Freebase.com invitation
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007I've got five freebase.com developer invitations; if you're interested, and are a 'data fanatic,' then get in touch with me.
Archive for the ‘Search technology’ Category
I've got five freebase.com developer invitations; if you're interested, and are a 'data fanatic,' then get in touch with me.
Quotes on names (2)
Saturday, May 5th, 2007The uniqueness and immense pragmatic convenience of proper names in our language lie precisely in the fact that they enable us to refer publicly to objects without being forced to raise issues and come to agreement on what descriptive characteristics exactly constitute the identity of the object. They function not ...
Quotes on names (1)
Friday, May 4th, 2007When Mr N.N. dies, one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. -- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Future of Search conference
Monday, April 30th, 2007The Future of Search conference coming up on May 4 looks interesting, with lots of heavy hitters from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and other companies; Powerset's CEO, Barney Pell is on the list.
WordNet, saints and Robin Hood
Saturday, April 28th, 2007Why are you reading this, when you should be reading Natalia’s ball-peen hammer to the head? One of the many things that it takes for a computer to “understand” text (as we are trying to do at Powerset) is for it recognize names and what they refer to. So for example, ...
Semantic Parser, best in show
Friday, April 27th, 2007I got an email today from Larry Hunter at University of Colorado School of Medicine, who writes to say that a DMAP-based parser was the "international world-champion" in the The BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction systems in Biology) data text mining challenge. The chart above are the results from ...
Onomastical poem
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007How do all things with names combine? Words are but nests, the meanings are the birds, Body the bed through which the spirit-river flows. The surface of this mental watercourse Is not without its chaff of good and bad repute: It flows, but you would say it stagnates; It moves but you would say it stays; From ...
Powerset in NY Times, Venturebeat
Friday, February 9th, 2007The company I work for, Powerset, is being written up in the New York Times and Venturebeat, both reporting on a deal between Powerset and PARC. The New York Times article (behind a registration wall, alack) mostly follows the storied arc of the Palo Alto Research Center, where the graphical ...
A Google Poem
Monday, February 5th, 2007This is a kind of found poem Google wrote for me. It's the 'common words' list from kmenno.org, the site for the Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship: mennonite kalamazoo fellowship worship prayer song usa church confession god hymn lectionary opportunties readings songs affiliated community exploring focus forming gather gathered helpful introductions january jesus kmenno life listen love normal opening passages peace revised silence sip soup sundays supper welcome word
The new digs
Friday, December 29th, 2006Powerset's new office in San Francisco. (I'm still in Michigan and haven't seen it yet, but I hear it's nice).
Welcome, Tim Converse
Sunday, December 24th, 2006Since the news is out about where Tim is going after he leaves Yahoo!, I'd like to welcome Tim Converse to Powerset. I'm looking forward to working with Tim again. We've had interesting working relationships in the past: He worked for me writing code to parse RAP System execution code under ...
The new Google is … Powerset?
Monday, November 27th, 2006Gulp. David Smith at The Guardian hypes web 2.0 (or web 3.0) and writes "The new Google is ... Powerset." Calm down, everyone. Read what Barney Pell (Powerset CEO), Lorenzo Thione (Product Architect) and Steve Newcomb (COO) are saying on their blogs, especially Barney's comments on Google and Powerset in the ...
Powerset announces Series A round
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006Cool, the news is officially out: Powerset has raised $12.5 M in series A financing (our press release). Bambi Francisco wrote a story for MarketWatch, and did an interview with our CEO, Barney Pell. Great lead to Francisco's story: So they must be crazy, have a high threshold for pain, or ...
Company blogs
Sunday, November 5th, 2006Our company did a slight remake of our website, with perhaps the most interesting thing: a list of our Angel round investors mentioned on our newly minted company blog. What's that you say, a company can't have a blog? That there's no difference between a company blog and a press ...
The Powerset Blogstorm
Thursday, October 12th, 2006We way cool. We loved school. We Work late. We Code straight. We Plugged in. We Bloggin. We Balloon. We Show soon. (with apologies to G. Brooks).
A Powerset reveal
Thursday, October 5th, 2006An article in Ventureblog about Powerset, the company I work for, has kicked up a minor storm in the blogosphere about Powerset and the very idea of natural language search. I'd just like to point people to a weblog post by Barney Pell, our CEO, on Powerset and Natural Language ...
Powar(+) law
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006This just in: Results from International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
First Powerset writeup?
Friday, August 18th, 2006I think this is the first writeup of the company I work for, Powerset, that I've seen: Spying an intelligent search engine. Barney Pell, our CEO, is interviewed. Search engines try to train us to become good keyword searchers. We dumb down our intelligence so it will be natural for ...
Page duplicates on the web
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006The always interesting Jean Veronis posts about page duplicates in English and French. He investigates how many pages are returned for a search for the new word "ségolisme" (for which he can control at bit for precision numbers), and how many of these are duplicates due to RSS feeds, etc. ...