Welcome to this course on Web Intelligence and Big Data.
In this first lecture, I'll introduce you to the topic, as well as outlined the,
course itself and discuss some of the logistics and evaluation.
When talking about intelligence, one can't help but recall Allen Turing and his
famous thought experiment introduced way be back in 1950, to test if a computer was
actually intelligent. Turing's original test is based on a
popular party game where a human judge is able to converse using typewritten text
only between two people, one a man and one a woman.
And needs to judge, based on the conversation alone, which is a man and
which is a woman. Turing's variation of this imitation game
was to replace one of the participants by a machine.
And now the judge needs to determine based on the conversations alone, who is human
and who is a machine. Turing claimed that if a machine could
successfully fool a human judge into believing that it was not a machine and
actually human, then that machine should be considered to be intelligent.
An interesting variation of the Turing test is where the judge's, now a machine,
and needs to figure out which of the parties it's talking to is a human, and
which is another machine. Now, do you think you might have seen or
experienced such a reverse Turing test yourselves?
Think about the captchas which all of us encounter on various webpages.
They ask us to type in a set of letters looking at disfigured versions of those
words. A task which machines find quite
difficult. So this is an example where the machine is
trying to figure out whether we are actually human.
And so it's the reverse hearing test in action every day.
But there's more. As we shall soon see in this course,
machines inside the web can pretty easily figure out based on the conversations that
we have with each other whether we are male or female, the products we like and
dislike, whether we are shopping or just surfing, whether we are rich or poor, or
even scary things like our ethnicity. The surprising thing is, that this is
happening all the time on the web, as we shall see in our course.
So is the web becoming intelligent.