Editor’s Note: Here at the Semantic Web Blog we’ve done a lot of coverage of the personalized news mag app space. That includes some in-depth looks into Zite, acquired by CNN in August, such as this article. Most recently, we brought you news of Zite’s iPhone app.

Today, over at Zite’s blog, the company today will run a piece entitled Zite: Under the Hood. It should be of interest to anyone who wants more details about how its technology operates. It goes like this:

Zite: Under the Hood

If you’re already a Zite user, you’ve experienced the delivery of personalized content that is updated every time you open the app. To make that transparent and easy for you, takes a lot of effort. The Zite team brings together decades of software development in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language technologies, and more than six years of product development, to blend and tune the experience for you. In short, Zite works by:

• mining content from your social web
• modeling that content
• modeling the community that interacts with it
• modeling your interests
• matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Google Director of Research Peter Norvig recently answered questions about Google’s search algorithms. Norvig stated, “We test tens of thousands of hypotheses each year, and make maybe one or two actual changes to the search algorithm per day. That’s a lot of ideas, and a lot of changes. It means the Google you’re using this year is improved quite a bit from the Google of last year, and the Google you’re using now is radically different from anything you used ten years ago.” Read more

MIT has created a computer chip that they claim thinks like a single synapse of the human brain. The article explains, “It may be a bit on the Uncanny Valley side of things to have a computer chip that can mimic the human brain’s activity, but it’s still undeniably cool. Over at MIT, researchers have unveiled a chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt to new information (a process known as plasticity) which could help in understanding assorted brain functions, including learning and memory. The silicon chip contains about 400 transistors and can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — the space between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other.” Read more

In a recent interview George Dyson discussed the nature of artificial intelligence. Dyson discusses Lewis Fry Richardson’s quote that a computer “is a simple mind having a will but capable of only two ideas.” He stated, “The significance of Richardson’s idea was that he broke with the assumption that computation had to be deterministic, because so few others things in the universe are deterministic. Alan Turing was very explicit that computers will never be intelligent unless they are allowed to make mistakes. The human mind is not deterministic, it is not flawless. So why would we want computers to be flawless?” Read more

A new article marvels at the advances of artificial intelligence, pointing to a news brief written by a computer: “WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3.” The article notes, “Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-UNLV football game earlier this month… The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.” Read more

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are teaching an online course entitled Introduction to Artificial Intelligence from September 26 through December 16, 2011. The course, also taught in-class at Stanford University, is a popular intro level examination of AI. “For the online version,” the description states, “the instructors aim to offer identical materials, assignments, and exams, and to use the same grading criteria. Both instructors will be available for online discussions.” Read more

A recent article reports, “A new technology enables almost any application to learn like a human. The Topic-Mapper software development kit (SDK) by ai-one inc. reads and understands unstructured data without any human intervention. It allows developers to build artificial intelligence into almost any software program. This is a major step towards what Ray Kurzweil calls the technological singularity – where superhuman intelligence will transform history.” Read more

A new article by Michael Green discusses how “the Semantic Web, Mobile Web, and the immersive Internet [are] changing the way we learn and deliver learning.” Green states, “The growing and central role of technology in organizational learning can be characterized as both a boon and a burden. While the benefits of emerging technologies are broad and unprecedented, it is nearly impossible to keep pace with the rapid evolution of these tools. Even as today’s technology experts discuss artificial intelligence, immersive virtual worlds, and the future of mobile devices, many organizations are still wrestling with how to best leverage online learning.” Read more

Watson, it may come as no surprise to those who’ve been following its progress on Jeopardy this week, took home the grand prize, or rather the charity it was playing for did : $1 million for World Vision and World Community Grid.

But while Watson started off strong this round, its two human competitors – especially Ken Jennings – gave it a better run for its money than we’ve seen in the whole competition. Especially Ken Jennings, who actually was on a winning streak going once or twice in the game. He advanced big-time at one point by landing on the Daily Double and betting the lot of his winnings, telling the audience that it was either do that or unplug Watson.

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What do you get when you combine Semantic Web technology, geo-targeting capabilities, and Apple iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad? How about News360, a free App Store/iTunes app that can give you local news drawn from hundreds of content sources around the world based on your current position. While the team at News360 that developed the technology is based in Russia, the company’s focus is on English-language content, and about 80 percent of its users are U.S.-based.

The app was just updated at year’s end to include, along with some UI redesign and layout features, up-to-date stock graphs for all public companies and more data and links between objects in the dossiers it collects for each of the 130,000 different entities it currently tracks across the Internet. Plans for the service, which can extract users’ favorite objects so that news is more personalized, were to grow from 600 content sources to 1000 by the end of December, says Roman Karachinsky, chief business development officer at News360, with the bigger next-steps goal of reaching 2,000 or 3,000.

Approximately 150,000 articles are indexed by the service each day, and a chunk of them have their full text processed for semantic analysis, with the help of Microsoft’s cloud resources, so that they are available to users no later than 15 minutes after their original publication.

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