More Artificial Intelligence: This Time Search
July 11, 2008
I remember when InfoWorld was a big, fat tabloid. I had to keep two subscriptions going because I would be summarily dropped. So, my dog at the time–Kelsey Benjamin–got one, and my now deceased partner, Ken Toth got the other one. It was easy to spoof the circulation folks who had me fill out forms. I used to check my company size as $10 to $20 million and assert that I bought more than $1 million in networking gear.
Paul Krill wrote “Artificial Intelligence Tied to Search Future”, which appeared on July 12, 2008, on the InfoWorld Web site. You can read the story here. (Search is not a core competency of most publishing companies, so you may have to enlist the help of a gum shoe if this link goes dead quickly.)
The point of the well-written essay is that an IBM wizard asserts that artificial intelligence will be instrumental in advanced text processing.
No disagreement from me on that assertion. What struck me as interesting was this passage from the essay:
“We’re going to see in the next five years next-generation search systems based on things like Open IE (Information Extraction),” Etzioni said. Open IE involves techniques for mapping sentences to logical expressions and could apply to arbitrary sentences on the Web, he said.
The Etzioni referenced in the passage is none other than Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington.
Why is this important?
Google and Microsoft hire the junior wizards from this institution, pay them pretty well, and let them do stuff like develop systems that use artificial intelligence. The only point omitted from the article is that smart software has been part of the plumbing at Google for a decade, but Google prefers the term “janitors” to “smartbots”. Microsoft in 1998 was aware of smart software, and the Redmonians have been investing in artificial intelligence for quite a while.
My point is that that AI is not new, and it is not in disfavor among wizards. AI has been in disfavor among marketers and pundits. The marketers avoid the term because it evokes the image of SkyNet in Terminator. SkyNet is smart software that wants to kill all humans. The pundits over hyped AI years ago, discovered that smart software was useful in air craft control systems (yawn) and determining what content to cache on Akamai’s content delivery network servers (bigger yawn).
Now AI is back with zippier names–the essay includes a raft of them, and you can dig through the long list on page 2 of Mr. Krill’s essay. More important, the applications are ones that may mean something to an average Web surfer.
I must admit I don’t know what this means, however:
Etzioni emphasized more intelligent Internet- searching. “We’re going to see in the next five years next-generation search systems based on things like Open IE (Information Extraction),” Etzioni said. Open IE involves techniques for mapping sentences to logical expressions and could apply to arbitrary sentences on the Web, he said.
If you know, use the comments section for this Web log to help me out. In the meantime, run a Google query from www.google.com/ig. There’s AI under the hood. Few take the time to lift it and look. Some of the really neat stuff is coming from Dr. Etzioni’s former students just as it has for the last decade at Google.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2008
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