i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

I came across the following video: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/64111786/

This is 40-minute video exploring the history of Google and the company's current endeavors.  The video follows the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, from their first meeting at Stanford to the new media-company that collides with old media businesses of newspaper, books, movies and television.

Published Monday, the NYT wrote about the Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL). This article touches upon many topics from recent lectures!

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.

One interesting service that provides an ontology for common things is Freebase (which is now part of Google). You can look for a concept/person/place and Freebase will tell you different domains in which the concept is used. For example, if you look for Berkeley, you can refine your search for Berkeley (USA), Berkeley (UK), or Berkeley (University). You can go crazy and see that all the information that Freebase has about Berkeley is available as an RDF file.

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

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.

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.