Category Archives: Uncategorized

worio is a new search engine that uses recommender technologies to improve the search experience quite a bit. If that is all greek to you: Worio transfers the “people who bought this also bought that” thingie from online shopping to web search. Because just as an online shop, a search engine is different things to different people.

To gain the needed knowledge, worio doubles as a social bookmarking site like delicious to learn more abut the content of the web and its users.

This combination seems to work reasonably well. As the public failure of cuil to present flattering images for people’s names showed, ego searching is an important first test for a new search engine. Worio passed with distinction for me. When searching for myself, it suggested to look for famous machine learning researchers as well. This is not only flattering, but also rather useful for people not in the area.

Using my profile, Worio was also way more quick in finding the ICML 2009. That, to me, means “International Conference of Machine Learning” and not “International Congress on Medical Librarianship” as yahoo! spits out by default. Search is just not the same thing for all people anymore, if it ever was.

But maybe Worio is heavily biased towards machine learning topics as it was leaving stealth mode at NIPS this year and hundreds of machine learners were its first users thereafter?

Does worio work for you?

As a side note: It cannot be worse than MSN, Yahoo! or Google, as it uses them if you choose to. You will still be able to enjoy the recommendations if you do so.

Yahoo! Research posted a short story about the SPARTA project I was involved in this summer:

Yahoo! Research has teamed up with Yahoo! Mail engineering to develop state-of-the-art spam detection that has dramatically reduced the amount of spam mail that can leak through to the in-boxes of Yahoo! Mail users. The project originated in 2007 when the mail engineering team approached the research team about collaborating on an improved content classifier.

read on

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Source: oblong industries

Garr Reynolds @ Google: This is 70 minutes well spend:

If simplicity really is the ultimate sophistication, what does that tell us about the sophistication level of most stuff published today in computer science? Nevermind….

… dass Politiker so viel (Galgen-)Humor haben:

Angesichts des zunehmenden Fachkräftemangels auch in Forschung und Lehre will die Bundesregierung mehr junge Menschen zu einer wissenschaftlichen Karriere ermutigen. Auf einer Fachtagung am Dienstag in Berlin schaltete Staatssekretär Michael Thielen (CDU) vom Bildungsministerium dazu eine Internet-Plattform kisswin.de frei. Sie soll bei den Studierenden “Lust auf wissenschaftliche Karriere” wecken. Auch Informationen zu Förderwege und zum Aufbau von Netzwerken soll es dort geben.

Quelle: Heise Online

Aber vielleicht machen die ja auch ernst und es gibt bald unbefristete Stellen und anständige Gehälter?

… and I miss California already. 10 Degree Celcius and clouds! I had 26 and sun yesterday! Anyway, off to ECML now. Thanks Kilian, Anirban, Marty, Marc’Aurelio, Eva, Malcolm, and all the other great people at Yahoo! Research for the great summer!

Home, sweet home, originally uploaded by Markus.Weimer.

this does not look to good in comparison…

Power to the people, originally uploaded by Markus.Weimer.

This is the remote to the wonderful world of comcast. Seriously, it lets me watch Top Gear, whenever I want

ECML 2008 just announced the best paper awards this year. Looks like we got one for the paper Improving Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization