Anyone interested in search and discovery is spoilt for choice at present. First, the excellent Haystack conference on open-source search, and now the wonderful BCS Information Retrieval …
Category: AI
This is a book that packs a punch – although it’s not quite the punch the reader might expect. Published in the MIT “Essential Knowledge” series, Michael Schrage’s Recommendation Engines moves from ancient Greece to the recommender systems we are familiar with today – and …
Should you add functionality just because you can? Here is an example of why perhaps you should not. Todd Carpenter has written an excellent post on Scholarly Kitchen about …
Imagine you are a researcher, studying, say, bird migration. How do you find out about new papers on your topic? You have written a PhD on the subject, which enabled you to become familiar with all the recent research on …
Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why (co-authored with science journalist Dana Mackenzie) (2018) is a tantalising read. For the initial premiss of the book, I am convinced by Pearl’s description of the limitations of current tools, particularly in statistics. He describes three levels of causation:…
I’m a great admirer of the Very Short Introductions: clear, concise outlines of a topic by an expert in the field. Well, this book is certainly very short, but how good is it as an introduction? Readers hoping for a good exposition of present-day AI …
Dan Kolkmann made an interesting point in his recent post about algorithms, entitled, charmingly, ““F**k the algorithm”?: What the world can learn from the UK’s A-level grading fiasco”. The article looks at an example of algorithmic bias, and how best to deal with …
I was interested to see a new report, Machine Learning + Libraries, commissioned by the Library of Congress. Actually, the report is from LC Labs, a team in the Library Digital Strategy Directorate, so it looks as though this …
I find histories of artificial intelligence very revealing. Computing as an academic discipline is relatively recent, but AI in particular has always been a cross-over subject, something that has been studied by academics for over 75 …