@MarsPhoenix is a twitter success story. It’s also a NASA success story. Oh and also a scientific success for all it has done on Mars. As six months of night approach, the Phoenix probe was slowly shutting down systems to finish analyses. A couple of days ago, a dust storm diminished the day time charging [...]
Archive for October, 2008
Twitrratr
Posted: 27 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, data, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, twitter, web 2.0
Twitrratr is a new service that attempts to do sentiment analysis on Twitter (follow me while you’re at it). According to their about page, they started off by tracking opinions on Obama but have since expanded to any term. Enter a keyword and it searches twitter for occurrences. It then assigns a sentiment to each post [...]
Microsoft U Rank
Posted: 25 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, information retreival, mahalo, microsoft, u rank, user-driven search, web search, wikia search
Microsoft just announced a research project called U Rank, which aims to do pretty much just that. You rank search results, share with friends, blah blah blah. Basically it’s Mahalo with Microsoft branding plus a few trinkets. And it’s backed by Live Search so you can feel confident the baseline results will be easy to [...]
He’s dead, Jim
Posted: 24 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: deforest kelley, enterprise, nasa, real sci-fi, shuttles, sociolinguistics, space travel, spaceships, spelling, star trek
Something about this photo speaks to me: Now, I wonder if DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) is really that interested in talking to the NASA engineer-looking dude on the left. It just brings to mind hundreds of conversations between scientists and laymen where the laymen appears interested and the scientist rambles on about stuff way too [...]
GWAP Gender Guesser
Posted: 22 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: games, gender, gwap, human computation, preferences
I don’t have a lot to say about the mechanics behind it, since I’m not privy to them, but my former project GWAP is testing out a gender guesser. Based on your preferences for 10 pairs of images, it seems to achieve decent accuracy guessing your gender. At least of the 10 or so times [...]
NACLO 2009
Posted: 15 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: announcements, cfp, computational linguistics, high school, linguistics, NACLO, outreach
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad has been announced for 2009. It’s a great outreach program to high school students to increase interest in general and computational linguistics. I’ve talked about it before here. I have reproduced the announcement below the jump.
Relevance-based language modeling
Posted: 14 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, information retrieval, language modeling, queries, relevance, search engines
I just finished reading about relevance-based language models for information retrieval (Lavrenko and Croft, 2001). It’s an old paper, but some new stuff I was checking into relied on something else which relied on it — you know how the story goes. In information retrieval, there are many retrieval models that have been used over [...]
Daedal on the hunt
Posted: 11 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: beagles, chipmunks, digging, dog parks, dogs, holes, hunting
Daedalus does a great job of finding where animals are or have been. He tends to let the smells consume his attention, though, and he fails to notice when the animal scurries away, mere feet from him. Today was one such day. I watched the chipmunks he was pursuing all slip away to safer places. [...]
A thing of horror
Posted: 10 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: abomination, androids, creepy, horror, little girls, real sci-fi, robots
If you’re in the mood for some bad dreams, look no further.
