Researchers performing cognitive experiments on toddlers claim that children acquire language through a process similar to data mining. The toddlers were shown a series of object pairs while recordings of two words were played. During each iteration, one of the words corresponded to one of the objects. Over time, the children were able to disambiguate the references and determine which words corresponded to which objects.
While the scientists claim this language learning method to be akin to data mining, to me it seems less like a statistical searching process and more like rule-based pattern recognition and association building.
via Slashdot
Showing posts with label data mining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data mining. Show all posts
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Monday, June 18, 2007
Delusions of Grandeur
An article has been floating around the web that overstates the importance of video game artificial intelligence.
I don't agree. I think this (just like everything else, right?) is a problem of semantics. Consider this quote:
Researchers all over the world are doing exciting and relevant work in AI, yet we don't recognize it at such. Consider the work by Google in machine translation, by Stanford and other in autonomous navigation, and by scores of groups in data mining. I would argue that these are monumentally important advancements, far greater than the incrementally improved enemy combat tactics in Halo, yet most people don't recognize them as artificial intelligence.
AI has a PR issue. Perhaps AAAI needs an advocacy arm?
"A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers," says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT's Media Lab.
I don't agree. I think this (just like everything else, right?) is a problem of semantics. Consider this quote:
"As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system." - Martha Pollack
Researchers all over the world are doing exciting and relevant work in AI, yet we don't recognize it at such. Consider the work by Google in machine translation, by Stanford and other in autonomous navigation, and by scores of groups in data mining. I would argue that these are monumentally important advancements, far greater than the incrementally improved enemy combat tactics in Halo, yet most people don't recognize them as artificial intelligence.
AI has a PR issue. Perhaps AAAI needs an advocacy arm?
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Moving Forward
Last night I did some work on the Answer Machine, and today I'm working on adding topic detection to AutoSummary.
Check out the entry in the Answer Machine project log for details about its new functionality. As for AutoSummary, I came up with a good idea about how to implement topic detection within the current framework of the program. I was checking out this post at the Search Science blog that I read, and thought "I can do that."
What I plan on doing is after determining the likely sense of a given word, I'll build a list of all of the possible topics that word is connected to (using the WordNet domain function). From that I'll be able to find the topic of a sentence by taking the best intersection of all the anchor words (not "the" or "and" etc).
You can probably see how it will scale from there, building intersections of sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into entire texts. So very shortly I just might be able to take an fully body of text and determine just what the heck it is all about. Could be an interesting step forward in search relevance and data mining...
Check out the entry in the Answer Machine project log for details about its new functionality. As for AutoSummary, I came up with a good idea about how to implement topic detection within the current framework of the program. I was checking out this post at the Search Science blog that I read, and thought "I can do that."
What I plan on doing is after determining the likely sense of a given word, I'll build a list of all of the possible topics that word is connected to (using the WordNet domain function). From that I'll be able to find the topic of a sentence by taking the best intersection of all the anchor words (not "the" or "and" etc).
You can probably see how it will scale from there, building intersections of sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into entire texts. So very shortly I just might be able to take an fully body of text and determine just what the heck it is all about. Could be an interesting step forward in search relevance and data mining...
Monday, August 29, 2005
AI: Now and In the Future
Red Herring has a couple of excellent articles online regarding the present state and future possibilities of Artificial Intelligence.
The first article covers existing AI systems such as data mining and intelligence search, while the second chronicles Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins' quest to revolutionize the way we look at intelligence.
The first article covers existing AI systems such as data mining and intelligence search, while the second chronicles Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins' quest to revolutionize the way we look at intelligence.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
The tech behind Able Danger
All politics aside, an NPR program covering 'Able Danger' and pre-9/11 intelligence (Real Audio & Windows Media) includes a look into the technology enabling the sophisticated data-mining software that allegedly identified four of the Al Qaeda hijackers in the U.S. well before the 2001 attacks.
The Lieutenant Colonel who oversaw the program explains how the smart algorithms sifted through 2.5 terabytes of open souce intelligence looking for patterns in the unstructured data that would lead to terrorists links.
The Lieutenant Colonel who oversaw the program explains how the smart algorithms sifted through 2.5 terabytes of open souce intelligence looking for patterns in the unstructured data that would lead to terrorists links.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
When the flaw in the software is the human element...
If you read between the lines of the most recent controversy concerning the intelligence failures and the 9/11 commission you'll find an interesting story concerning artificial intelligence and human error.
The NY Post has a piece covering the "Able Danger" data-mining software (registration required) used to identify and track suspected terrorists. It seems as though Able Danger located several of the 9/11 hijackers (including mastermind Mohammed Atta) in the United States well before September 2001. This information, however, was not disseminated or acted upon by intelligence personnel (for whatever reason), and the terrorists were allowed to continue planning their attack. So what we have is software designed to protect American citizens executing its mission successfully, but poor judgement (granted, in hindsight) on the part of the human actors possibly led to the deaths of thousands. Like I've said before, until we become comfortable with fully automated systems making life and deaths decisions on our behalf, society will insist on keeping humans in the loop. This will only change after the human element is repeatedly identified as the single point of failure in the decision chain, and I fear this example will unfortunately be the first of many yet to come.
The NY Post has a piece covering the "Able Danger" data-mining software (registration required) used to identify and track suspected terrorists. It seems as though Able Danger located several of the 9/11 hijackers (including mastermind Mohammed Atta) in the United States well before September 2001. This information, however, was not disseminated or acted upon by intelligence personnel (for whatever reason), and the terrorists were allowed to continue planning their attack. So what we have is software designed to protect American citizens executing its mission successfully, but poor judgement (granted, in hindsight) on the part of the human actors possibly led to the deaths of thousands. Like I've said before, until we become comfortable with fully automated systems making life and deaths decisions on our behalf, society will insist on keeping humans in the loop. This will only change after the human element is repeatedly identified as the single point of failure in the decision chain, and I fear this example will unfortunately be the first of many yet to come.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Natural Language Processing in the Global War on Terrorism
I came across a NY Times article recently discussing software used by the CIA to scour the web for terrorist messages.
The company behind the sofware, Attensity Corporation, has developed tools which can take the near-infinite masses of unstructed data on the Internet, and turn it into meaningful information. They've developed algorithms that can parse sentences, extracting the subject, object, verb, etc. enabling the computer to process the plain text and take contextually relevant actions.
This type of software, teaching a computer to read and extract read information from text, is exactly the sort of project I have in mind. I guess all those grammar lessons spent diagramming sentences in elementary school were actually important.
The company behind the sofware, Attensity Corporation, has developed tools which can take the near-infinite masses of unstructed data on the Internet, and turn it into meaningful information. They've developed algorithms that can parse sentences, extracting the subject, object, verb, etc. enabling the computer to process the plain text and take contextually relevant actions.
This type of software, teaching a computer to read and extract read information from text, is exactly the sort of project I have in mind. I guess all those grammar lessons spent diagramming sentences in elementary school were actually important.
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