i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

StatSheet recently launched a network of websites devoted to individual college basketball teams. All the content and articles on these individual sites are apparently written by software not humans. The founder of StatSheet, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as "Robot Army" and this type of writing activity as "robo journalism."

I came across an article about the BIObus, which is currently travelling across North America collecting insects and other invertebrates. The BIObus supports the Barcode of Life Project, which is a collaborative effort among researchers to create a digital identification system for life on Earth. Scientists take tissue samples from each specimen, extract DNA and then register the sample into a global database.

I think that San Francisco's current system of regulating street food vendors is an example of a classification problem. Personally, I think that street food should be classified under activity that the health deparment regulates because I think food service is related to public health. But that's not how it is in San Francisco.

In this article, Intel’s Chief Technology officer Justin Rattner talks about context-aware devices that can “learn about who you are, how you live, work and play”. He suggests that future handheld devices will use a variety of sensory technology in order to collect and analyze information about their human user. For example, last Wednesday at IDF, Rattner demoed “a television remote control that figures out who is holding it based on how it is held and learns the viewer’s entertainment preferences”.