Foggy Software

Or, Running Lisp Probabilistically, backwards. It started at a talk I attended in previous post . Yes, there's been lots of talk about analytics and cloud, even made famous in popular media .... But the "whats" and the "hows" are in constant flux. The curiosity triggered by the subtitle, lead to a weekend filled with AI and to this post. AI is a big space. I'm focusing on one small part, Machine Learning. And specifically, translation and categorization, in exploring how The cloud supports AI, and AI supports the cloud... What does the could have to do with machine translation? The early attempts at machine translation (circa 1950's) went down the path of Natural Language Processing. They failed for various reasons. current approaches  (do the quizzes!!), as in Google Translate, play a matching game. Use the cloud to collect ridiculous amounts of sample translations, e.g a newspaper which publishes in more than language, restaurant menus an...

Or, if you have the bits, but not the information.... I'm sitting at an event  which combines a common thread of thoughts that has been floating in my head - Hadoop deals with lots of data... but how do I get to the Information contained there. ThaDa... Big Data and machine learning are made for each other. I've just learned about the Mahout  - the tool to make information out of data, by using machine learning! Definitely something to look at. Update: I've spent some time reading and digesting some of the AI topics, with the results in this followup  post