Techno-News Blog

December 27, 2011

Computer Scientists Create Algorithm That Measures Human Pecking Order

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:20 am

by KFC, Technology Review

Measuring power and influence on the web is a matter of huge interest. Indeed, algorithms that distill rankings from the pattern of links between webpages have made huge fortunes for companies such as Google. One the most famous of these is the Hyper Induced Topic Search or HITS algorithm which hypothesises that important pages fall into two categories–hubs and authorities–and are deemed important if they point to other important pages and if other important pages point to them. This kind of thinking led directly to Google’s search algorithm PageRank. The father of this idea is John Kleinberg, a computer scientist now at Cornell University in Ithaca, who has achieved a kind of cult status through this and other work. It’s fair to say that Kleinberg’s work has shaped the foundations of the online world. Today, Kleinberg and a few pals put forward an entirely different way of measuring power and influence; one that may one day have equally far-reaching consequences. These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/?p1=blogs

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