Course Notes
A funny take on spelling and grammar correctors
This is quite funny and well done, and very relevant to our section on spelling correction. Warning: contains adult themes and content. |
Jeopardy Challenge
IBM has created Watson, a computer program that plays Jeopardy. It has been winning lots of rounds against actual human players, and now it will be playing the top Jeopardy players next week: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116163439390834.html http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-04-watson04_ST_N.htmWatson is a heavy-duty computational linguistics application, so this is quite an exciting event! |
Growth of UNICODE
This is the graphic that I showed in class a week ago, showing the increase in the number of characters in UNICODE over time. The data was pulled from the Wikipedia page on UNICODE. |
Spring semester starts!
The semester has begun, and the course web page is now live, with syllabus and schedule prepared! I will use this announcement page to post items of interest to the course throughout the semester, so feel free to subscribe to it if you would like to receive updates as and when I make them. |
City management through data-driven crowd sourcing
Wired magazine has a nice article from a few months back that is about how municipalities like New York City can use individual reports from lots of residents to identify problems and opportunities to make their city better. This idea touches directly on the georeferencing topic that we'll discuss later in the class. Here's a graphic from the article that shows the proportion of reasons people called 311 over the course of the day (averaged over multiple days, presumably): On a different, but related topic, you can also check out a site that allows you to look at Twitter word usage over the course of the day. For example, check out a graph of hungry, breakfast, lunch, dinner over the course of the day, according to Twitter. Or, you can look at the use of words on Twitter according to the sex of the tweeter. |
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