SIMS 141 – Search Advertising: Dr. Hal Varian

Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. The World Wide Web brings much of the world’s knowledge into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer and an internet connection. The availability of huge quantities of information at our fingertips is transforming government, business, and many other aspects of society. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. The Instructor, Dr. Marti Hearst, is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. The UC Berkeley School of Information was created in 1994 to address one of society’s most compelling challenges: enabling people to create, find, manipulate, share, store, and use information in myriad forms. Through research, collaboration, and the education of future information leaders, we generate ideas, solutions, and guidance that transform information — text, still and moving images, sound, numeric data — into knowledge. [courses] [is141] [fall2005]

Human Computation

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.

random thought 1

Representation is everything in Datarology.

random thought 2

Rakesh’s Data Mining Definition

An Expansive Definition of Data Mining (Rekesh Agrawal, KDD06):
Deriving value from a data collection by studying and understanding the structure of the constituent data.

This is the closest in meaning to what I have in mind for “Datarology”. I particular like the part of the definition where he used “understanding …” instead of “analyzing …”, because I believe Synthesizing is an equally important activity for Datarology as analyzing.