So I decided to finally fart around with OpenCalais a little. There’s a nice video on the site that gives you an impression of what it is capable of, but it’s also like all videos about software: propaganda. Calais is basically Named Entity Recognition (NER) software that can be accessed via a web API. Whereas [...]
Archive for May, 2008
OpenCalais
Posted: 31 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: calais, computational linguistics, named entity recognition, newswire, nlp, open source, opencalais, python, rdf, reuters, xml
5
No moseying
Posted: 30 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: aquariums, fish, humor, north carolina, plants, signs, turtles
While at Oak Island, we visited the North Carolina Aquarium. It was decent, nothing on the Baltimore Aquarium, but it had some cool stuff. In the southeastern swampland exhibit, there was a very specific sign (below) about what not to do on the plants. When I trundled on the venus flytrap three feet away, I [...]
Oak Island
Posted: 29 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: beach, crabs, family, friends, north carolina, oak island, piers, sharks, vacations, weddings
This past weekend at Oak Island, NC was extremely fun. My sister got married, I got to catch up with family and friends, and I got to bask in the beauty of the ocean and great weather. It was very depressing to leave. The beach house we stayed in was surprisingly nice. The game room [...]
Memories of the Sun
Posted: 21 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: beach, clouds, family, north carolina, pittsburgh, seasons, sun, weather, weddings
I think that Memories of the Sun would be a fitting name for a Pittsburgh blog. When I was younger, I loved dark, cloudy weather. I’ve never been a fan of the steel gray overcast that doesn’t change, but it didn’t bother me much. After experiencing it nearly nonstop for the past few months, it [...]
Is that all there is?
Posted: 19 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: movies, music, pandora, peggy lee, revolver, the nines, youtube
My taste in music is definitely in flux. Five years ago I would have found this intolerable, but now I can’t stop listening to it. I blame Pandora. The musical journeys it takes you on can be transformational. Unfortunately the video stops before the song is over, but YouTube offers several full length suggestions immediately [...]
GWAP Promo
Posted: 18 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computer science, family, games, gwap, human computation, johnny lee, ohio, videos, wii
Figured I’d post this promo video the GWAP group did. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in the filming of it since I was visiting my dad and family in Ohio for the first time after many years. So unfortunate in that I missed the filming, but the alternative was worth it. Johnny Lee had [...]
Pythonic Matlab
Posted: 15 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computer science, functions, matlab, memory, memory management, programming, programming languages, python
I attended a Matlab training seminar yesterday with the dual topics of “Advanced Matlab Programming” and “Distributed and Parallel Computing.” Of the two, the Advanced section was more interesting, though my original motivation for going was the parallel computing part. In the morning, I felt like it was going to be a waste because my [...]
Know your audience
Posted: 14 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: ads, cmu, dorks, humor, image consulting, losers, marketing, nerds
It is very important to know your audience when marketing your product. This was posted at the bus stop just outside the CS department at CMU.
Games with a Purpose
Posted: 14 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: ai, cmu, computer science, games, gaming, gwap, human computation, luis von ahn, research
Today is the official opening day of GWAP: Games with a Purpose. This is one of two research projects I have been working on for the past few months, though my involvement with GWAP so far has only been in the form of attending meetings, minor testing, and offering my sage gaming advice (and by [...]
MT Eval with Binary Comparisons
Posted: 12 May 2008 in UncategorizedTags: collaborative filtering, computational linguistics, machine learning, machine translation, machine translation evaluation, mt, mt eval, rankings, recommender systems
The standard way of doing human evaluations of machine translation (MT) quality for the past few years has been to have human judges grade each sentence of MT output against a reference translation on measures of adequacy and fluency. Adequacy is the level at which the translation conveys the information contained in the original (source [...]
