Semantic Void

I started working on my second weekend project, guess I’ll do something small every week. This one is an extension to LifeLogger. The aim is to analyze ones daily and weekly browsing history and extract themes which could aid in recommendations. It is still a ‘work in progress’ - currently I have been able to generate the following visualizations:

The following visualization depicts the dominant keywords/topics for one day (the terms are stemmed):

I had been reading a couple of Yahoo! related articles and visualization blogs. This is captured by the above visualization - but there is still alot of noise which I need to get rid of.

The next visualization depicts the linkages and clusters for the keywords. There exists a link between two terms if they occur in the same document. [may take sometime to load - you’ll need to zoom in to get a better look - click on ‘compute layout’ if the clusters don’t show]

Both the above visualizations depict important metrics that could be used to extract dominant themes from the browsing history. Dominance should not be just inferred from frequency but also from the prevalent of a term across multiple pages. I still need to work on removing noise and running this on larger datasets like browsing history for a week or so. If you have any ideas or good papers to recommend that would be nice.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) celebrated its 50th anniversary today. Who knew 50 years ago that contributions by this defense research agency would evolve into the present Internet. Hadn’t it been for their research you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog post today. Most of us know of DARPA because of the ARPANET or the DARPA Urban Challenge (ai geeks mostly). Its time we knew why and under what circumstances DARPA was created.

President Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 50 years ago in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch, which surprised and embarrassed the United States as the Soviets became the first nation to successfully launch a satellite into space. DARPA’s 1958 charter charged the Agency to perform certain advanced research and development projects, with the primary mission of ensuring that the United States would never again be surprised by another nation’s technological advancement. The list of DARPA’s contributions includes the Saturn V rocket, the ARPANET (which laid foundations for the Internet).

On this very day 50 years ago, Feburary 7th 1958, the following short and concise document started it all: the original DOD directive.