Wouldn’t
it be great if instead of spending hours mining feeds and Twitter each day you
could just go to a web page and have a personalized stream of news? A
stream that learns about you over time and continues to get smarter about
giving you just the right news for you.
Yesterday
at the Neural Information Processing Systems
Conference in Vancouver, Ralf Herbrich and Jurgen van Gael of FUSE Labs showed the latest version of Project
Emporia – it goes a long way towards providing this kind of service. This
research project has come a long way since it was first shown at the Thinking
Digital conference in the UK earlier this year – an all new HTML5 UI for starters.
Project
Emporia is a recommendation engine for news. Based on the Matchbox
technology from Microsoft Research, it uses a Bayesian probabilistic
model to learn the preferences of users for recent news stories.
In
plain English, that means Emporia recommends
news for you based on news you have read
earlier – it predicts what you may want to read. When using Emporia
you can vote a link up or down and that influences what you continue
to see. From a personal point of view, I wish someone would do this for
television and stop showing me ads for stuff I really
don’t need 🙂 In fact there is a whole bunch of things I’d love to see
this applied to but that’s the topic for another post.
Emporia
mines RSS feeds and all links shared on Twitter – discovering around 1,000,000 articles every day. Not only
that, it does automatic classification of articles into categories using another Microsoft
Research technology for classification. Of course that’s
not enough for Ralf and team so they’ve developed a system for
“active learning” to automatically discover links that cannot reliably be
classified. They sit down and do this manually each night by hand. Just kidding
– these types of links are automatically sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk for
labeling, they’re then “spam filtered” and returned the
classification model to be appropriately categorized.
Fortunately
all of that big brain stuff happens behind the scenes leaving the user with an
elegant interface that presents personalized news.
I got to play with the app this week and I can report that it works very well indeed. You can see the demo from NIPS at http://emporianips.cloudapp.net/#/topStories – stay tuned for release and some more exciting news I have coming,
