Michael Cooney reports that next month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is set to detail “the union of advanced technologies from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning, natural-language fields it hopes to bring together to build an automated system that will let analysts and others better grasp meanings from large volumes of text documents.”

DARPA stated, “Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Brandon Keim reports that the Turing Test may soon be passed. He writes, “One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade. Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.” Read more

Behavioral Recognition Systems (BRS Labs) has been issued a US Patent for “the company’s unique artificial intelligence based technology that serves as the foundation for its AISight® 3.0 video surveillance software platform. This is one of a series of more than 60 related U.S. Patents that have either been granted, are pending, or are in process.”

BRS Labs President John Frazzini commented, “The video surveillance technology we have invented is distinctly and materially different from the simple recognition capabilities found in video analytics solutions currently available from a number of vendors in the physical security market… Read more

Rob Gonzalez has written a new online lesson discussing the two views of how to apply the semantic web. He explains, “Various authors and practitioners have radically different view on how best to apply Semantic Web technologies. Some see its potential best applied to artificial intelligence, while others feel that it would be better applied within the context of its flexible data model. This lesson aims to clarify these two distinct points of view and to consider a few of the advantages of each perspective.” Read more

Steve Lohr recently reported on Dr. Fill, a crossword-solving program that has been pitted against human crossword champs. Lohr writes, “Computers can make mincemeat of chess masters and vanquish the champions of ‘Jeopardy!’ But can the trophy go to a crossword-solving program, Dr. Fill — a wordplay on filling in a crossword and the screen name of the talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw — when it tests its algorithms against the wits of 600 of the nation’s top crossword solvers?” Read more

Kyield recently announced “a new pilot program for its recently patented semantic enterprise platform. The artificial intelligence system provides a holistic architecture that extends advanced business intelligence and predictive analytics to all information workers in the organization with an adaptive approach to data optimization.” Kyield CEO Mark Montgomery stated, “We are inviting well-matched organizations to collaborate with us in piloting our breakthrough system to bring a higher level of performance to the information workplace… In addition to the significant competitive advantage exclusive to our pilot program, we are offering attractive long-term incentives free from lock-in, maintenance fees, and high service costs traditionally associated with the enterprise software industry.” Read more

Manu Sporny writes, “Google is building a gigantic Knowledge Graph that will change search forever. The purpose of the graph is to understand the conceptual “things” on a web page and produce better search results for the world. Clearly, the people and companies that end up in this Knowledge Graph first will have a huge competitive advantage over those that do not. So, what can you do today to increase your organization’s chances of ending up in this Knowledge Graph, and thus ending up higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?” Read more

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.

Read more

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