sensemaking

Theory Garden™ Seed™ is the brainchild of Professor Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Dr. Tanvir Y. Goraya. It grows from research funded from by the National Science Foundation Program on Coordination Theory and Collaborative Technology. That award was supplemented by a grant from Digital Equipment Corporation and resulted in the development of a software tool named Spider. Publications describing the Spider project are listed below.

Rotman Magazine is published for alumni and friends of the Rotman School of Management three times per year.

We enable people to know who knows. We take a people-centric view on information and provide links to people that are knowledgable about your question at hand. Thereby we help organizations to better leverage the knowledge of their members and work more efficiently.

The mistake is that semantic search engines present us with Google-like search box and allow us to enter free form queries. So we type the things that we are used to asking - primitive queries. It never occurs to us to type in What actor starred in both Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever? or What two US Senators received donations from a foreign entity? We type simple questions, but this is not where the power of semantic search lies. Lets look at the spectrum of semantic technologies from Google, to SearchMonkey, to Powerset, and Freebase to understand what is going on.

The full text of The Future of Reputation is now available online for free. Click on the links below to download PDFs of each chapter. The front matter to the book is at the beginning of each chapter.

The most disruptive idea being explored by startups is to channel coal stack carbon dioxide emissions into water filled bags with carbon-eating algae which can re-purpose carbon and hydrogen into fatty acids which can be used to create liquid biofuels.

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically-but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

The Stream replaces the homepage you see when you sign in, and shows what's happening in your circle of groups and individuals: new bookmarks, groups joined, and new people followed will be the first actions shown. You'll also see Thanks given to you from other members. More actions will be added, as will aggregate views to avoid telling you over and over that the same page was bookmarked or the same group joined.

Evri opens up a whole new way to explore connections - between people, products, places, and things on the web and in the news. see also http://www.evri.com/garden.html

iLeonardo is an impressive site for those interested in research. It's a social utility that connects people and their notebooks which are collections of information from the Web. iLeonardo combines search methodologies, social bookmarks and social networks to produce relevant search results and ranking determined by people - not bots or publishers.The name of the service is obviously an homage to the legendary renaissance man, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was famous for his notebook collection of research information, thoughts and ideas. ILeonardo and its notebook collection technology strives to help the Leonardo's of the digital age. see: http://mashable.com/2008/09/01/research-tools/

Create your own social network, quickly and easily. Elgg allows you to take full advantage of the power of social technology with elegant, flexible solutions for organisations, groups and individuals.

Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model. Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

When it comes to product searches, Yotify is very smart. It doesn't just look at keywords, but also lets you know what the current best price is and then lets you select a checkbox to have the service alert you if the price drops below a certain point. You can also optionally check to be alerted when there are new product reviews available. The shopping section features scouts for common searches like digital cameras and laptops, but the shortcuts section lets you create more specific searches for a keyword, like a product ID or model number. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/stop_searching_the_web_let_yotify_do_it.php

Computational Collective Intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions or processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The aim of this conference is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the computer-based methods of collective intelligence and their applications in (but not limited to) such fields as semantic web, social networks and multi-agent systems.

Built on top of Calais and scalably hosted on Amazon's EC2 service, the new site at SemanticProxy.com enters public beta today, and enables anyone to easily generate rich semantic metadata for pages on the open web, simply by passing the URL to SemanticProxy.

"The Institute of the Future will soon be launching what it calls the first massively multiplayer forecast game, billed as The Superstruct Game. According to the game's FAQ, the idea is to 'imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face.' Interestingly, the game itself is meant to be played 'on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces.' From the IFTF website's sneak peak, the game is set in the year 2019, where the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast the possibility of human extinction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous 'super-threats:' Quarantine, which is a result from 'declining health and pandemic disease;' Ravenous, which relates to the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, related to the flux of power 'as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions;' Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and, lastly, Generation Exile, which covers the massive increase in refugees."

This paper addresses the issue of text normalization, an important yet often overlooked problem in natural language processing. By text normalization, we mean converting 'informally inputted' text into the canonical form, by eliminating 'noises' in the text and detecting paragraph and sentence boundaries in the text.

George Siemens compares connectivism to other learning theories