Roaming Eye: 11/14/07

If you're at all interested in new media, business models for same, or venture investing - if not, why are you reading this? - check out Marc Andreessen's post on rebuilding the Hollywood business model along Silicon Valley lines. It deserves a whole post in itself,but for now RTWT.

Now that the 2007 installment of the Urban Challenge is over, my new favorite DARPA-funded project is CALO. This is out of DARPA/IPTO's Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, so naturally just about every surviving AI lab is wrapped up in it. (Though a lot of 'AI' seems to look more and more like advanced IR (information retrieval) these days - vector models and bottoms-up clustering, and the like. Just sayin....)

Anyway, here's a big PDF'ed slide deck on the project. Among other outputs, there's an open-sourced (Win XP only) 'cognitive desktop' called IRIS. There's a long list of publications. Amongst them is this report on reverse engineering an individual's information and social context by datamining their workstation, particularly including their e-mail archive. After creating initial clusters based on a fairly standard vector representation, it repartitions them based on a social network analysis of the e-mail traffic. Another example of what I've called First Person SNA. (Hat tip to Tom Gruber, who organized the SDForum session where I saw this.)

From the Innumeracy Department, Aviation Week takes down CBS' smear on veteran's suicide rates. That probably took all of 30 minutes in the vital statistics files. You'd think the 'fact checkers' at CBS could have done that. Oh, yeah...