Wolfram Meets Berkman
Book off an hour or so at 3 p.m. ET this coming Tuesday, April 28, to join, via webcast, the “sneak preview” of the grandly named Wolfram/Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As we told you last month in One to Watch?, Wolfram, a mathematician, has kept wraps around his project while talking up its potential in general terms. Will it be a search engine? Will it be an answering tool? Will it be so much more? Now you can tune in as Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, law prof at Harvard expose some of the mystery. You can send in your questions via @ reply/DM @BerkmanCenter on Twitter, or join the IRC.
If you’d like to prep yourself for the affair, take a look at Read/WriteWeb’s preview of Wolfram/Alpha. Seems there might be something to the project.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8026331.stm
BBC reports the researchers’ claim that the Wolfram/Alpha web tool, with the anticipated launch of mid-May, will be as important as Google.
I’ve used Wolfram Alpha recently and IMHO it has very limited knowledge. There is really no technological breakthrough here !!! Alpha just compile large amount of data that already exist in much greater depth all over the internet and built a flimsy language recognition algorithm to access it. While it might not be a Google Killer, it definitely might change how users search for academic type questions.