The iLink technology was developed as a part of the SRI-led CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) program and was funded and managed under DARPA's PAL (Personalized Assistant that Learns) program. That project was designed to create cognitive software systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise: in other words, A.I.

iLink specifically was the part of the overall CALO project that focused on social search and message routing within social networks. It was also used to develop a system for FAQ generation within a network - they call this technology "FAQtory". With this technology implemented on a social network, FAQs are continuously generated and revised by the community using a Wikipedia-like model, as opposed to being static creations made by the site's authors. But it's not basic as a simple user-generated FAQ system - instead, iLink's FAQtory technology allows for incremental bits of information - even those that don't qualify as answers to the question. As the members contribute these bits of information, the learning system in iLink monitors how users are attempt to resolve queries and is then capable of drafting off of the social network's learning. Essentially, the technology actually enables the social network to discover and amplify its own capabilities

Other aspects of the overall iLink system involve not just incremental learning capabilities, but also the use of prior knowledge to solve problems, message-matching technologies for finding related information, algorithms for gathering data from multiple sources and compiling it together, and the ability to differentiate private information from that which is safe to share.

The Research Behind iLink's Creation

For those that helped create the iLink technology, such as the researchers at SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, they see social networking as a much more valuable tool than, arguably, even some members of our own tech community do today. In a research paper on iLink (filled with details math nerds will eat up), they state:

"The social web provides much more than an opportunity for people to interact and exchange general information. It is a new medium for powerful models of organizing purposeful social activities. This is compellingly illustrated in the growth of open source efforts (e.g., LAMP,2 Wikipedia), which some authors [8, 14, 20, 27, 29] argue represent an alternate mode of social and economic production."

The authors of the paper state that much of the research in social networks has not formally modeled how these networks accomplish tasks. Most of the current work focuses on other areas like structural representation, analysis, and interpretation of social network data. Their work instead introduces a general approach to modeling how real-time, dynamic social networks communicate and cooperate to solve problems because an understanding of this could enhance the development of potential future applications...applications like expertise identification, FAQ generation, and smart RSS filtering.

iLink Model

iLink in the Military

Today, iLink is being used in the military communities to help recognize "who knows what" within a community, connect members to each other, and point members to valuable content, discussions, and others who share their same interests. Those connections between members and resources are made with iLink's machine-based learning to model the users and the content in order to facilitate the information sharing.

Currently, three military sites are using the technology: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. In Platoon Leader, current and former U.S. Army Lieutenants worldwide discuss and exchange information with each other. Company Command does the same for Army Captains while also allowing them to pose questions in order to solve problems together (crowdsourcing the military!). The Family Readiness Group helps coordinators nationwide share information and best practices with each other in order to point military families to resources they can use.

Platoon Leader

Where The Military Goes...Civilian Businesses May Follow

It was only a year ago that the military shut down access to several social networking web sites, including MySpace and YouTube, to users of the military networks. However, that shutdown was not so much a criticism of the social networking technology itself - only the public nature of those "civilian" networks. Concerned that users would share secure information like schedules or locations (for example: "Hi Mom! We're sailing into Dubai tomorrow!"), the military opted for a "better safe than sorry" policy. They also cited bandwidth concerns - sharing videos and photos can use a lot of bandwidth and not all areas of the world have much to spare.

Yet, social networking itself can be a valuable tool for businesses, and the military has realized that. In an organization, even one the size of the U.S. armed forces, connecting people to information and resources has been a challenge that I.T. has struggled for some time to achieve, and never mastered quite as well as the social networks do. In the past, businesses used impersonal, intranet-based web sites to provide files and documentation, but they miss out on one of the most critical sources of information - the knowledge that is stored in users' own minds. That knowledge that comes from both experience as well as information surrounding the undocumented processes that exist in any organization.

Now that the military is implementing more social networking technologies into their online networks - in addition to the three communities today, it's being evaluated for inclusion in several others - we'll likely see big business soon following suit. For those enterprise organizations that have been slower to pick up on Web 2.0 trends, seeing how the military uses a particular technology will be a big influence that may change their course of thinking. Social networks may just be fun for us as personal activities, but in workplace, they can be valuable tools for getting the job done...or even helping craft military strategy.

iLink's technology has been made commercially available. More information can be found at SRI International's web site.

military photo by: Randy Son of Robert; building by bourget_82

Accoona's new focus is on business search and news search. More from Zuula here:

Although it never reached the search engine “major leagues”, Accoona was a serious minor-league player for several years.  The service was launched almost four years ago at a major PR event attended by former president Bill Clinton, who reportedly carried out the first public search on the service.  Investments totaling as much as $100 million apparently were made to ensure that the service was backed by the best technology (and, of course, marketing).  And, if memory serves, the site even managed to garner a decent — if not earth shattering - amount of traffic in its first year or two.

At some point, though, Accoona’s fortunes took a wrong turn.  The quality of its search results didn’t meet expectations.  There were accusations of inappropriate marketing tactics on behalf of the search engine and inappropriate sales techniques by affiliated websites.  All of this — and more — ended up in a New York Times article last August that was far from flattering.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when the Accoona announced late last year that it was halting its plans for an IPO.

It also wasn’t a surprise to most search industry veterans when word started leaking out over the past few months that Accoona was downsizing and considering alternative strategies for its business. [...] Today, Accoona quietly unveiled its new strategy, and web search apparently is not part of that strategy.  Instead, the new focus is on business search and news search.

Nicholas Carr blogged about Gwap a couple of days after its launch, noting that "one thing the Internet enables, which wasn't possible before, at least not on anywhere near the same scale, is the transfer of human intelligence into machine intelligence." In Gwap, which stands for "Games With a Purpose," that transfer of intelligence is done by getting people to do the routine chores that computers don't know how to do - chores like tagging photos, describing songs, and outlining objects, as well as transferring a good bit of human common sense to the machine. The trick to getting people to do these things is to make the work fun. Hence the games.

The creator of these games is Luis von Ahn, winner of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and a pioneer in the field of human computation. Ahn is most notable for helping to develop CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), those somewhat annoying but rather effective distorted letter puzzles used millions of times each day. Last year, he also introduced the "reCAPTCHA," where CAPTCHAs were used to gain access to a web site while also helping digitize old books.

Gwap homepage

The Games

Gwap currently features five games, one of which is an old classic called the ESP Game. In the ESP game, two players view the same image and try to guess words that the other player would use to describe it. Google licensed this technology and launched Google Image Labeler to help improve the quality of their image search results.

• Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, is designed to eventually enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best.
• Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs so that computers can search for music other than by title - such as happy songs or love songs.
• Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge that will amass facts for use by artificial intelligence programs.
• Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

According to the Carnegie Mellon announcement, von Ahn plans to add a lot of games to the site, saying "we have three more that we'll be launching in the coming months." He hopes that by having all the games on the same site it will encourage players to try several different ones. Players also have a single sign-on and password, Top Player rankings, and online chats, said von Ahn.

The Human Processor

In his whitepaper entitled "Invisible Computing," von Ahn compared game design to to algorithm creation, saying:

"...it must be proven correct, its efficiency can be analyzed, a more efficient version can supersede a less efficient one, and so on. Instead of using a silicon processor, these "algorithms" run on a processor consisting of ordinary humans interacting with computers over the Internet."

In other words, we're the processor. The machine is us.

This concept isn't entirely new - Amazon's Mechanical Turk, for example, pays people to contribute their time to work on small, simple tasks called "Human Intelligence Tasks," or HITs. However, unlike HITs, which can sometimes be boring or tedious, the games on Gawp are actually fun - and they don't feel like work.

Some believe that human powered processing is the next big wave for computing. You could argue that Mahalo, the human-powered search engine is an example of this. (Though others call it a human-powered link farm.) Perhaps a better example is ChaCha, the mobile Q&A service that uses human guides to respond to questions called or texted in from your cell phone. We've also covered other human-powered services on RWW in the past, like the Galaxy Zoo and Stardust@Home project, among other (our coverage here). Many of these efforts have tried to incorporate an element of "fun" into what is actually work.

Whether Gwap will actually gain momentum and get a large number of people involved is yet to be seen, but it is definitely has potential to help teach computers the things they can't do for themselves....yet.