Re: Criticism of Kidcode (was Re: KidCode: Next steps )

Regarding the labeling of information, I just today was made
aware, through the bounce-digerati@ai.mit.edu mailing list,
of a service at MIT's Media lab that helps one find things
on the Web that they may like.  To cut-and-paste from
a discussion on bounce-digerati@ai.mit.edu:
    
    From: medlar@ua.com (Art Medlar)
    Subject: Audience Discovery
    Sender: bounce-digerati@ai.mit.edu
    
    For a truly excellent example of a potential technical solution to
    a part of this problem, have a look at:
      HOMR -- the Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service
      http://homr.www.media.mit.edu/projects/homr/
    
    The system collects your ratings for a number of music
    performers, does some magic statistical correlations with
    other people's ratings, and returns a list of other
    music that it determines you might like, based on the likes
    and dislikes of other users who seem to share your taste.
    
    
    
    From: Alan Wexelblat <wex@media.mit.edu>
    
    Since no one else has commented and since HOMR originated in our group, I
    should note that there's another project using similar technology, called
    Webhound, which helps people discover Web pages of possible interest.
    
            http://webhound.www.media.mit.edu/projects/webhound
    
    You can find these projects, their authors and other Agents Group people,
    and more work (and papers about same) off the Agents group page:
    
            http://agents.www.media.mit/groups/agents
    
    

I copied Alan Wexelblat so that perhaps he could comment.

Alan, for your background, this discussion was initiated
over the concern of government regulations on the available
to minors of adult-only material on the Web, and on what
technology could be used to label and filter such material.

It occurs to me that an automatic-grading system through
correlation of peoples' opinions like you have built could
just as easily be used to filter out unwanted resources
as to "filter in" wanted resources.  Perhaps requested
resources (or, their URLs) could first be passed through
a grading system such as yours, and automatically labeled
according to correlation of peoples' taste and previous
recommendations on the labeling or the resource.

Comments?

PF

Received on Thursday, 22 June 1995 20:54:27 UTC