tagsy is an aggregator for different tag-enabled content. tagsy is a social bookmarks and feed management service, allowing you to save, categorize and browse information based on its popularity and relevance. It was born out of our frustration with fragmentation of content between various blog feeds, feed aggregators, social bookmark managers and other content aggregating services.
Tags: clustering, tagging
Cina’s government has blocked authorization for satellite TV broadcasts from foreign countries. A control will be applied to the transmissions to verify that they are compliant with government’s vision. In the future the attitude will be to extend this control to all kinds of cultural materials coming from abroad. Sad …
[the news (in italian)]
Adam pointed me to this nice project:
Hyperfabric is a digital art project that creates a very touchable touchscreen, made out of an elastic-like fabric, so the screen warps like rubber, and can sense how hard your press it, where you press it, and you can even have lots of people using it at once, you really feel like you are going “through” the screen.
Tags: interactive furniture, new technology, tangible interface
Microsoft launches a service for letting people build their own information. It is called filter.
MSN Filter is your one-stop shop for the inside scoop on what’s happening across the Web, according to the people who know the most … YOU! Whether it’s music, sports, TV, style or technology, our team of bloggers will filter the best stories, photographs, links and other interesting tidbits that you’ve sent in, as well as items that they’ve dug up.
Tags: citizen journalism, new technology
M. A. Hearst. Untangling text data mining. In Proceedings of the ACL’99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. University of Maryland, June 20-26 1999. [url]
Mining implies extracting precious nuggets of ore from otherwise worthless rock. This paper suggest that data mining is often confused with information retrieval or information access.
This search-centriv view misses the point that we can actually extract new, never encoutered information from the data.
The possibilities for data mining from large text collections are virtually untapped. Text expresses a vast, rich range of information, but encodes this information in a form that is difficult to decipher automatically. Perhaps for this reason, there has been little work in text data mining to date, and most people who have talked about it have either conflated it with information access or have not made use of text directly to discover heretofore unknown information. In this paper I will first define data mining, information access, and corpus-based computational linguistics, and then discuss the relationship of these to text data mining. The intent behind these contrasts is to draw attention to exciting new kinds of problems for computational linguists. I describe examples of what I consider to be real text data mining efforts and briefly outline our recent ideas about how to pursue exploratory data analysis over text.
Tags: text data mining
Cell phones can be used as environmental sensors. According to UC Berkeley computer science graduate student R.J. Honicky, the ubiquity of those devices could be leveraged to help reduce pollution, fight disease, and tackle other societal scale problems with no additional effort on the part of the person carrying the phone.
Tags: hack, new technology, society
W. Ke, K. Börner, and L. Viswanath. Major information visualization authors, papers and topics in the acm library. In IEEE Information Visualization Conference, Huston, Texas, October 10-12 2004. [url]
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This paper presents the results of the processing of the InfoViz Contest dataset. The authors applied several techniques to clean and cluster the data to produce a visual representation based on the work of Borner 2003.
Tags: clustering, map algorithms
H. Small. Visualizing science by citation mapping. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(9):799–813, 1999. [url]
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This paper present methods for science mapping with the aim to allowing the user to spot literature not directly related to the one another. The object of this work is to create a global structure and overview of as large a sample of data as possible and then enable the user to user to explore the underlying fine structure. They call this procedure od positioning objects in space ‘ordination’.
They use the frequency of co-citation as the building block of the visualization of science. The authors list different techniques for graphically compute the position in space of the documents. The first is the distance tranformations, achieved through a mathematical minimization. The second is the ordination by triangulation, which principle is the arbitrary poistioning of the first two objects on the coordinate systems, and the subsequent positioning of the rest of the object according to the distance to the first two objects. Others techniques are listed to reduce the number of computations required for the task: as the sampling with fractional citation counts, and the humpty-dumpty method.
The visualization method chosen is called Volvox (McCain, 1996). This display presents lower-level objects as circles, within larger high-level objects. A linkage between the clusters is also offered, allowing for the discovery of the shortest pathways through two points/documents on the map.
Tags: clustering, map algorithms, maps
“Chi non si aspetta l’inaspettato non troverà la verità”.
–Eraclito
