Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From The Noisy Channel
Follow The Data
Today is my last day at Google. I have enjoyed an incredible year there, during which I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the smartest engineers on the...
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Giving Thanks as an Information Scientist
As a first-generation American who is married to a card-carrying Native American, I celebrate Thanksgiving the traditional way: a day of gluttony followed by yummy...
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An Information Cascade
I’ve been reading Networks, Crowds, and Markets, a great textbook by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. I’m very grateful to Cambridge University Press for surprising...
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The Element of Surprise
Surprise is not a word that user interface designers typically like to hear. Indeed, the principle of least surprise (also called the principle of least astonishment)...
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A Question of User Expectations
Ideally, a search engine would read the user’s mind. Shy of that, a search engine should provide the user with an efficient process for expressing an information...
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Pluralistic Ignorance and Bayesian Truth Serum
Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with CMU professor George Loewenstein, one of the top researchers in the area of behavioral economics. I mentioned my idea...
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LinkedIn Signal = Exploratory Search for Twitter
I like Twitter. Yes, I know that a lot of its content is
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An Open Letter to the USPTO
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to release new guidance as to which patent...
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Search at the Speed of Thought
A guiding principle in information technology has been to enable people to perform tasks at the “speed of thought”. The goal is not just to make people more efficient...
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New Web Site for HCIR Workshop
In 2007, I persuaded MIT graduate students Michael Bernstein and Robin Stewart (who was interning at
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David Petrou Presents Google Goggles at NY Tech Meetup
Image recognition is one of those problems that has presented long-standing challenges to computer scientists, despite being taken for granted by science fiction...
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Slouching Toward Creepiness
One of the perks of blogging is that publishers sometimes send me review copies of new books. I couldn’t help but be curious about a book entitled “The Man Who...
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HCIR 2010: Bigger and Better than Ever!
Last Sunday was HCIR 2010, the Fourth Annual Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, collocated...
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Exploring Nuggetize
I’ve been exchanging emails with Dhiti co-founder Bharath Mohan about Nuggetize, an intriguing interface that surfaces “nuggets” from a site to reduce the user’s...
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Taking Blekko out for a Spin
If you’re a search engine junkie like me, you’ve probably heard about Blekko, a search engine that has been percolating for over two years and recently launched...
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HCIR 2010 Accepted Papers
The 4th Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2010) is coming up on August 22 in New Brunswick, NJ, taking place immediately after...
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Overcoming Spammers in Twitter
As I blogged a few months ago, University of Oviedo professor Daniel Gayo-Avello published a research paper entitled “Nepotistic Relationships in Twitter and their...
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Questions. But Why?
Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com have been around since 2005. But community question answering (as distinct from question answering using natural language processing)...
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SIGIR 2010: Day 3 Industry Track Afternoon Sessions
While the SIGIR 2010 Industry Track keynotes had the highest-profile speakers, the rest of the day assembled an impressive line-up: The new frontiers of Web search...
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