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I’m thinking about participating in Google Code Jam competition. A while ago (back in school i guess) many of us use to be crazy about all kinds of regional and national competitions and i know that there are quite few “medalists” here. I wonder if we still have the will, speed ++ 
I have a question !
I would like to know the actual possibilitys of making a “smart” search engine that could give you answers of your questions.
For example, let say that i want to know the birth date of Napoleon, i’m going first on google and type Napoleon brithdate, i find few links and by habit, i click on Wikipedia. There, i look in first lines to find what i’m looking for.
Is there a way of finding directly this information by asking a simple question like this? I mean noone care about looking stuff in search engine or encyclopedia but the answers.
Even better, what if i speak directly in mic asking my questions and get replyed by voice. Avoiding typing and mousing gesture for earn time. Imagine a children playing with such application for years! Or this could in reverse made the learning process almost unusefull for most people.
Until where could we go about question complexity?
John told me few years ago about ontologie and this really blow my mind but what now? Is there something like Wikipedia but ontologie oriented more open than a “simple” dictionary?
Currently WolframAlfa (http://www.wolframalpha.com ) is the best answer as far as I know.
It would give you answers to questions like Napoleon birthdate and it has some other nice features (type AAPL vs GOOG for example)…
That is very interesting. I looked for various (and few very stupid) things but what surprised me was that: “Jesus Christ date of birth” – result ~ 4 BC, looks inaccurate. But it’s still better that nothing, i.e. as if the guy never existed.
I agree with Daniel that WolframAlfa fits your description the best. Here are some other interesting once.
http://www.clusty.com/ – categorizes/clusters searches.
http://labs.hakia.com/hakia-lab.html – they are based in Turkey i think..
http://www.powerset.com/ – from MS
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&esrch=FT1&tbo=1&tbs=ww:1&q=ontology&btnG=Search -Wonder Wheel
I can’t skip WordNet http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Ok guys, thanks for the tips. I’ll play around with.
Aardvark (vark.com) seems something to check out too.
The intelligence of the engine consist of routing your questions to experts in your social network.
More human interaction, better?
Thanks Jean, I signed up and i like it ! Even Answered a question trough GTalk 
I’ve been thinking about “universal” instant messenger with some good plugin framework that can make easy writing applications that utilize the FOAF contacts network since PMF days (PMF was a framework we wrote in Qt while working together…) but never got around to it. It would be cool if one can hack a network app with GUI in a week and publish to the world or some subset without effort… Ahh wait that sounds like Apple App Store?! … well not exactly.
Google Research presented at NIPS some of the toying they have been doing with qubits from D-Wave.
This is quite interesting and its happening in Vancouver! I’ve watched few videos (one even with a PHD student with Bulgarian origin – Vasil S Denchev . When i have time I’d like to watch all http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?page=multimedia
For a while now I’ve been thinking about using knowledge representation – Ontologies as a base for creating a modular Natural Language Processing system focused on extracting structured data from unstructured. For example we can create/use Ontologies (models) that describe “simple” concepts like: Address, Time, Task, Expense, Transaction etc… and use them to “match” information from a text stream. The reason i’m writing this is because i think that there is a common ground for collaboration… I know Stefan is interested in RDF/OWL, the company that Neven is involved is in a very near domain and finally i was playing with Google Wave which i think is a good platform for creating intelligent bots that will be very easy to distribute if they turn out to be useful :)
Here are some references:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://protege.stanford.edu/
http://jena.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openrdf.org/
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html
Although I’m currently not even in near domain (kernel level C driver development is not even close by any means) it is very interesting to me and would gladly participate…
Awesome, I’ll try to start with some examples “soon”
I want to add a few NLP projects that I personally find interesting: openNLP, which is in Java, and NLTK, which is in Python.
Thanks Nikolay, I browsed around the links you provided and stumbled on Apache UIMA, a graduated IBM Research project which has recently been approved as an OASIS Standard. I think that it could be used as a framework in which we can plug our NLP modules when they mature.
It seems pretty good, but why it’s still in the incubator… since 2006?
Here’s one project that uses Apache UIMA – SEASR. It has interesting stuff such as sentiment analysis.
This is very interesting topic indeed.
Knowledge representation is just one part of the process. It is relatively simple task to represent knowledge in a digital form no mater how complex structures or algorithms you should use or how much processor power and memory you will need. But the task does not end with the representation of this knowledge, you need to do something with it.
One of the obstacles that existed before was the enormous quantities of information that need to gathered first and then process them, but now with Google and all other web-spiders and similar, collecting the information is feasible.
By the way, Google machine translation is mostly based on what they find on the web and they think one is translation of the other. It’s a version of the statistical machine translation. Others use other sources for parallel corpora such as books, legal documents, etc.
I will do a parallel here, like the hypothetical best compression algorithm is very similar to a random generator – in its behavior and the result that it produces, in a similar way the perfect machine translation engine is very similar to the best knowledge representation and processing system. It should be in fact a representation of the entire human knowledge with the ability to derive new representations of it in form of one human language or another.
I like the idea of presenting a program by what it does. The computer language and the computer behavior pair are not very different from humans’ language and respectively their behavior. One day we will be creating programs just by example given to the some kind of knowledge processor that will convert it to a machine code based on what we expect that program to do, just by giving verbal examples.
I forgot to mention that there was a worldwide recognized NLP conference in Bulgaria, in September, that I was invited to attend but couldn’t for reasons beyond my control, organized by the Bulgarian Academy of Science. The lecturers were mostly from EU and few from US.
Also, don’t take seriously what I’m saying here about NLP, I’m not proficient enough in that area. 
Hello ! I’m not sure what an ontology is.I’m not a Linguist. Let’s say “ontology” is the grammar way of building a sentence(in English). As I have a simple Language processor( Phrase generator ) , we are able to connect a pattern /logical or even derived relational database with different “ontologies”/patterns to Phrase generator. And we are not talking about Natural language processing, and for Virtual Natural Language Processor
“ontology” may become every grammatic rule.
As you can connect one Application to different databases, you are able to create a pure Logical database based on Artifficial Intelligence with predicats connected to the Application with recurent conections(not database) based on Neural networks Theory. And so, this Application becomes a BOT to communicate with
the beginning( reference ) :
http://www.languagetool.org/ ( be a patient and smart )
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/node/2297
The Mandatory Google Wave thread, so we all enjoy the real-time Web innovation. If anyone gets an invite or has invites to spare, please share in this thread. My email is…
…and I still haven’t got one.
I would enjoy an invitation as well
First Web 2.0 service to announce Google Wave extension functionality is Ribbit.
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/09/29/ribbit-injects-voice-into-google-wave-release/
Still no invite in my Gmail either. I read they are going out later today though.
Extensive review of Google Wave on Gizmodo, just in case you like staring at Wave screenshots.
According to Mashable, we’re mere hours away from Waving goodbye to static Web
I have invited you guys but it seems it takes forever to get 2nd level invites from Google.
No problem, we can wait… don’t we all? *continues chewing his nails, tasting blood*
It seems a lot of people are currently waiting, so we will wait as well. !0x for the invitations…
I’m waiting for you to get your accounts as there isn’t much I can do with Scoble, Yakuel, Trapani, Stay, and the other VIPs I have there as my contacts.
Scoble is the last person I’d want to Wave with. He’s proven himself on FriendFeed as a crybaby with a cunning sense of blogosphere drama, and a hype psychologist for stressed out CEOs that crave attention.
I know and that’s why I’m waiting for all of you to get your invites. I’m gonna ping some googlers as they’re truly deceiving us with those 2nd level invites! How can you test a service with nobody to try it with! That’s ridiculous! It’s not like Gmail where you can send and receive email with the World; to test Wave, you need friends with access to Wave.
Here’s a company (Halcyon Molecular) that can truly change everything covered on TechCrunch. Imagine what the low cost of full sequencing (and a lot more data going to be available) can do to the Medicine, the ultimate personalization, match making, and so on. I’m sure Sergey Brin would rush to acquire/merge Halcyon Molecular with 23andMe. I always thought that Sergey’s interest in DNA is from the aspect of the ultimate ad platform – DNAds or GeneAds or whatever. Your DNA linked to your Google Account gets you precisely targeted ads that you’ll love with huge conversion rates for advertisers and big bucks for Google.
It’s a scary thought to have my DNA linked to Google account. Precisely targeted ads looks like blackmailing to me…
btw: there is a movie – “Idiocracy”. Take a look when you have some time…
I don’t mind Google having my DNA – Google or any other non-evil multi-billion corporation (isn’t multi-billion equivalent to evil though?) to aggregate such data, which used by researchers can benefit me and all of us. Privacy is overrated. If we all have life recorders (like Microsoft’s SenseCam, but recording a lot more than just that), correlating our daily activities, events with our DNAs can give answers to many medical, psychological, criminal, and so on questions that would stay unanswered until something like this happens. I’m not afraid of a Big Brother; I’m afraid of science not advancing fast enough before we or our children become too old or too sick… Think from this perspective and privacy will really sound ridiculously. Life is way too short to be wasted with non-issues like these! My co-worker Pete said once: “I really want to live long enough to see Playstation 10″… or something in that sense. Me too and that’s why I’m one of those fanatics who strongly believe that science should always be put first as it has the key to solve all miseries of today. Putting human rights first will take us only a block away! Analyzing DNA and having tons of data to correlate it with would take us far… just like stem cell research. We just need to put science first like it used to be in the past. I’m fed up with that “sharehoder value” crap I hear left & right! So many great ideas failed to materialize just because they weren’t easy to monetize and that’s what’s slowing down the progress.
While I believe DNA sequencing can benefit users a great deal especially in fields of medicine and self-improvement, exposing DNA sequencing data to third parties either directly or indirectly is bound to happen, and is a collosal privacy issue that the general population already is negatively already heavily dispositioned towards. Companies with access to DNA sequencing could refuse job positions, health insurance or other bonuses and options to personel that is likely to develop certain physical weaknesses, illnesses or short life span. In a world where human genome can provide quantative degree of success would likely deny options to people with less chance of success or requiring longer preparation or training. Even without genome modification available to the masses, our soceity would develop towards a future similar to the vision of the cult movie Gattaka. There is a lot of opposition to such business models on a social and on a government level.
I think any company interested in using DNA sequencing data on a mass scale should allow users to generate data out of their DNA offline, for free (despite associated costs, such program should be heavily funded), and then pick what information from their sequencing results is being shared online with data companies such as Google. For example, a user could pay for the sequencing, but then cashback up to free service by providing bits of data to data companies, with bits of data being freely chosen by the user so that if he decides, he won’t share those he believes would be used negatively against him. Although one can imagine such a program being covered in enough legalese to confuse users and that would open a totally different can of worms.
First, nobody is perfect and “perfect” costs tons (the simple demand-supply rule), so, if companies use DNA to screen candidates out, it would be in 95-99% of the cases for the right reasons. At the end, more well-suited workers means higher efficiency leading to lower cost and faster progress. We all know what means to deal with a person who’s not right for their job, don’t we?
Of course, I’ve watched Gattaca and others on the subject; read sci-fi in the past… but that’s just that – fiction! I applied for a contracting job a few months ago and they made me undergo drug test via urine sample, which is a standard policy with many employers. Many companies do full background check in the US – your credit history, your driving record, your criminal record, etc, so, even if they add a DNA screening in the future – do you think it will make a big difference given the current level of screening? And I’m talking about a regular develop jobs here! I am also talking about the country that claims to have the most advanced democracy and human rights!
Anyway, human society is a very complex system, but it finds balance pretty quickly – there are many examples in history. That’s why I think we should focus on solving real problems, problems that kill and truly make millions suffer. The rest will follow naturally as advances in science and humanity go in parallel. If it happens that a part of the society starts to abuse technology to discriminate and enslave the rest, then, again, look back into history.
My point is that the human body is probably the most complex system in this universe (wrongly assuming that there are no aliens). So, in order for us to better know ourselves, we can only do so by collecting and crunching tons and tons of data and that’s why I believe DNA, life recorders, and other such methods would provide the data required. Also, having such data available to personal intelligent agents would completely revamp our lives.
An example is the wide use of LBS (Location-Based Services) nowadays. It was just 3 years ago when people (including me) were predicting the failure of those due to people caring too much about their privacy. Well, intelligence prevailed and people chose to trade privacy for better lives. The same I hear is happening in Japan with their payment cards – convenience prevailed over concerns. And that’s what usually happens – people exaggerate and overthink something, then they try it out and see nothing bad is happening and continue to use it, then start using it more and more, and at the end they can’t live without it.
Nickolay, the society as it is does not favor techno-fascism you propose. Even small changes to a general population thinking take a whole lot of time – racism and gay rights being two simple issues that are yet to be resolved even in most civilized countries. Your example with location-based services is not the same, as it illustrates acceptance of privacy issue opt-in services by a small group of technology-fluent users. Most of those services do not get deeply integrated and are not inherent to every human being’s life and their segregation into multiple, non-compatible services makes their impact very small, compared to what a DNA-sequencing nationwide or worldside database could do to every facet of a human’s life. Also, the problem with the undefined right of self-realization. The problem is very well studied in Gattaca. While fiction is fiction, I separate the fictional story of a man overcoming his shortcomings from the realistic look on an engineered society. In a society that favors gene-perfection and filters based on innate qualities, giving life to imperfect gene-carrying individuals is a crime against that individual because of his inability to exist as a productive unit in that society. Our society does not have gene-modification technologies right now. Filtering people by gene-qualities without tools to modify human genome to suit perfection, is like punishing people for being born, with no exception. I can guarantee you that your point will not hold in congress nor court. Too many implications that do not offer a solution to them, nobody would dare open such Pandora’s Box.
I really don’t see where you get the fascism ideas from. I never mentioned gene modification and engineering babies and that’s the big problem – people always seem to scale down any idea to their biggest nightmare.
I am not supporting any gene alterations and you probably don’t know, but I’m a person who is a huge supporter of everything natural and green, I eat organic, I don’t take medicines that do nothing and just tax liver and other organs. “Studying” and “altering” are two different things. And even without mass DNA sequencing and aggregating life data, rich would still be altering their genes and engineer their heirs. You can’t stop this! They already engineer babies here in the US – you pay $3K and get the gender of baby you want. Also, “perfect” is all relative. The Aztec considered cross-eyed women the most beautiful. Nowadays, the crazier you are, the cooler people think you’re, and so on. So, again, things change and to me, there isn’t such thing as an imperfect person – we are as perfect as we could be given evolution and natural selection. Genes give us different starts in life, but what we become is possibly mostly driven by other things. The classic example are the twins. Another example is having good genetic material, but your mom smoked heavily during pregnancy or used recreational drugs or spent too much time nearby the microwave oven.
Very interesting discussions here.
Why we are so afraid of age and death? In fact, it is a philosophical question.
If we assume for a moment that death is a real end and there’s no afterlife, then there’s nothing to worry about. You just die and all your suffering and pain ends with the end of your life. On the other hand, some people believe that death is not an end but just another beginning. We don’t know that for certain since no one have ever returned from there. But in all cases, that’s even better. There’s a third group of course who believe that life does not exist at all, but it’s only a product of the imagination of a giant (supreme) being, or just a “matrix” in the memory of the primeval computer that controls the universe.
So then why studding NDA to prolong your lifespan? What you gonna do after you turn 100?
You haven’t lived even one third of your life and you’re already thinking about living longer, isn’t that absurd?
Every period of humans life has its purpose. At 10 you start discovering things in the world around you; at 20 you start learning things; at 30 you develop yourself, you enjoy your family and children; at 40 you start gathering the fruits your long years labor; at 50 you enjoy the life; at 60 you enjoy your grandchildren; at 70 – I don’t know what you do, it’s too early for me to think about it. But what you gonna do after you turn 110? You certainly cannot do what you were doing when you were 22.
Everything in the existence has its purpose, including all living things and all thinking things – like humans and aliens. It is interesting topic anyways. I was wondering why that giant turtle Adwaita lived 250 years.
Like it or not people and companies will continue DNA research, studding it, modifying it.
It is tempting to claim that DNA researches could cure a lot of diseases but may harm someone else, but for a great cause. But tell me if you can find the ultimate medicine for the worst disease in the world and removed it from the face of the earth forever, but you have to kill one person, will you do that?
Seriously, I’ll be most afraid of the Chinese, they will probably produce some kind of a 99 cents personal DNA analyzer or $9.99 personal DNA modifier, that you can buy from eBay – free shipping. But that will be long after all the military research labs have implemented some “improvements” to their soldiers – for army there’s no limits and there’s no moral, there’s only short term winning strategies and tactics that do not coupe with life and its preservation. This is not science fiction.
I’m sure that one could find 100% practical reasons why such studies should be supported. Unfortunately, we nave no choice but observe, we cannot influence this, but no one can stop us for thinking about it and discuss it.
If it was only for the purpose of pure science and to add more to the knowledge of human race, yes – I will support, I could even participate a research – as a white mouse. But in the world of that strange mixture of democracy and capitalism (I like the remark about Idiocracy), I always have doubts about what’s the real purpose behind the beautiful color brochures that suggest you do this or that.
BTW, I forgot to mention – these are just random thoughts on Tuesday morning.
Neven, governments are most afraid of society of no fear. People who fear are predictable and easy to control and manipulate, thus can be contained within certain boundaries of behavior. People who fear nothing – including age or death – are hard to control and manipulate. Such development on a global scale would meet extreme government resistance, thus manipulated social resistance as well. We do not know what a society of no fear would breed, as no society has ever maintained such. In fact, societies are based on fear – from the primitive fear for survival, to the social fear of ostracizing.
It seems I cannot further reply within the old thread so I have to start a new one. Nickolay, Fascism AFAIK is about eliminating people based on inherent traits deemed unworthy, not modifying them. I think gene modification would go in lines of forced post-humanism. But fascism is about eliminating people – and in a future where gene analysis eliminates people from social and professional career is pretty much fascism in action. If that statement offends you, I apologize and won’t dig into it further.
Studying DNA and altering DNA are two completely different things, although the former is ultimately seeking to achieve the latter. The problem with studying DNA and having the data vailable for verification and analysis by third parties without the ability to modify it actually means that you brand certain people unworthy or uncapable of certain acts, certain professions and compensating innate incapabilities by definition of their DNA analysis, no matter how precise the data it. Actually being able to modify the DNA structure would compensate for that – by sacrificing a mid-generation of naturally born humans, we will strive towards a generation of perfect human beings. Perfect for the tasks the parents have set to prepare their child for – family of sportsmen would want a physically talented kid, family of lawyers want an intelligent son, etc. Specialization in life based on pre-birth modification will even further limit individuals in excelling in totally different fields of professional life, i.e. super intelligent geek who is denied physically capable genes and would live a life in envy towards physically capable jocks – only because his life has been predetermined by choice of DNA sequencing. Media will continue to influence consumerism values and set expectations even further, into body modification perhaps, now that the general population could meet criteria that prior that were strictly in the domain of selected physically gifted individuals. As for post-birth development, we both agree that people get their potential from the genes, but how they develop that potential is in the hands of their parents, their own and their environment. That is beyond control of simple genetic analysis, yet in a world that favors structural predetermination, people would be preferred for their genetic affinity even if they show phychological or emotional incompetence for the job.
I understand Fascism and just wondered when did I mention elimination – that’s all and I don’t get offended so easily! Anyway, at the end, Fascism is a lo-tech DNA modification – by eliminating unworthy people, you control the “quality” of the collective DNA of the future – materializing the Aryan race in the course of several generations – just like they probably did in Troy. But, tell me, aren’t they doing this nowadays anyway? In the USA, every pregnant woman undergoes a Down Syndrome test. If the test is positive, the parents have the choice of an abortion. Isn’t this a low-grade Fascism of the modern time?
Actually, if we have to be precise, Fascism was not about DNA modification at all – it was about DNA elimination. Germany presumed Aryan race was superior, no need of modification as it was already superior as it is, and went jihad on everyone else. You are right about DNA filtering for Down Syndrome, but on a larger scale when a baby can be checked for almost every trait and parents decide abortion on base of trait is not good enough, keep in mind we have a serious problem. What if the world goes totally pro-intelligence and parents start aborting children showing physical traits but low intelligence traits?
You are right that Fascism was DNA (owner) elimination – my mistake. I’m not perfect, I’m not Aryan. 
Regarding existing practices in the US: they screen for sickle cells and some other diseases using blood samples. If the mother would be 35+ during delivery, they also routinely perform amniocentesis, which is getting genetic samples from the baby and then they run various tests. Then parents should make a decision upon any positive tests.
But I’m sure that even now the rich can send samples to private companies such as Knome and perform full sequencing… BTW, Knome used to charge $300K an year ago and now I see they have lowered to “only” $100K.
OMG, I just saw that Knome has their site in… Russian (their only translation)! I guess they get a lot of business from Russian oligarchs!
Stefan Stefanov
ihayes2000
jyonkov is discussing. 
Jean, 
Apostol Apostolov, and 
jyonkov 10:18 am on April 18, 2010 Permalink |
There is still time… registration ends may May 8th. You can practice on the tasks from last year. I’m learning Python this way (any programming language is allowed … but i thought of giving Python a try)
jyonkov 10:58 pm on June 3, 2010 Permalink |
Google code jam update: I’ve managed to pass the first round using Python, it was very cool… but learning a language while coding for time is not the best strategy so i ran out of time in the second round even though the tasks where not that complex . It was fun though and Python is a very nice language. (surprisingly most people used C++ with a lot of macros to reduce verbosity ++).
Here is another competition organized by a smaller group in Slovakia http://ipsc.ksp.sk