CS Research Day 2008

So, I have to say that (despite the weather) the first annual Computer Science Research Day at UD was a success. The keynote speaker from Stanford provoked quite a reaction, at least from me (more on that soon). During the panel discussion on Privacy & Security regarding digitizing medical records, Emily made a good point by suggesting that the controversy could be avoided by giving individuals the ability to choose exactly what data would be made available.

I presented a poster about ICICLE (my first as a grad student), and ran some demos afterwards to anybody who was interested. In addition to ICICLE, I also demonstrated my Answer Machine and summary program. I'm hoping to have a CGI version of the summarizer online soon for anyone to try out.

By the way, I'm thinking of calling it 'gist,' which could stand for either "Greenbacker's Instant Summary Tool" or "gist Is a Summary Tool," depending on how narcissistic I'm feeling at the moment...

Commercially Available Automatic Summarization Software

In his weekly article, Robert X. Cringley profiles a company that has created software which is seemingly able to create relevant summaries of arbitrary size from bodies of text covering all possible subject domains. This is precisely the sort of thing I wanted to accomplish with my AutoSummary project. Automatic summarization is yet another application of NLP as a solution to the problem of too much information for humans to deal with. Learn more about iReader at Syntactica.

More summarizing software

IBM is not the only organization actively developing software that can extract knowledge from text.

Technology Resource News has a little write-up about researchers at MIT and Cornell who are working on a system that can analyze a document and produce a coherent and relevant summary of the information contained therein.

Yeah, I know its an old article, but I just stumbled across it.