Penn State: February 2008 Archives

1) Does anyone read my blog?

2) Do you know of any universities that have tenure track librarians and also a library school with tenured faculty? How similar are they and how do they interact? Those I have talked to so far (including myself) only have experience where the librarians are quasi-tenure with a separate/dis-similar system. How would Penn State accommodate Library and Information Science faculty professors?

I attended one talk during the 2008 IST Graduate Symposium this year and it was the opening keynote from Google's Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research. I was hoping to hear more about the new Google Research project that would support eScience and large data sets. Instead I got a talk that appealed to the Computer Scientist in my (ah, 211). He covered what was in the description of the keynote, the amazing ability of simple algorithms to identify images and natural language text... just because of BILLIONS of data points. Test their ability to draw semantic links between ideas from words with Google Sets.

Some gems of insight:
"Don't make algorithms that work well, make algorithms that work well with large enough data"
We can model the entire world by "using the world as it's own model"
We don't need to define rules because "the rules are in the data"