Sunday, July 1, 2007

the interwebs -- they're made of people! mmmm! people!

The Newest Artificial Intelligence Computing Tool: People

Science Daily — A USC Information Sciences Institute researcher thinks she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning.

That tool, according to ISI computer scientist Kristina Lerman, is people, human intelligence at work on the social web, the network of blogs, bookmark, photo and video- sharing sites, and other meeting places now involving hundreds of thousands of individuals daily, recording observations and sharing opinions and information.

Lerman shared her recent work with others in the burgeoning new field of social information processing a special AAAI-sponsored symposium on the subject March 26-28 at Stanford.

She says that extracting 'metadata' about transactions -- who is talking to whom, who is listening, how conclusions are reached, and how they spread -- can help researchers answer currently refractory problems about documents: their accuracy and quality, their categorization, the relation of their embedded terminology.

One benefit, according to Lerman, who in addition to her ISI appointment, is a research assistant professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Computer Science at University of Southern California, is automatic determination of the semantics of content from one kind of metadata: tags.

Tags play a crucial role in a longrunning project called the Semantic Web.

more @ ScienceDaily.com

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