i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/the-laws-of-information-chemis.html

From The New York Times Magazine
New Vocabulary for Parents
by Lisa Belkin

Last week, NYT featured Julius Eulberg, a German who loves collecting antiques, especially porcelain birds. This piece made me think of Kimra's chapter-- especially the part about retrieving the chair. Can you imagine having to fetch one of his 300 + birds? How would he describe it in order for you know which porcelain bird he was talking about?

NPR recently featured a story on religiously-specific search engines. These search engines filter all results based on specific religious beliefs. There are currently separate search engines for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Besides the controversy over it being considered censorship, these search engines raise questions on how the returned results are being selected; particularly who is doing the filtering and what criteria is being used.

The Deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

This blog would like to explore two different Identification / Organization approaches to explore value in their retrieval results.

“When a tiger dies, it leaves its skin behind. When a person dies, he leaves his name behind.” Chinese proverb

As you know, we die someday. We will leave what we had, made and used. Nowadays, we are living on the web as well as physical world. On the web, we not only meet friends and family, also make a new friends. More works are done by and seen on the web. What is not on the web is sometimes regarded as even not existing. Then, what will happen to “my existence on the web” after I died?

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.

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”.

With a 'radical overhaul' of its website, Twitter has to decide how to describe itself. 'Media company' or 'Content Aggregator' or both?

Xerox launched a new marketing campaign about assisting major brands with business process and document management.

1) Personalized mailing offers for Target customers by collecting and analyzing individual's shopping habits

2) Translating and delivering handbooks and technical manuals for Ducati around the globe      

A service that extracts associations and their relationships to entires in Wikipedia, i.e. crawling a wikipedia side an generating tags based on the content. The Platfrom works like a search engine wher users type in a word and an ontology that distinguishes between people, places, labels etc. is displayed.

dev.sigwp.org/WikipediaThesaurusV3/

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is reporting that the the US government's classification and safegauring of sensitive in information is in complete disarray [PDF]. The problem it seems that there are at least 130 different labelling for such information. Here are 20 out of the 130 possible clearance labels:

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.