Games to Play

The games that were covered in Luis Von Ahn presentation below are very interesting to play. I just did not know that there are people who spend 20 hours a day playing! Anyhow, I played the ESP game and found it very interesting. I am providing the links to the games so you can try them in your free time.

Have fun!

- The ESP game: to index pictures
- Peekaboom: to identify objects in an indexed picture - the pics come from the ESP game
- Phetch: picture hunting where the seeker needs to find a pic on the web that matches the discription provided by the other player .. I think. I did not play this one yet!

Human Computation - by Luis Von Ahn

Google TechTalks July 26, 2006 Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship. ABSTRACT Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it. I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.

A word on Creativity and education from Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson is an influential advocate for the importance of creativity in education. He makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for overhauling our education system. [Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA] This is a must see to all the parents out there... Enjoy!

Live at KDD 2006!

The 12th international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD 2006) is taking place in Philadelphia from August 20th to 23rd. My advisor Tony (Xiahua) Hu is the chair of local arrangements committee so I am part of the student volunteer group that is comprised of PhD students from UPenn, Temple and Drexel. We have about 750 attendees total, which is a good size for a specialized conference. I will have light attendance this year. But now that I have the proceedings book I can look for interesting papers and discuss with colleagues. Today I spent the day in a workshop that addresses knowledge discovery on the web. There were some very interesting papers that I will be discussing later on my blog.

Hooked on Sudoku!

Sudoku is a really cool game and I am totally into it now. I have to play it at least once every day. I am in the habit now to start a puzzle and solve it before bed every night. I did not know much about it few months ago and some friends at school got me started and now I can not stop. It is exciting and makes your mind creative in coming up with new strategies to solve the puzzle. Anyhow, I would like to build a java program that people could invoke to provide them the next step when they are stuck. I do get stuck sometimes! I will load the program when it is ready. Schools everywhere in the US use Sudoku as part of the science curriculum to stimulate thinking. I had a good time playing it with my 12-year old nephew.

I highly recommend giving it a try if you have not done so already. Have fun :)

You Tube is Now Promoting Music Video Clips

You Tube serves videos to 60% of the Internet users that are interested in videos. Now they are in communications with all the major television network and music artists to serve short music clips as promotional items. Here is a video clip of what CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley had to say about this.

Google Chinese Style!

Google and China.com have joint forces through a partnership agreement. This partnership will allow the two companies to leverage resources across advertising, search technologies, branding and content. China.com is one of the most visited portals by Chinese professionals. "China.com firmly believes that this partnership between the world's premier search company and one of China's leading portals with over 5 million daily users is a perfect fit," said Xiaowei Chen, Executive Director and CFO of China.com.
Click here to access the full story.

When Sharing is Bad!

AOL released search query data of 500,000 customers from March to May 2006 without customers’ consent. The purpose was to provide this real data to the Information Retrieval research community for examination and discovery purposes. Screen id were not released and replaced by a unique id. As you can imagine, so many people objected to this and considered it a breach of privacy forcing AOL to unexposed the data file, which they did. Get more info at digg where 2,512 pepole so far responded to this story. However, some believe that the data currently is in the hands of about 1,000 people. This means that the data can not be re-claimed and will be further disseminated. This is the magical power of the web!

The Future of Indexing

Document indexing is a key to good search. The better the index is, the more relevant the search results are likely to be. However, indices are traditionally viewed as a static vocabulary structure that represents a document collection. There used to be human involvement in indexing, which did not work and had many limitations for obvious reasons. With massive amounts of data finding its way to the web the need for automatic indexing became pressing. So nowadays, most indices are generated automatically by machines. However, IR community still views indices if a collection as a static set. I believe that indices are properties that evolve and grow over time due to the social construct of collection usage. If you are not sure what I mean then do this: go to google and type miserable failure and see what comes up. Then ask yourself the question of how did this actually happen.

I believe that indices must be obtained in real time and they need to be built with a dynamic notion that allows them to grow and change over time. This is in deed the reason why my research is focused on discovering human indices or what you know as tags which is also called Folksonomy (taxanomy by folks or people). I believe that this new construct is the one foundation for quality searches in the future.

Topical Relevance – Is It a Good Idea?

Topical relevance has increasingly become the focus of researcher over the past 5 years. The idea of topical relevance is quite simple. A search engine results would try to match the topic of the query thus returning better (more relevant) results. Topical relevance is one way to try to capture context of a search request.

For example, if I am looking for info about mouse, this could be taken as mouse the animal or mouse as in a computer peripheral. So in this case the search engine would try to use other query words to detect the topic (animals vs. computers) then render results in that domain. If the query is too short and does not provide hints on what the topic is, we could provide a shortcut menu as navigational hints. But let’s assume that this is not the case.

Topical relevance could be a promising notion if a number of assumptions have been met. If such assumptions are not satisfied, search results could be far from good or relevant. One of these assumptions is that the words mean what they are supposed to mean. If you type tomatoes in Google you will get Rotten Tomatoes as first link. Rotten Tomatoes is an entertainment site – a well-known one. So one of the researchers was arguing that this was a bad thing and that we should find ways to not match an entertainment site to the word tomatoes. Should we? In this case, do we not match the work Amazon to Amazon.com?

Basically, there is no silver bullet to when topical relevance can be useful in search – I recommend using caution when you are thinking of topical relevance. Topical relevance works in well-defined domains and structured search environments …etc. Topical relevance is not always appropriate in general search settings!

SIGIR Pics

A picture is worth a million words! Click here to see SIGIR 2006 pics on Flickr including pics of CJ van Rijbergan 2006 Salton Award Winner - Keith is considered on of the most influential scholars in information retrieval over the past 30 years.