Semantic Web at Web2.0 Summit

In the latest web2.0 summit, more excitement about semantic web are coming out! Besides powerset, two more companies officicially announced their products, twine and freebase. Twine is a knowledge orgnization tool, with which you can mark any interested document on the web, then the twine engine could automatically discover the semantic tags in it and merge them into the your knowledge center. Freebase is an open semantically-tagged database.


What is more exciting is that now a lot more people are paying attention to the semantic/intelligent future of web. Here are some very insightful quotes (http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8404935373453506700):



"Tim O'Reilly (The guy popluarlized the concept of web 2.0) brings up Google, Flickr interestingness and how users can influence results (collective intelligence etc), but that it's usually passive and hidden behind silos. But these new semantic apps are more open and they're platform players. "


"Barney (Powerset) says the real value is "making explicit what was once implicit" (in terms of data)"



"Hillis (From freebase) says Web 1.0 was a "web of documents", and that it will be the same with semantic apps - it doesn't make sense to have silos of data."



This is a graph from Nova's blog, which presents his vision of the future of web, basically pretty optimistic about semantics.

Yao Wei, Entrepreneurship and etc...

A few days ago, I saw a summary of a Yao Wei's presentation in Cao Liang's blog. I know him since the business plan competition. As a veterant in entrepenurship, his dramatic style is too impressive to forget. It triggered me a lot of memories back in ITP. Now in graduate school, it is so hard to find opportunities to engage in some deep conversations like that. Basically, what I do everyday is sleep, lecture, projects and sleep again... After it is gone, I realized that how precious is an atmosphere like that, and how hard it is to find it back.



I read a lot of friends' blog today, I am so glad, or even so moved to see that the passion, comaradeship and the pursuit of bringing something different to the world is still there, although we are spreaded in all kinds of industries now. I do appreciate some people's efforts (park?spiritcell?Hong?) of building http://www.iteper.net/ . It is a great way to stay in contact. Hope that we could build it to last.



As far as what I have seen now, new york is not the kind of place that a high-tech guy would want to stay. Finance looks like the center of everything here. In the past time in investment bank, you have to command communication to earn a living. Bu these years, quantitative finance has opened the doors to a lot of Chinese guys who is just-so-so in communication but super-smart in math or programming. On these positions, although uncomparable to traders, they make big chunk of money. Say, a CS master could earn 70,000-80,000$ per year, but a quant-support (which is a programmer for real quant/trader) could easily make 100,000- 150,000$ per year and has a much steeper salary curve. This is pure temptation, as it is highly possible to transfer from CS and other engineering discplines to these professions.



A lot of people are seeking this transition. I was tempted too. But when I try to imagine what is going to happen if I choose to go into that industry 10 or 20 years later, I hesitated. I would be a middle-rank manager on a deep hierarachy, and earn probably half a million per year- so what? Do I have any impact? Can I bring any positive changes to the world? Who do I serve besides my boss? It looks that this is not the kind of life I want.



However, I believe there would be friends who want to get into this industry. NYC is definitely the place you should come. A lot of my friends here in finance are living on the edge. They understand the brutality of job market, they are stressed out, they are building connections and they are competing to stand out. This is probably the right attitude and nerve that some one needs to survive in finance. So come to arena.

A weak intelligence era

I believe a new fad in the IT industry is emerging. I would call it as a weak intelligence era. The weak/strong distinction comes from an old argument in the AI field. Weak here means to reach the result of behaving intelligently without imitating the process of thinking "intelligently".

This fad is mainly based on latested advances in artificial intelligence and the huge amoung of data generated after web2.0. A long-time controversal vision - the semantic web - may also help to shape this new era.

From a consumer's view, applications with weak AI will:
1) Know who you are, what you like, what groups you belong...
2) Be able to predict your preferences.
3) Engage in simple human-computer interactions (Verbal/NLP, visual/Computer Vision...).
4) Possess a sense of autonomy.
5) Build a weak level of personal relationship.

From a business's view, applications with weak AI will:
1) Make more sense of various kinds of data.

When will the fad come? I think the question lies in when there could be several killer applications that dramatically show the improvement of the cluster of new methods. It will not be long~

Recommendation Systems

Check out www.mspoke.com, these guys are doing recommendation systems based upon some machine learning techniques. Some latest acqusitions as eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon , CBS acquisition of Last.fm and this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine seemingly indicate that recommendation system will be a big thing (From Read/Write Web).

I have personally tried mspoke's product - www.feedhub.com which is a filter to generate personalized RSS feed, but I did not find it particularly useful. A user like me reads feeds for fun, so I do not care how many unread articles are out there. Its target should be some more serious readers who have very tight schedule. However, would these group of users trust a machine to filter information for them? Hopefully, AI would advance to the point of obtaining that trust.