Web Directory Searches For Artificial Intelligence

Today I had a look at some online directories for artificial intelligence resources and information, here are the results:

• dmoz – hand sorted directory containing over 1400 links.
• Google directory – The A.I. section from the Google directory, with over 1600 links.
• Librarian’s Internet Index – “Websites you can trust”, has a massive 8 links, although each one is selected, described and organised by a team of librarians, which is bragable.
• Yahoo directory – The A.I.section from the Yahoo directory, with 173 links.
• All the internet – More artificial intelligence links.
• TekGuide – “The Internet’s IT directory.” Seems to have a good selection of links.
• internet-web-directory – over 400 links.

I also came across this Artificial Intellegence on the Internet PDF, and as a result, AIResources, both created by Marcus P. Zillman, and both containing loads of useful resources.

Hopefully you will find this resource pool useful. I guess it might function as a fairly good list of web directories too. As usual, if there is anything that you think I should add to the list, let me know in the comments.

10 Free Online Document Sources

7 high quality free online  document sources / resources:

• wePapers – Specifically for students, and as a result, the site features mainly academic papers.
• Scribd – Millions of documents including books, maps and sheet music spanning thousands of topics.
• Issuu – “Issuu turns your documents into beautiful online publications.” Tons of people have used this site, so now it’s also a fantastic document resource.
• Calaméo – Another online publication creation utility, again with a reasonable number of searchable past publications.
• Docstoc – “Search over 5 million public documents.” Lots of documents, mainly professional / legal etc.
• Slashdoc – “Slashdoc is essentially a generic content submission system.” the site currently has over 62,000 documents.
• Yudu – Aesthetically pleasing site that has loads of magazines and generally image heavy documents.

3 other sites worth checking out:

• slideshare – Specialises in PowerPoint presentation sharing, allows adding of audio to create ‘webinars’.
• edocr – Has around 3,000 mainly business orientated documents.
• wowio – Looks like it could be good, but currently I can’t seem to get this to work.

If I have missed anything out that you think I should include, please let me know in the comments section, and if you discover any especially interesting documents, you could let me know about those too.

Cosmic Time

Nice non-technical documentary:

Cosmic Time – A documentary about time. (runtime: 1 hour) (T3)

No background knowledge is required, and the video offers an interesting introduction to some physics concepts.

Free Stanford Engineering Courses

“For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world.” It just so happens that three of the courses currently available are on areas of artificial intelligence:

• Introduction to Robotics
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

There is lots of other good stuff as well, for example I have been watching a great course on Linear Dynamical Systems. Each of the courses is a set of 20 75 minute lectures (that’s a total of 25 hours per course), so there is a LOT of material here. All of the lectures I have watched so far have been well presented, and expertly explained, so this really is a great source of information. Check out the main page here.

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics is a not quite weekly column on mathematical physics by John Baez. It is currently on week 276, and so there’s a massive back catalogue of interesting articles available to read. If you are not overly into maths and/or physics then a) you should be, and b) you can be, as his site has a guide for those who want to know how to learn maths and physics. If you would rather turn your computer off and throw it out the window than learn any maths, you can still check out John’s fun stuff page, which contains some interesting material about neither maths nor physics.

If you are still not satisfied, John Baez has also produced the crackpot index, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics” which is somewhere inbetween the two extreams.

The Linguists

‘The Linguists’ is a one hour documentary about two linguists travelling the world documenting dying languages. “Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages.” I found the video on Babelgum:

The Linguists – (run-time: 1 hour and 4 minutes)

It’s a great documentation, especially for anyone with interests in linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology or even something like knowledge representation theory. Also, the colours in lots of the tribal footage are really cool, especially in the parts shot in India. You should totally watch it.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Bellow is a link to a recording of a lecture titled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” given by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus from the department of physics at The University of Colorado, which has been uploaded under the title: “The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See”, and even though that might not be the case, this video is certainly worth watching:

Arithmetic, Population and Energy by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (run-time: approx 80 mins, consists of 8 parts)

In the lecture Dr. Bartlett argues that “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.

Possible originality in coming weeks

Currently this blog is serving only as a source of interesting links, but in the next week or so I will try to upload something original, so keep your eyes open my average of 0.76 daily visitors.

The Devious Logic of Metaphors

Yesterday I watched another interesting Microsoft Research Lecture:

The Devious Logic of Metaphors by Leroy Searle

The talk covers the problems of metaphors, both philosophical and literary, as well as discussing the diffuculties metaphors pose in the field of artificial intelligence. Leroy Searle uses several poems as sources of examples over the course of the talk, and ends with some analysis of The Tempest. As before with Microsoft Reaserch Lectures, I had to watch this talk in an internet explorer tab in order for it to work.

Video Lecture Search Engine

A little while ago I attempted to use the ‘custom search engine’ feature on Google to create a tool specifically for finding free on-line talks and lectures, focusing mainly on academic subjects. It’s ‘kind of works’ at the moment, and currently searches around 30 sites. Here’s the link:

I will try to improve it over the next few days or so; refining and expanding the sites it searches etc. In the mean time, search away!

Also, I might try to compile some kind of list of other good custom search engines out there, and then post that up here too, so if you know any, let me know.