Gmail Machine Learning

I just quickly tried the new Gmail Labs feature "Got the wrong Bob"? and it actually works quite nicely! I put some email addresses of family members, followed by the address of an old professor, who has the same first name of one of my cousins, and... Gmail found it! :) It suggested right way to change to the correct person, based on context!

The other new feature, called "Don't forget Bob", is probably simpler, but quite useful as well. As I typed names of some close friends, I got more suggestions of friends I often email jointly with the previous ones.

I wonder if the models to run this feature are very complicated. Probably they are not. I guess one just has to estimate the probability of each email address in our contacts to appear in the "To:" field, given the addresses we have already typed. To estimate these, you just have to use a frequentist approach and count how many times this happened in the past. With this in hands, "Got the wrong Bob?" will notice unlikely email addresses and "Don't forget Bob" will suggest likely ones that are missing.

I think it's a really cool idea, in the same spirit of "Forgotten Attachement Detector". A bit of machine learning helping daily life!

Google CADIE vs Wolfram Alpha

Google already has a tradition of April fool's jokes: this year they are introducing an Artificial Intelligence brain!

They describe the development process of their so called CADIE : Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity like this:

"For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster."

Remember, this is an April fool's hoax. But now compare it with Wolfram's announcement of the new Wolfram Alpha:

"I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work."

I find them quite similar! ;)

Now more seriously: I don't doubt Wolfram Alpha will have interesting features, but please don't try to sell it like the ultimate AI search engine. By the way, Daniel Tunkelang has a recent and well informed post on this topic.

Update: Indeed this sneak preview of Wolfram Alpha shows some cool features! In the meanwhile Google also gave some steps in the direction of better public data/statistics visualization.