Two Complaints

Briefly, two problems that should already be solved:

1. Text Messaging: Why are we still being charged for ~150 measly little ASCII characters? Why hasn't instant messaging on mobile devices entirely replaced SMS/MMS? IM is free and SMS/MMS costs ~$0.20/each or ~$20/month unlimited. In fact, its actually more expensive to send data via text message than the Hubble Space Telescope.
   
   Yes, I know there are currently IM apps on cell phones, but they're really no good and not well integrated into the device. But poor execution doesn’t damn a plan (or technology). Given the right implementation, this should be seamless and invisible, the only noticeable changes being the elimination of SMS charges on my bill and the ability to send short messages to any of my friends on any mobile or IM network. In fact, Apple could do this with my iPhone, keeping the same UI & everything, and I would be none the wiser, but of course AT&T would never allow them to eliminate such a valuable revenue stream.
   


2. Social Media Status Updates: Why do I have to log into several different sites to ensure all my followers across the web can enjoy my witty status updates? Why can't there be one site that allows me to fire off an update via web or mobile, and my Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. statuses are immediately updated? Bonus points for periodically checking my pages to see if I've made a rogue "native" update and keeping the rest in sync.

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

As mentioned earlier, my department recently held a very successful Computer Science Research Day. The keynote speaker was Dr. Guru Parulkar, Stanford researcher (and UD alum) working on a project called the "Clean Slate Design for the Internet." The goal of this work is to re-design the Internet with 'modern' features that will improve security and quality of service, as well as provide new classes of services.

I viewed his entire presentation as a direct attack against Network Neutrality. The basic premise was that the Internet is broken, it's getting worse, and it needs to be fixed. How do we fix it? Increased 'control & management' by ISPs and government. A central theme seemed to be finding new ways for ISPs to monetize traffic and develop 'value-added services.' In other words, getting me to pay for things I can get for free elsewhere. This will be accomplished by denying or degrading access to competitors in the name of 'security,' 'reliability,' and 'return on investment.'

My question to the speaker was, "Many people would argue that the freedom and success of the Internet is a result of what you refer to as the 'dumb' infrastructure. If we were to implement the changes you propose, how would Network Neutrality survive?" [paraphrase]

Dr. Parulkar's response was based on the claim that it wasn't 'fair' that Google made billions while Comcast's market capitalization remained stagnant. The last time I checked, these companies were in entirely different businesses, although Dr. Parulkar conveniently lumps them together as "service providers." Why in the world would I ever want to pay Comcast (or Verizon, or Time Warner, etc.) additional fees for poorly designed implementations of services I can get for free elsewhere? I pay my ISP for access to the Internet, and Google et al. pay ISPs for their net access, so why do the ISPs believe they are entitled to any additional remuneration for this connection?

The phrase "Network Neutrality" was not mentioned until I brought it up in my question. I believe the subject was intentionally avoided.

ISPs are a utility, just like the electric company. I just want to pay a competitive market price for unfettered Internet access with no strings attached. Is that really an unreasonable expectation? Unfortunately, many ISPs don't understand the business they are in, and apparently, neither do many researchers.

It's ironic that Stanford, original home to Google who has thrived due in large part to Network Neutrality, is leading the charge against it.

Apparently I'm not the only one who takes issue with the underlying purposes of this project.

Google’s Future

MIT Technology Review recently posted an interview with Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, regarding the future of search. An AI expert, Norvig sees machine translation and speech recognition as the next big things to improve Google's search and advertising. He also identifies understanding the contents of documents as one of the two biggest problems in search... leading to much NLP work ongoing at Google.

via AAAI.org News

How would NLP parse buzzwords?

More about Powerset (covered here before), which Techdirt seems to think is little more than buzzwords and patent threats. The start-up claims to be developing natural language search technology, and recently held an event in San Francisco to unveil itself to the world.

Among its many lofty goals, Powerset wants to become the ultimate web system, by creating what ZDNet calls "the natural language search mashup platform." For now, I've got to be as skeptical as Techdirt and think that these folks just combined as many hot buzzwords as they could come up with and slapped a couple of questionable patents on them. This kind of talk is a great way to generate venture capital funding, but likely won't do much to advance NLP. Hopefully it will turn out that Powerset has something great in store for all of us, and that this is all just some marketing and PR run amok, but until then we'll just have to wait & see.

Stovepipe NLP Research

The National Science Foundation is sponsoring research into NLP designed to help government clerks get a handle of the information overload coming from the glut of public comments pouring into www.regulations.gov. The site allows officials to solicit and consider public comments while creating rule and regulations concerning things like organic food labeling and media ownership consolidation. It seems to be a success, as far more comments are submitted than can be effectively sorted through by hand. While it seems reasonable to apply NLP techniques to this problem, should the research money be directed at something like the more general problem of information overload than such a narrow application as this?

Google Knows Your Face...?

Google has added another powerful AI tool to their search arsenal, this time in facial recognition. By adding the argument "&imgtype=face" into the URL of a Google Image Search, results can be filtered to provide only faces related to the search string. It seems to be pretty accurate, excluding most non-facial images, and capturing many cartoon faces along with results where the face is only a small portion of the image.

Maybe if they mash this up with their new Street View in Maps, they can start identifying people outside of strip clubs...

Semantic Search is Coming

I came across an article about semantic search that does a decent job of explaining the differences between statistics-based and semantics-based approaches to information retrieval. It also describes some of the difficulties and shortcomings of the Semantic Web, along with a few of the related natural language applications.

via Slashdot

Google Speaks 12 Languages

I just read an interesting article about the great success Google has been having using statistical machine translation for automatic translation of foreign language documents, as opposed to the rule & grammar based approaches used before.

I, for one, am very much persuaded by the idea that human language is so complex (we don't even fully understand it, just ask a linguist!) that it can never be fully hard-coded into a machine, but rather, a machine must "learn" it on it's own for the most part (we'll guide it and help it where needed). I like the approach that Google is taking, but without a conceptual framework or knowledge representation model, the system really isn't "understanding" or "comprehening" anything--it's just doing a "dumb" translation using statistical references. Still quite an accomplishment, but entirely different from my ultimate objective.

Mobile Email Back Up

On or about 19 Sept, Google made some changes to their Gmail service.

I had been using my Palm Treo 650 smartphone on the Sprint network to get my email on the go. These changes made the Versamail auto-sync stop working. I couldn't download new email manually either. I was still able to check my messages via webmail on the Blazer browser, but that was a pain in the butt.

I finally had a chance to research this issue, and came across a very helpful Google Groups topic. Basically, I had to disable POP completely, and then re-enable it for all new email. And voila...we're back in business!

Google Tops in Machine Translation

News.com.com reports that Google scored highest in a recent language translation competition run by the U.S. Government.

Google beat out competitors such as IBM and the University of Southern California on the Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests. Interestingly enough, although Google offers an Arabic homepage, Google language tools does not currently offer Arabic translation. Looks like we've stumbled across some more top-secret Google software...

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.

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.

Wild about Wildcards

The C|Net News Google Blog entry explaining the use of wildcards in Google searches gave me a great idea for another small project.

'Fill in the blank' type questions can easily be converted into a wildcard search. A carefully constructed intermediary process could be used to tap the vast resources of the Google databases to provide real instant answers to straightforward questions. Once I release the initial version of my new semantic analysis engine, I will code up a PHP page that takes user input in the form of a simple English question ("What is the capital of Delaware?"), convert it into an appropriate Google wildcard query (the capital of Delaware is *), capture the output from Google and reformat that output in the form of an answer to the original question. The answers won't be 100% accurate, but it should be a bit more realistic than other attempts at natural language question answering.

Better Off Without the Butterfly

Despite its questionable track-record of innovation, many people often assume the coming revolution in Artificial Intelligence will be led by Microsoft.

Although MS has devoted significant resources to this cause, my utter lack of faith was recently amplified by this banner ad for MSN Search. In an attempt to showcase the new 'intelligent' instant answers provided by their search engine, MS has demonstrated new levels of artificial stupidity. A definition of champagne (the bubby alcohol beverage) is not a valid answer for a question seeking to ascertain the location of the Champagne region of France. MS is completely missing the point, and I suspect this trend will continue. I'm betting on another couple of grad students defeating the billion-dollar warchest of Microsoft in this battle as well.

Rise of the Machine

I finally got around to reading a futuristic Wired article pointed out on Slashdot.

The bulk of the article is a retrospective look at how people have thought about and used the Internet. The really interesting part, however, begins with the last few paragraphs of page 4. While the Slashdot crowd focused on the prediction of a web-based OS and its ability to heal itself, the truly remarkable forecast is the emergence of real artificial intelligence from the net itself. The author recognizes that this "planet-sized computer" is as complex as the human brain, and is growing exponentially. It has already exceeded the "20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence" proposed by Ray Kurzweil. Our participation in and behavior on the world-wide web might provide this being with the knowledge and programming necessary for consciousness to evolve. In the very near future the human race may be presented with a global network that has become self-aware.

Skynet anyone?

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.

Semantic Knowledge from Google

Again, people out there are stealing my ideas. Where the heck did I put my tin foil hat?

As posted on Slashdot, a team in Amsterdam is working on an unsupervised system that can perform Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google. This is quite similar to the idea I have of building a much more broad and extensive knowledge base for AIML bots using a web crawler with built-in semantic analysis. Except these guys are limiting the scope of their project to distinguishing "between colors and numbers, and [...] 17th century Dutch painters."