Information Retrieval Gupf

Over the past month and a half, computer science researcher and UQAM Professor Daniel Lemire has been on fire.  He’s written a series of blog posts on what it means to do research and be involved with a research community.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the whole series, and want to pass along pointers to his last [...]

Now seems as good a time as any to post a quick recap of the series of collaborative information seeking posts that Gene and I have been writing over on Palblog.  We’re about halfway through the series.

Communicating about Collaboration
Communicating about Collaboration: Intent
Communicating about Collaboration: Synchronization
Social Search
Social Search Redux

I will post another recap once we finish [...]

Well, the move comes 9 years after I suggested it to ‘em, but Google finally launches a music service:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/03/reuters_us_google_china
Now, my only question is whether they have simultaneously been researching and implementing intelligent search algorithms to go with the free music downloads, or whether they have been too busy moving Microsoft Office into the online realm [...]

Google researchers Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira have an article in IEEE Computer magazine entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data“.  The article continues a theme that has been running strong within Google circles for the past half decade about how training a simple algorithm with larger amounts of data is more effective than [...]

Daniel Tunkelang continues to raise provocative and interesting questions over on his blog.  I would like to point readers to the comments section of a recent post.  In one of my own comments there, I raise a question about ad-supported web search engines (as typified by, though by no means limited to, Google) and their [...]

PBS has an interesting article on the new media gatekeepers and the need for transparency in the process by which they promote media.  Here is an excerpt:
The problem for these new gatekeepers is that they are providing the old editorial functions, but there’s a key difference between the way they operate and the way that [...]

At SXSW this year, Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest and Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine engaged in a head-to-head panel about the utility of:

Using computer algorithms (e.g. collaborative filtering, tag-based, content-based, etc.) to automatically recommend music, versus
Using computers to (a) connect people who can directly recommend music to each other and (b) provide contextually [...]

Over on the new CACM blog, researcher Tessa Lau has an interesting post on three common misconceptions that folks have about HCI.  I recommend reading the full article, but I would like to call attention to her provocative opening statement (emphasis mine):
I come to the field of HCI via a background in AI, having learned [...]

Long-time Music Information Retrieval researcher Pedro Cano has a new book out, based on his dissertation: “Content-based Audio Search: From Audio Fingerprinting to Semantic Audio Retrieval“.  From the review:
Music search sound engines rely on metadata, mostly human generated, to manage collections of audio assets. Even though time-consuming and error-prone, human labeling is a common practice. [...]

Just the other day I observed that Google, by thinking only evolutionarily and being unable to make leap-based changes, long ago fell into a local maximum trap.  The following blogpost from a designer who is leaving Google appears to reinforce this conjecture:
When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. [...]