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

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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

According to a recent article, “In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low… Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space. These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.” 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 reports, “Perhaps the biggest announcement at Apple’s iPhone event (about one hour from this posting) will be Assistant, Apple’s evolution of the Siri Personal Assistant Software. Siri, you’ll remember, is the company Apple picked up for a rumored $200 million in April of last year for, in Steve Jobs’ words, its “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.”

Before Apple bought the company, Siri described itself as a Virtual Personal Assistant 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

The Semantic Web Blog mentioned here, there is speculation that the Siri intelligent personal digital assistant technology may come to light in Apple’s fall iOS 5 release. Which is all well and good for users on Apple’s mobile platforms, but myBantu founder and vice president of products and strategy Bharath Yadla sees an opportunity to bring personalized recommendations for entertainment to a wider swath of the populace. The iPhone and Android version of its application, to join its web and Facebook applications. officially launch next week.

“We see absolutely a great opportunity with other platforms from a mobile standpoint,” he says. “And when you leverage the application on Facebook, that is a predominant presence.”

What users are leveraging in this intelligent assistant is its ActiveRelevance platform for providing relevant and personalized recommendations based on their profiles and queries. The platform leverages both artificial intelligence and social relevance, assessing some nine dimensions, including personal interests, proximity of choices, popularity, and peer influence, in order to deliver a handful or two of results. The social relevance comes by way of crowd-sourcing recommendations from sites such as OpenTable and Rotton Tomatoes, friends on social networking platforms, and the output of search as well as semantic engines. Users can enter their requirements in natural language, such as top romantic restaurant nearby, for the ActiveRelevance engine to parse intent and come to some conclusions.

Read more

ai-one has acquired Auto-Semantics, “a local start-up providing artificial intelligence services to corporate IT departments. The acquisition is the latest in a series of joint-ventures and acquisitions by ai-one that consolidates its leadership position within the emerging market for machine learning technologies.  In less than one year from its founding, Auto-Semantics built a solid pipeline of commercial accounts to apply computational semantics to solve ‘big data’ and marketing problems – such as modeling consumer and investor behaviors.” Read more

iSOCO, a Spanish semantic technology company that specializes in helping companies position themselves in the Network Economy, is planning a major international expansion. According to a recent article, iSOCO “has decided to push further afield by opening branches that will enable it to replicate its business strategy in other countries and, above all, extend its experience and knowledge as a creator of technological business solutions for companies and institutions.” Read more