i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Remember the WIRED article in Aug this year named “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet?"

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.

And in conclusion, it predicts that the web is dead. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/business/media/16adco.html?_r=1&ref=te...

Other than a traditional search box for information retrieval, it is not a new idea to employ much richer user interfaces such as voice search, or visual search.

A year ago, Google introduced a smartphone application that lets users take photos of objects and get search results in return. Now they start testing water by working with five national brands to see how consumers interact with a brand.

Apparently, this is an individual classification system in a fun way. (Taken from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mootaz/ftp/html/research.html.)

This is a view of computer science research. Sarcasm abounds. This is supposed to be funny, but it can offend people. Don't read if you are easily offended, and don't get angry if your most favorite research topic is not presented appropriately. If your most favorite pet is not here, please let me know.

Language Understanding has been studied for years. But so far, progresses are only made within a limited domain (think of controlled vocabulary).

In this article, researchers at CMU, Google and Yahoo come together ambitiously trying to build up an ontology space that could capture language meanings based on contents from billions of webpages.

NYT story on July 28^th, 2010, (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/why-dont-more-cameras-offer-gps/) suggests that cameras with GPS functions have been in the market for a year or two. These cameras will provide either built-in or stand-alone add-on devices to capture the latitude and longitude of the location, and ‘geo-tag’ any photo with such information.

New York Times (NYT) published a very interesting article asking the question about the potential future of the social objects. (In case you don’t know what social objects are, here is the article called “Social Objects for Beginners”.) In brief, social objects are essentially the physical objects which embody social stories or social data.