People as an AI computing tool
The tagging phenomenon started about 3 years ago, with people putting labels on their posts in their blogs or on their pictures or videos. Now, a researcher from the University of Southern California (USC) has discovered the newest AI computing tool: people. Computer scientist Kristina Lerman thinks that ’she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning.’ For example, ‘by extracting the tags that Flickr users had described the images with, and applyng a mathematical technique called the “Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm,’ she found it’s possible to quite accurately separate pictures of insects from pictures of cars returned by the “beetle” search. So can we expect better search tools in the future? Time will tell.