechanisms:  Multi-head attention layers allow the embeddings to attend to different levels of abstraction, ensuring that information flows from the smallest (word-level) to the largest (document-level) effectively.

• Loss Functions for Hierarchy:  During training, the loss function is designed to ensure that the embeddings correctly capture information at all levels.  For example, they need to preserve relationships at both the local (word-sentence) and global (sentence-document) levels.

Real-World Examples

• Document Classification in Legal Domain:  Imagine you have a large number of legal documents.  Each document is composed of paragraphs, sentences, and words, with different granularities of meaning.  Matryoshka embeddings can be used to represent these documents so that you have a representation for individual sentences, paragraphs, and entire documents, allowing you to:
• Classify whether a document is related to civil law or criminal law

• Extract relevant paragraphs that contain specific clauses

• Retrieve similar legal cases based on both sentence-level and document-level semantics

• Question Answering Systems:  In question answering, hierarchical relationships are crucial to finding accurate answers.  For example:

• A Matryoshka embedding can represent a book chapter, a paragraph within that chapter, and individual sentences within the paragraph.  When answering a user query, the system can use the hierarchical structure to determine which level of information is most relevant, allowing it to zoom into the paragraph or sentence level to extract specific details.

• Customer Support Chatbots:  A customer support chatbot often has to deal with text at different levels of abstraction.  Consider:

• A user types a question about a product.  The chatbot uses a Matryoshka embedding that nests product-level information, feature-level information, and specific troubleshooting tips.

• Depending on how generic or specific the user's question is, the bot can choose the appropriate level of response.  For a high-level question like "Tell me about Product X," the system provides a general response, whereas for "How do I reset the password?" it can zoom in on the password reset process.

• Video Captioning:  Matryoshka embeddings can also be used in video understanding and captioning.  Imagine a video is broken down into scenes, shots, and frames:

• The embedding for the entire video (document-level) contains aggregated information from scenes (paragraph-level), which are in turn made up of shots (sentence-level), and individual frames (word-level).

• This nesting allows for comprehensive video summarization at different resolutions.  For example, a short summary can describe the video’s overall theme, while a detailed caption can describe events shot by shot.

Advantages of Matryoshka Embeddings

• Scalable Representation:  They provide a scalable way to represent complex information, allowing applications to handle both fine-grained and coarse-grained information.

• Flexible Context Handling:  Depending on the task, different levels of embeddings can be utilized, leading to more efficient and task-specific model performance.

• Preserves Context:  Matryoshka embeddings ensure that relationships between different parts of data are preserved hierarchically, which is particularly important in tasks involving long documents or structured data.

Challenges

• Complex Training:  Training Matryoshka embeddings can be computationally intensive, as it involves maintaining coherence across multiple levels of hierarchy.

• Attention Overhead:  The attention mechanism that facilitates hierarchical representation can add significant overhead, especially for very large documents or highly complex nested structures.

Conclusion

Matryoshka embeddings are powerful for representing hierarchical data, similar to how Russian Matryoshka dolls are nested inside one another.  By allowing for multi-resolution, nested representations, they enable deep learning models to handle complex relationships within text, images, or even video data more effectively.  They are particularly useful in areas like document classification, question answering, and video captioning, where understanding different levels of context is crucial.

ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (Podcast)

    

ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (Podcast)

   

ServiceNow's Legal Service Delivery provides a set of applications (Legal Request, Legal Investigations, Legal Counsel Center, Legal Matter Management, Legal Contracts...) to deliver digital experiences for efficient legal operations by reducing risk and accelerating business outcomes.  

Please visit ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, to explore more about its portfolio of exceptional products, now supercharged with AI agents.

Maintain Rank after Filtering (Tableau)

This table is showing states with sales, using RANK() function to rank highest sales.  The requirement is to have this filter using this formula:

 

@Profit Ratio & Sales Per Customer

IF [Profit Ratio] >= 0.3 and [Sales per Customer] >= 700 

then "Excellent Profit Ratio & Sales/Customer" 

ELSE "OK Profit Ratio & Sales/Customer" END

 

Issue:  When this formula is used as filter and selected for 'Excellent Profit Ratio & Sales/Customer', the ranking is changed for the states, i.e., Michigan is ranked 1, Indiana 2, Delaware 3...  But this is not correct, we would like to keep the ranking the same after filtering, i.e., Michigan 9, Indiana 13, Delaware 21...

 

Solution:  Change formula above to a table calculation filter using LOOKUP function with a 0 offset.  

 

@Profit Ratio & Sales Per Customer (LOOKUP)

LOOKUP (

IF [Profit Ratio] >= 0.3 and [Sales per Customer] >= 700 

then "Excellent Profit Ratio & Sales/Customer" 

ELSE "OK Profit Ratio & Sales/Customer" END

,0)

 

This change will make the formula a table calculation filter, which in the Order of Operations is after table calculation.  So RANK() as a table calculation will take precedence over the table calculation filter.