You may have noticed that the postings in this blog become scarcer even though it was already scarce before. This doesn’t mean that I have lost the interest in writing posts here. Instead, the sabbatical period (in another sabbatical period) has brought me a lot of new findings, interesting and exciting things to explore. Here, in this post, I write some of the stuff you may find yourself curious about too.

Wolfram the Knowledge Engine and Knowledge Discovery

Some have speculated that Wolfram will be the Google-killer although by purpose they are a bit different (and the Wolfram dev team also clearly mentioned about this on their site). Wolfram is a knowledge engine with its own data repositories which is capable of answering questions to very diverse domains. Different with search engines in which data are collected from various sources and then ranked based on relevance, utilizing page rank algorithms, the knowledge engine stores data that are “factual” and representative for the knowledge. For each given question, it computes the answer based on the model that represents the question. Two pertinent fields to this application are machine learning and data mining. Key issue in developing application like Wolfram is that it should be smart enough to interpret the question and provide relevant and factual answers thus less being subjective. Continue reading →