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MIT Media Lab: Reality Mining

MIT Media Lab: Reality Mining

Deb Roy - MIT Media Laboratory Technology Review: Software That Learns from Users The thing that makes computers a huge pain for everybody, says Pedro Domingos, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, is that you have to explain to them every little detail of what they need to do. “It’s really annoying,” Domingos jokes. “They’re stupid.” That’s why Domingos is taking part in CALO, a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users. Adam Cheyer, program director of the artificial-intelligence center at SRI, explains that CALO tries to assist users in three ways: by helping them manage information about key people and projects, by understanding and organizing information from meetings, and by learning and automating routine tasks. “It’s an amazingly large thing, and it’s insanely ambitious,” Domingos says.

Saxelab Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT About The Open Group: Boundaryless Information Flow through interoperability The Open Group: Leading the development of open, vendor-neutral IT standards and certifications The Open Group is a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through IT standards. With more than 400 member organizations, we have a diverse membership that spans all sectors of the IT community — customers, systems and solutions suppliers, tool vendors, integrators and consultants, as well as academics and researchers to: Capture, understand and address current and emerging requirements, and establish policies and share best practicesFacilitate interoperability, develop consensus, and evolve and integrate specifications and open source technologiesOffer a comprehensive set of services to enhance the operational efficiency of consortiaOperate the industry’s premier certification service The Open Group Vision Boundaryless Information Flow™ achieved through global interoperability in a secure, reliable and timely manner The Open Group Mission Statement

MIT World | Distributed Intelligence And The Winners Are… — Sunlight Foundation Blog Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult: 40+ solid, open source applications that solidly moved the ball forward in terms of opening government and providing new methods of communicating to our legislative branch. The entries ranged from highly technical Bayesian prediction tools like Words Vote, to the super simple and super useful GovPix. Every entry presented was open source and and amazing commitment on behalf of the development community to open their government. But we can't. Scoring was done with our own judging application-- if you could call it that. First Place for $15,000 Filibusted: "Hold senators accountable for blocking legislation." Second Place for $5,000 Legistalker: "The latest online activity of Congress Members." Third Place for $1,000 (4) Hello Congress Know Thy Congressman Yeas & Nays e-PaperTrail Honorable Mentions for $100 (10) RepresentedByCapital CallsiLegislatorTweetCongressCongress BillsLocalPolitics.inWords Vote.ExpendicusCall CongressHear Me Say This

MIT management professor Tom Malone on collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups Do groups have genetic structures? If so, can they be modified? Those are two central questions for Thomas Malone, a professor of management and an expert in organizational structure and group intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The smart group First is the question of whether general cognitive ability — what we think of, when it comes to individuals, as “intelligence” — actually exists for groups. And what they found is telling. So how do you engineer groups that can problem-solve effectively? Which, yay. The group genome But where Professor Malone’s ideas get especially interesting from the Lab’s perspective is in another aspect of his work: the notion that groups have, in their structural elements, a kind of dynamic DNA. That all seems simple and obvious — because it is — but what makes the approach so interesting and valuable from the future-of-news perspective is, among other things, its disaggregation of project and method and intention.

Twitter's Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter. Twitter's Most Active Users in Detail Sysomos's Alex Cheng and Mark Evans decided to take a closer look at the top 5% of Twitter's most active users, and the results of their study are quite interesting. These active Twitter users also tend to have more followers. 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for Twitter overall. Who Are The Most Active Users? More Info

Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology A hack in progress in Lobby 7. Although the practice is unsanctioned by the university, and students have sometimes been arraigned on trespassing charges for hacking,[18][19][20] hacks have substantial significance to MIT's history and student culture. Student bloggers working for the MIT Admissions Office have often written about MIT hacks, including those occurring during Campus Preview Weekend (CPW), an event welcoming admitted prospective freshman students.[21] Alumni bloggers on the MIT Alumni Association website also report and document some of the more memorable hacks.[22] Since the mid-1970s, the student-written guide How To Get Around MIT (HowToGAMIT) has included a chapter on hacking, and discusses history, hacker groups, ethics, safety tips, and risks of the activity.[23] Cultural aspects[edit] Residents of MIT's Simmons Hall collaborated to make a smiley face on the building's facade, December 8, 2002. Famous hacks[edit]

What IBM learned from Linux, open source | The Open Road IBM trumpets open standards so much that it's easy to forget the company cares deeply about open source, too. I much prefer this latter emphasis, incidentally, because IBM is so good at playing the "open" standards game - it's much harder to game an open-source license. Which is why I found this interview with Bob Sutor refreshing. Bob is IBM's vice president of Open Source and Standards, and does great work for Big Blue. When asked what IBM has learned from its Linux experience, he responded: It taught us how to better collaborate with others who don't work for IBM; it demonstrated that business models can evolve; it showed us that a good intellectual property strategy balances both "open" and "closed"; and it taught us that software that grew up in a non-corporate setting can be excellent, wildly successful, and meet customer needs. Well put.

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