My Summer of Dilettante Data-mining or Making a corporation-sized cannon and letting the Internet decide where to point it November 6, 2007

Virgil Griffith (Cal Tech), will give a lecture:

The web today contains vast amounts of useful information, but it is scattered within a disconnected archipelago of web sites as well as public and private databases. Using both traditional and novel techniques, with small effort one can unite the information from these islands to produce novel, entertaining online services. By fusing information from disparate or little-known databases, I aim to empower everyday users by giving them powerful, promiscuously interoperable digital intelligence tools typically reserved for major corporations. In this talk, I will discuss the glories and ease of amateur data-mining to make the Internet a more interesting place. The talk will also include amusing behind-the-scene WikiScanner anecdotes as well as a how-to for useful data-mining tools.