November 19, 2007
Natural Language and the Semantic Web: ISWC Keynote talk
I gave an invited keynote talk last week at The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007. The abstract for the talk is below. The image below links to the original video and presentation slides.
The live presentation (and video) contains technical demos that aren't in the slides. Some of the demos are already available inside Powerlabs (e.g. Powermouse, which lets you browse and query our semantic database of facts extracted from Wikipedia), while some of these are still internal (e.g. an open search box, and output of our natural language system on full sentences). I also gave some detailed walk-through showing how Powerset takes advantage of external semantic resources like Wordnet and Freebase.
For me, the most fun part of the talk was toward the end, where I got to speculate on how ecosystem effects can make natural language search and the semantic web become deeper and more powerful more quickly than people might expect. For example, advertisers, publishers, and vertical search sites will be able to contribute ontologies that enable them to get more users, better internal search, and more revenue, while having as a side effect that the broad search engines get more knowledgeable about different domains. The questions afterward were also challenging and interesting.
POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web
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Posted by barney at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2007
Powerlabs internal launch
Today was an exciting milestone for Powerset. We released the first version of the Powerlabs platform for our employees to try out. The Powerlabs platform is a framework for innovation in which a community of users can generate and refine ideas as they interact with products and concepts. It combines elements of social networking, crowd-sourcing, and social search (among other buzzwords that, in our case, really make a difference).
It turns out that the product team have been using Powerlabs to improve Powerlabs itself, so there were already a large set of ideas and evaluations by the time the rest of the employees got to try the system out. And we are already finding the system to be addictive: within a couple hours of internal release (the time it took Product Manager Mark Johnson and me to play a few matches of Dance Dance Revolution), already over 50 ideas had been generated and evaluated!
With this much interest from our own small number of employees, it is amazing to think about the kind of ideas, creativity, and feedback we are going to get from the 16,000 people already signed up for Powerlabs launch in September! (You can sign up at the Powerlabs Website).
Powerlabs is so cool, in fact, that we have already started talking about potentially offering this as a service to other companies who want community innovation around their products (both internal employees and outside users). So the race is now on to see which takes off faster: a radical new way to search using natural language, or a radical new way to create products!
Posted by barney at 8:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 30, 2005
Google Prediction Markets
Patri Friedman, a google engineer who works on evaluating search quality, posted about the surprising accuracy of Google's Internal Prediction Market.
I've written a post about the previous prediction markets workshop at SuperNova2005, which gave some background on the topic from pioneers and leaders in the field.
I am excited to see Google developing and using prediction markets internally. It just points to what, in my mind, is one of the best things about Google: they really think about collective intelligence (CI), in the sense envisioned by Doug Englebart -- how to ensure that the many within an organization or community can process information and make decisions that benefit from scale, rather than get hurt by it.
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Posted by barney at 11:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack