A Dedicated Bot for Science News. (July 6, 2008)|
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News & Views item - July 2008 |
A Dedicated Bot for Science News. (July 6, 2008)
Canadian graduate student Michael Imbeault, an HIV researcher at the Université Laval in Quebec, had become dissatisfied with science coverage on online sites such as Google News and Yahoo News. For example, they have a paucity of material dealing with basic research.
To satisfy what he sees as niche requiring filling he has developed a robotic aggregator -- but this is how he describes it:
There is no human editor behind e! Science News; it is powered by the Eureka! news engine, a fully automated artificial intelligence.
Its
sole purpose is to ensure that you have access to the very latest and
popular science breakthroughs. To achieve this, it constantly surfs the web
to gather, regroup, categorize, tag and rank science news from
all major science news sources.
It computes relationships between science articles and news found on the web using a vector space model and hierarchical clustering. It then automatically determines in which category each news item belongs using a Naive Bayes classifier. Finally, it examines multiple parameters (such as timeliness, rate of appearance on the web, number of sources reporting the news, etc) for each news group. The result is an e! score which represents the relative importance of a news item.
Thanks to Eureka!, you now have a smart way to keep up to date with fast-evolving science!
So check it out:
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