Tag: ALGORITHM

Google announced today that it'll be instituting some changes to tailor the ads that appear in your inbox to your interests. Using the algorithm set up for Priority Inbox, Google can now better understand what is actually relevant to a user. The company is basically implementing the same technology used to sort your inbox for a more commercial (and probably more profitable) pursuit. For instance, ...

Lately, Google's been taking a lot of heat for the suddenly nebulous quality and reliability of its search results. In response, the company reaffirmed its commitment to enhance its search mechanisms, and rolled out a handful of small and subtle changes. Yesterday, however, Google announced that it's making a "big algorithmic change" -- one that its users will actually be able to notice. The ...

We've seen our fair share of slow news days here at Switched, but, according to a computer programmer named William Tunstall-Pedoe, none in living memory has ever been quite as dull as April 11th, 1954. On that Sunday, Belgium held a general election, a Turkish academic named Abdullah Atalar was born, and a soccer player named Jack Shufflebotham died. And, apparently, that was about it. As the ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never move from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over their creations, nevertheless. The good ...

While they aren't full-blown 'Transformers,' ultra-thin smart sheets developed by MIT and Harvard researchers could pave the way for machines that fold into different shapes. According to Popular Science, the fiberglass sheets, which are made from .5-inch wide, .5-millimeter thick, triangular tiles, are dubbed 'programmable matter.' The researchers equipped the smart sheets with ultra-thin, ...

While it might be overshadowed by the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the Robocup, a soccer tournament for robots, is also happening right now. According to Physorg, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computer algorithm for the American robo-team that allows the bots to anticipate and predict how the ball will move around the pitch. The goal of the Robocup is for researchers to ...

Well, you can add one more thing to the long list of tasks that computers can complete better than a human: jigsaw puzzle solving. Taeg Sang Cho and his colleagues at the MIT aren't the first to write jigsaw puzzle-solving software; a Danish team wrote a program that was able to solve a 320-piece puzzle back in 2008. While the older program only worked on simple "cartoon-style" drawings with a ...

For those who often miss out on a virtual joke, scientists have found a way to help identify online sarcasm. According to Geekosystem, a team from the Institute of Computer Science at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem developed an algorithm that detects sarcastic sentences posted online. The Semi-Supervised Sarcasm Identification Algorithm (SASI) learns to detect sarcasm by studying sentences ...

After a vicious, three-year battle royale, Netflix finally closed its statistics geek algorithm contest Sunday. The Netflix Prize competition pitted teams of competitors against one another in hopes of improving the appropriateness and accuracy of the site's movie recommendations feature. While the results have not yet been finalized, a virtually unknown underdog emerged at the last minute to ...