Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”

J CREW launched an advertising campaign in September, featuring splashy print ads and a photograph of a well-dressed young man on its Web site, sitting atop a ladder. Surrounding him was an assortment of items: umbrellas, medicine balls, a retro-looking trailer, a slab of raw meat. All of those items were available for purchase. But J. Crew stood to profit only from the sale of its clothes. The other goods were merely recommended by J. Crew to its customers, with Web links to the purveyors of those goods. J. Crew saw a business opportunity in assuming the role of a sophisticated and self-assured friend, guiding customers through the infinite offerings of the Internet without pushing them to buy only its own wares. “What the world needs now is curators and filters,” said Anthony Sperduti of Partners and Spade, the New York advertising agency behind the campaign. “J. Crew is savvy enough to know that the Internet has changed our buying patterns.” J. Crew is hardly the only company trying to sell something by befriending you. The idea that social commerce — which mixes networking with online shopping — can win business has spurred companies to try to connect with customers through sites like Facebook and Twitter.