bits and bikes

Damon Horowitz and Sepandar Kamvar recently published a paper — referentially entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” (PDF) — in which they nicely lay out the social search problem and the Aardvark solution. As I was reading this paper, one thought kept surfacing…

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I’m happy to announce that Grockit will be offering its paid summer research internship program for the summer of 2010. This is the second year that we’re doing this (thanks again, Angela!), and I think it’s a great opportunity for doctoral students to apply their own research experience to a system that a large (and growing) community of learners uses everyday. It’s worth mentioning that Grockit has a large and interesting set of educational data, a variety of research interests, a very talented team, and a fantastic work environment. I just posted details about this program (with an application form) on the 2010 Summer Research Internship, and I encourage you to check it out.

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I spotted this clever website today (via), which plots the number of Google results for various spellings of one particular expression. Now I, too, have generated statistics on various spellings of particular words, and have just yesterday posted them online. This includes about 100,000 spellings of about 3,000 English words, collected through the SpellBEE activity, as part of my dissertation work…

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Recently I’ve been spending time experimenting with (and extending) my coevolutionary simulation software, Coevisualizer, which I now use to model Teacher’s Dilemma-driven learning. … The teacher ends up consistently providing “appropriate” challenges for their student, even as the student’s abilities change.

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