Carrot2 is a research framework for experimenting with automated querying of various data sources (such as search engines), processing search results and their visualization.

Under the term “research”, we understand that the architecture of the system is oriented mostly toward flexibility, sometimes at a price of performance losses. Mechanisms such as data exchange via XML language, dynamically loaded components accessible via HTTP protocol, the use of Java as primary language of implementation — they all make the system very easy to tailor to one’s needs. Carrot2 was primarily built with search results clustering in mind, but it can be easily configured to do other, interesting things.

Tags: clustering, information retrieval, machine learning, search engine

I found this great portal of the World Watch institute, which is an independent research organization that works for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society by providing compelling, accessible, and fact-based analysis of critical global issues. The portal offers the access to a variety of publications of synthesis of research on environmental facts. Most of the publications are accessible with a small payment to sustain the activity of the institute. I think is a small price for the quality of the information they provide.

Browsing the site I found this article on the coal consumption projections for year 2010:

The rapid growth in coal use in China and India, where pollution controls are minimal, is adding to local and long-distance pollution. More than 80 percent of Chinese cities in a recent World Bank survey had sulfur dioxide or nitrogen dioxide emissions above the World Health Organization’s threshold.

Scientists have concluded that growing up in a city with polluted air is about as harmful to a person’s health as growing up with a parent who smokes. Although air pollution is concentrated in cities, it can move well beyond them: for example, acidic lakes in Scandinavia have been linked to pollution from factories in the United States. The World Bank projected that on average 1.8 million people would die prematurely each year between 2001 and 2020 because of air pollution.

Tags: ecology, environment, politics, society, statistics

These days Jean-Baptiste is working on the prototype of the Noise Sensitive Table. The idea is that this desk should react to the users voice offering a feedback on their turn-taking and collaborative processes. Here are some shoots I took in preview.

 

 

Tags: graphical user interface, human computer interaction, information visualization, interactive furniture, ubiquitous computing, tangible interface, usability

Il grado di civiltà di un popolo si misura dal modo in cui tratta gli animali.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Combine is an open system for crawling [harvesting and threshing (indexing)] Internet resources. The name is derived from the combine-harvester since the two perform their jobs in a similar way.

The Combine was initially developed as a part of the Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education (DESIRE) project, which was funded by the European Commission within Telematics for Science Program.

It is later beeing modified for focused crawling by integrating the automated topic classification algorithms also developed in DESIRE with the crawler. This work is funded by Vinnova, Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems (project P22504-1 A) and the EU project ALVIS project.

Tags: google, information retrieval, open source, search engine

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

retrievr doesn’t do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you’re drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won’t get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c.

It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.

Another thing to know is that there’s currently no way to specify the aspect ratio, so you have to rescale the image in your head (things that are close to the borders of the image you’re thinking of should be close to the borders of your sketches), but that’s really more of a missing feature of the drawing flashlet than an inherent problem. Sometimes it also helps to remove detail instead of adding it.

Personally, I see retrievr more as an “exploration” tool than as a “search” tool, and it seems to work very well for that.

Tags: google, information retrieval, machine learning, Python, search engine

The project, with partners here at EPFL, conducts research in the design, use and interoperability of topic-specific search engines with the goal of developing an open source prototype of a distributed, semantic-based search engine (the architecture is reported in the picture below).

Existing search engines provide poor foundation for semantic web operations, and US companies such as Google are becoming monopolies, distorting the entire information landscape. Our approach is not the traditional Semantic Web approach with coded or semi-automatically extracted metadata, but rather an engine that can build on content through automatic analysis. Linguistic processing is inside the search engine and a probabilistic document model provides a principled evaluation of relevance to complement existing standard authority scores. This facilitates semantic retrieval and incorporates pre-existing domain ontologies using facilities for import and maintenance. The distributed design is based on exposing search objects as resources, and on using implicit and automatically generated semantics (not ontologies) to distribute queries and merge results. Because semantic expressivity and interoperability are competing goals, developing a system that is both distributed and semantic-based is the key challenge: research involves both the statistical and linguistic format of semantic internals, and determining the extent to which the semantic internals are exposed at the interface.

Tags: google, information retrieval, open source, p2p, search engine

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The idea behind is that search engines are increasingly unable to capture the growing complexity of the web. Their solution is to let people to do this job: a community of editors (71053 to date) review hundreds of sites each day and catalogue them.

Tags: google, information retrieval, ontologies

According to Global Exchange (full text here), an NGO that promotes social, economical and environmental justice, corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times. In this report they focus on the worst 14th companies:

Caterpillar -> contracting with known violators of human rights, enabling house demolition, supplying equipment that kills Palestinian civilians and American peace activists

Chevron -> environmental destruction, health violations, and violent killings

Coca-cola -> violent killings, kidnap and torture, water privatization, health violations, and discriminatory practices

Dow Chemical -> creation of chemical weapons, marketing poisonous chemicals, illegal dumping of toxins into populated areas, environmental destruction, health problems, death

Dyncorp / CSC -> causing health problems, environmental devastation and death; endangering lives; physically abusing individuals; sex trafficking

Ford Motor Company -> environmental degradation, climate change, fueling wars for oil

Kellog, Brown and Root -> Overcharging and providing unnecessary services on taxpayer’s dollar, bribery, exploiting third country nationals

Lockheed Martin -> War profiteering, warmongering

Monsanto -> Displacement, health violations, and child labor

Nestle USA -> Abusive child labor, repression of worker rights, aggressive marketing of harmful products, violation of national health and environmental laws

Philip Morris USA -> aggressively marketing lethal products

Pfizer -> Killer price-gouging

Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux -> Water privatization

Wal-Mart -> worker rights violations, labor discrimination, union busting

Tags: politics, society

I-Spy is a community-based Internet meta-search engine that provides you with search results that are informed by similar users. By joining an I-Spy community and using it to search the Web you not only benefit from high-quality meta-search results, but also from the result selections of users within that community. The idea behind this is that users with similar interests are likely to find the same results interesting for similar queries.

I-Spy implements collaborative ranking, borrowing ideas from collaborative filtering. It is a meta search in the sense that builds on top of an existing web search engine (in this case google).

Tags: collaboration tools, google, information retrieval