Yet Another Blog On Organizing Information

Data and information everywhere. The digital age is generating so much information, that it has fast outgrown our ability to comprehend it. 'Information Overload', we call it. These are the questions that are posed to us:

• How do I find information that I want?
• What information is relevant to my need?
• Ok, this is way too much information than I can handle. I would like to have summary of the same.
• In this huge infobase, is there some useful information that isn't obvious? Some patterns, trends that may be useful.
• There are a lot of smart people generating content. How can the collective intelligence of these people augment my search for information?

These questions have had us hooked for a long time, and so have the solutions people have developed to tackle these questions. Search engines to help you find information, business intelligence tools to make find patterns in huge volumes of data, information extraction systems to summarize information in human generated content, recommendation systems to bring information relevant to your need and study of social networks to harness the "collective intelligence" of the crowd.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. These solutions are built on the more fundamental sciences of statistics, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding.

This is not the end, for the more fundamental questions we are posed with are about the nature of cognition, the understanding of language, the organization of the knowledge and the active role of the human observer in the perception of information. I think this is the holy grail that we are all in pursuit of.

We are beginners in this exciting field,. This is a place to share what we learn, what we do and to benefit from the "collective intelligence" of all who visit this page.

While the challenges span many problems, there are some that we are currently working on. Dhaval currently works on optimizing ad-networks and takes an active interest in search engines. I currently work on information extraction from text and medical informatics. So for now you may find a certain bias towards these topics, and related topics on this blog.