(Note added 11/14/09 Popular Science, the world's largest science and technology magazine, has released its 22nd annual list of the best 100 innovations, and named Wolfram|Alpha as the "Best of What's New" Grand Award winner in the category of computing. Popular Science states that all 100 innovations must "push past what we thought was possible," visit the Wolfram|Alpha Blog to read the full announcement: http://url.wolfram.com/1d.bMvO/
(Note added 6/25/09 A detail article explaining Wolfram/Alpha can be found in the latest issue of Technology Review, July/August 2009
Before you start reading this blog, I must ask you if you have ever heard of the person “Steve Wolfram”, or the book “A New Kind of Science”, or the software “Mathematica”. On the rare chance you have not heard/seen/used all three, please google one of these topics and read about it before your start.
In information technology, everyone is always looking for “the next big thing” or more narrowly or specifically, the next “killer application”. No one would disagree that WINDOWS and GOOGLE were the last two “big things”. I am going to tell you about “the next big thing”. On 4/28/09, EST 3:00pm Steve Wolfram gave a prelaunch presentation at Harvard University of his next project titled Wolfram/Alpha which he will announce to the world sometimes in early May 2009.
So what is Wolfram/Alpha?
Imagine you wish to know the detail weather on the day, April 19 1899 for the town of Lexington, MA, USA (my hometown actually) and the same for another town in Asia at the same latitude (ShenYang 沈阳 actually), and how they compare. Or you wanted to know something about the mathematical properties of the indefinite integral of x^2(sine of x)^3dx. By the way, the information basis of the answers to these questions actually exist in some data base available on the Internet. But can you search or google for it? A rather inexperience user of Google such as myself certainly don’t know how. Even a very advanced expert will require quite a bit time, several queries, and additional calculation and graphics after s/he obtains the basic data to answer the questions. Now imagine if you just type in
“weather Lexington, MA 4/19/1899” in the dialog box and the temperature by the hour, the weather and wind condition on that day were instantly displayed for you in graphical and tabular form. And if you add “vs. a big town in China at same latitude” , the same information will displayed side-by-side in tables and superimposed as curve in graphical form. Similarly if you type in the mathematical form of the indefinite integral of x^2sinx^3dx, immediately a plot of the integral in graphical form and closed form analytical answers if any together with any salient property of this function appear as answers.
Additional examples questions that Wolfram/Alpha can answer and are demonstrated live in real time at the presentation are:
1.Type in “6000 C”
Answer: equivalent in Fahrenheit, what metal will not melt at such temperature, the temperature at the surface of the Sun, etc.
2.Type in “ LDL 180”
Answer: Distribution of Cholesterol level in the US population, What you need to do if this is your Cholesterol level, medicines to lower your cholesterol number, etc
If you add “age 40” to the dialog box then the answer further specialize to data for the “age 40” qualification and any other information, such as life expectancy, etc that Wolfram/Alpha thinks you may need. The point is that you can “DRILL DOWN” for more information. In fact the Wolfram/Alpha answer page will in addition to answers suggest various possible paths for you to ask further questions.
3.Type in any sequence such as “ATGTA. . . “
Answer: Wolfram/Alpha will understand that this a genome sequence and will return whatever is known about this sequence – e.g., what is its place on the human genome, what biological function if known the sequence governs, etc.
4.Type in “CSC”
Answer: Wolfram/Alpha understands this is a stock symbol on the NYSE for the stock of Computer Science Corp. Earnings, stock price, expert opinions for the past as well as projected future will be displayed.
5.Fish production of France vs. Poland
6.President of Brazil in 1982
7.Tide in New York City Harbor on 1/1/2015
8.Next total solar eclipse visible in Chicago, USA
Answer: 15 years from now, duration, and eclipse path plotted against a world map
9.9. What is the 500th largest country in the world?
10.Answer: no such country or Wolfram/Alpha does not know the answer to this query
These and many other queries were demonstrated live during the presentation. I think you will agree that GOOGLE cannot accomplish these answers without a lot of expert human help and only in non-real time. It other words “Wolfram/alpha promises to make everyone in the world an instant expert on anything”
So how does Wolfram/Alpha do it?
For data it relies on the vast amount of information and databases that already exist on the Internet. For calculations and visualization, it utilizes the capability of MATHEMATICA. However, this is easily said than done. Wolfram Research, the company, employed over 100 persons for ten years to accomplish this project prior to unveiling it today (4/28/09) and publically launch it sometime in the next two weeks (Early May 2009).
There were four major components in Wolfram/Alpha :
(i)Data curation – While vast number of database exist on the WWW. Most of them use incompatible format, different languages, and sometime with inconsistent and faulty data. Wolfram/Alpha must first clean up, correlate, audit, and verify these DB and transform them into one uniform and consistent format before they can be access quickly. This is a time consuming and huge task
(ii)Computational algorithms – This is the relatively easy part since MATHEMATICA is already well developed
(iii)Language ability – While the AI problem of understanding general language remain unsolved, the problem of making sense of a query, even if it is ill formed, can be broken down into a finite set subproblems that can be tackled. We already see this is in “the automated telephone answering” software that is present in customer service popular with many manufacturer of equipments. In other words, we know when we initiate a query, we will not be making idle polite chit-chat with the computer or asking the computer if it feel sad/happy today. We only have a specific type of goal in mind. This makes the “understanding” free form language considerably easier.
(iv)Automate presentation – This has to do with graphic user interface (GUI) and user friendly design. Again this aspect is well understood.
Putting these four tasks together and you have Wolfram/Alpha. The creator claims that as of today it covers 95% of the knowledge in a typical reference library. Of course, the project is on-going as more and more DB and capability are integrated into the system (Just as GOOGLE of the 90s are very different and far less capable than the GOOGLE of today).
Question and Answers from the audience.
How does Wolfram/Alpha deal with inconsistent, incomplete, and uncertain data? Answer: whenever possible, W/A provides original sources, warnings, footnotes, and ranges of uncertainty if applicable in results
Are there documentation of APIs for Wolfram/Alpha? Answer: there will be. Of course, since Wolfram Researchis a commercial company certain part of Wolfram/Alpha will be proprietary.
Will you be able to personalize Wolfram/Alpha? Answer: yes, once you have access ot the APIs
What other information are provided on the Wolfram/Alpha answer page? Answer: assumptions used in getting the answer and choices for further inquires
What is the business model for W/A? Initially it will be free. Later on we plan to have Ads (just like Google) and subscriptions for specialized users.
What makes “Harvard” Harvard? It is where important discovery and announcement are often made by the creator himself live before the rest of the world knows about it.
Why do I blog? So that you, the reader can say, I read about this first on Science Net.
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