Amusing Text Classifier

I just happened to visit Kuklutzklan and found a link to Gender Analyzer

It is a site that allows you to feed a blog's url and they try to tell you whether the author is a male or female.Now, ain't that amusing??(though I admit that it is pretty useless as it is)

What is more interesting is the technology that runs the site,uClassify.This site allows anyone to create text classifiers using their APIs. Now this should be interesting to CS people involved with information retrieval(me for eg.),artificial intelligence(me again),neural networks(me,me..),natural language processing(should i repeat?) and ..blogging(of course me). The gender analyzer doesn't seem to work for both my blogs, but then its not that easy to make classifiers for all kinds of people out there, who write in various fashions.They claim that it works perfectly in their labs ;)

A visit to uClassify showed that there are many other products based on this service,one for guessing mood of author,another for analyzing personality type,love type and sports type(??) of the author. The first one never worked for me with urls,but does work for plain text that I copied from my posts(which means text classifying is working,but not parsing maybe).Mood Analyzer

I liked Typealyzer as it does work properly for my blogs,each turning up different results(naturally based on contents or rather nouns).Its derivative ie. Sport and Love are pretty much the same as the original with some differences in wording(meh..didn't impress).

There is one more service which I found very interesting and pretty different,which I want every blogger/non-blogger to test(bloggers would want to check their own blogs first in all these tools).ofaust, as they claim, is a literature expert that parses your url/text and tells you which famous author you resemble and in case of text,it highlights similar patterns(wow)..I was more like Jonathan Swift for some of my entries.Check out who you resemble the most...

So bloggers,try out these interesting services and amuse yourself(or maybe learn something about yourself/blog) and definitely its a great idea to work upon for people interested in those early mentioned fields(in which I was present..remember?). It would be interesting to see more accurate and innovative services being built out of these APIs in these coming days....adios

Obama brings in change

So thats it, Barack Hussein Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the US of A. I watched the speech yesterday evening,and it was very interesting. It's not Obama's policies or what he is going to do or not do that I am gonna write about..its about his association with new technologies.

That is the change that Obama seems to have brought, and with good effects as well. From the time he began his campaign, the utilization of the web facilities made him pretty popular among the people who support and embrace such facilities of the internet. The facilities he used included Social Networking sites,blogs,dedicated sites for reaching out to supporters,forums,and even channels in Youtube. His attachment to the blackberry too was in the news for sometime.

Though America is far ahead of us in terms of technology penetration and quality of service, unlike us, there are many there who do not trust/understand such technologies, in spite of being well educated. Many people who use these technologies do not understand the reasoning behind them(not technical), and hence can't think beyond what is provided to them.

With his intelligent campaign, I feel Obama has reached out to the vast population online and even proved a point or two to the people who believed that web and its facilities cannot be used for uniting people for a common cause. The use of such technologies also meant, many of his supporters got a chance to understand and appreciate the underlying technology and its capability to be used in innovative ways.

I was surprised and even amused by the amount of effort that has been put by his campaign teams in utilizing the resources of the web and high end technologies for the campaigning purpose.Even after being elected, his public activities were religiously followed by groups and forums consisting of his ardent supporters and blogs were constantly buzzing with his whereabouts. Even tech bloggers found enough material to write about this man.

The inaugural function was streamed using Microsoft Silverlight technology, which made quite a news. Read M$ press article But later, to assist Linux and MAC users, it was made available via Moonlight technology. There are also many sites that cover the function completely as streaming video as well as pictures. The Official Presidential Inaugural Committee too has online resource to guide supporters who wished to come to DC for the event. It contains maps,contact informations and guidebooks.

It seems Microsoft and Google are stealing the limelight in Obama's victory as 'technology partners'. Here is an article on CNN-Microsoft collaborative Photosynth that covered the Inaugural ceremony. Here is something about Google's youtube.

That's all for now folks..lets hope the change is positive ...