The prez made a funnyNovember 24, 2009
http://gizmodo.com/5411752/obama-to-robots-im-watching-youlol, I love it.
Starting at Wolfram ResearchSeptember 7, 2009
Here I am in Boston, on Labour Day, and tomorrow I start working for Wolfram Research. When I first read about
Wolfram Alpha last spring, I never imagined that something like this would have worked out. What a neat opportunity!
Speaking about opportunity, my team has it's work cut out for it. As I've read what the press has had to say about W|A this summer, one thing is clear: The part of the system that most limits it's ability to answer people's questions is it's ability to understand user input. Much of the time, the system has the data and algorithms it needs to answer a question, but is unable to map a question to those data and algorithms.
And of course, this isn't surprising, since it is really the language parsing layer of W|A that is the most difficult. Ever since computers were invented, people have dreamed about creating a computer that could understand questions -- and after several decades of trying, people become disillusioned with this vision. As of 2009, there are still decades of work to be done. It is a very difficult problem!
In a recent report written by Stephen Wolfram, it is stated that the team has been able to reduce the "fall through" rate by 10%, which is fantastic progress for only 1 summer of work! Hopefully this trend continues, and I look forward to helping make that happen.
Today we did a "duck tour" of Boston, which involved an amphibious vehicle... first driving around, and then boating down the Charles river. I even got to drive the boat, and let it be known that I was the only person out of about a dozen that could keep the boat going straight! What a hero.
We also took a tour of Fenway Park. One of the tour guides said that we were the first group in about six months to be allowed onto the field. And when I say "field", I mean the warning track. They wouldn't let us on the grass. Think he was telling the truth, or just trying to make us feel special?! Eli has been fantastic for the most part, but he was pretty upset when we made it back to the hotel this afternoon... apparently, disrupting a baby's nap schedule is a recipe for one very angry baby! Poor guy.
It will be fun getting up tomorrow, navigating the subways, and then arriving to meet the folks of Wolfram Cambridge!
Having fun with foodAugust 30, 2009
Over the last couple of months I've implemented some more features for my
Grace project. These features are focused around food, which was the original dream for the project, so it has been nice to finally get around to that.
At first, I focused on expanding my database of foods and adding their nutritional information to the program. Next, I added the ability to tell the computer what you have eaten and have it draw a nice
graph showing you what essential nutrients you are missing for the current day. Using the nutrition tracking has been an interesting exercise, and has confirmed my suspicion that I consume upwards of 5000 mg of sodium each day, twice the recommended amount. It has also been very helpful when certain other members of the family want to keep track of what they're eating without always having to look up points values.
With a good food database in place, I was able to move on to more interesting things. The first step was to use the food database to create a recipe database, and thus to be able to calculate the nutritional information for any of our recipes. The second step was to allow the program to keep an inventory of all of the foods in our kitchen by saying, for example,
"add milk to the fridge", or
"add frozen strawberries to the freezer".
The immediate reason for keeping an inventory was that we have so many cans in the cupboard (and things in our freezer) that it becomes very frustrating if you want to figure out whether you have a certain ingredient -- you end up pulling half the cans out of the cupboard searching. Now, you can simply ask
"do we have any refried beans?", and if you need to narrow down the location, you could ask
"where are the refried beans?".
Although the inventory is helpful, the real money is being able to answer the question
"what can recipes can I make?". For example, we were on our way back from church today, and as is usually the case, both of us were famished and didn't have much energy to figure out what we could cobble together for lunch. We figured we'd just grab some food on our way home, but instead I typed
"what recipes can we make?" into my BlackBerry and a list of several options came back, such as
Rotini and Fresh Tomato, Basil, and Parmesan. That sounded pretty good, so we drove home instead and had a nice home-cooked meal.
older >>
