

Aussie wunderkind gets $US250k for technology that could revolutionise web  - nreece
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/aussie-wunderkind-gets-us250k-for-technology-that-could-revolutionise-web-20120113-1pz35.html

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andrewcamel
I tried the service and I am sorry to say that it is really just awful. I
don't want to be mean, but it seems to pick a random sample of sentences.
Great idea, poor execution.

Much of the media attention has probably been around the fact that he is 16.
If Google engineers released this, they'd get laughed at.

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leak
That seems to be the state of a lot of coverage on tech companies. Age first,
service second, quality third.

~~~
charliesome
That sounds great! I'm 17, where can I sign up to get 250k

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wisty
Australia - the homeland of successful emigrants. And Dick Smith.

OK, before I get slammed for being a redditor ...

Australia has had some brilliant inventors and inventions. Not a hugely
disproportionate number (though we'd like to think so), but we don't do too
badly. But it never goes from prototype to product.

I guess Australians are used to zero-sum thinking. It's all rent seeking, con
artists, and conservative hard work - farmers, miners, government, business
people (hustlers) and retail. There's no real need for innovative companies.

So while we have a few good ideas, no-one really wants to fund them. There's
the occasional Ponzi scheme (generally backed by a good idea, but generally
over-hyped), but the actual value created by innovative Australian stuff is
relatively insignificant.

~~~
robryan
I think the problem is more on the side of investors than innovators.
Investors here are more likely to be after less risky opportunities and want
to see more revenue profit before getting involved. Compared to in SV where it
seems like a good team/ idea can land you enough funding to make a real go of
it without having to first bootstrap to profitability.

~~~
wisty
It won't just be investors. It will also be regulators (who will take a dim
view of smaller operators), potential employees, suppliers, and so on.

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naner
Pretty interesting. Fully automated text summarization certainly isn't new
(libots, Classifier4j, OSX's summarization service, Copernic Summarizer, etc.)
but I haven't yet seen any implementations that use a machine learning
approach.

EDIT: A better integrated summarizer obviously won't "revolutionize the web",
though.

~~~
marshray
Somehow "May summarize the web up to 30% better!" just doesn't have the same
ring to it.

~~~
indubitably
I don't really see how 30% better is going to make a qualitative difference in
the utility of text on the web.

~~~
marshray
I can't even think of any time other than raw search results that I read auto-
generated summaries now anyway.

Of course, maybe if the summaries were just a little better..it'd
revolutionize the whole web! :-)

~~~
ak2012
does this all work based on picking up key sentences or can it rewrite content
as well?

~~~
robryan
Doesn't seem like like it rewrites content, also seems to often use a sentence
as the first one that refers to a previously introduced concept in the article
that has no context in the summary.

This doesn't really surprise me as in the time he has been working in
ai/ml/nlp I don't think there would have been much time to do more than learn
up to and implement some of the current state of the art. The named entity
recognition for the keywords seems okay.

I did a bit of reading on summarization during my thesis, enough to know it is
a big and difficult problem. I hope he keeps at it, seems like a good start
but a long way to go.

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citricsquid
Previous: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399377>

Seems the technology is overstated:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399717>

~~~
switz
It usually is when the article title is "__ year old developer does _______".

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perfunctory
Robots summarizing text produced by other robots. That's the future of the
web? Sigh.

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user9756
Have anyone here tried the application/service?

~~~
andrewcamel
Yep. See comment above.

~~~
user9756
thanks

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AznHisoka
I bet Demand Media would salivate at using something like this. Pages with
automated summaries of every page in the internet.

~~~
samstave
Isnt that what reddit and HN are. metas of info available to see if we want to
click the bait.

The number of sites I visit directly over the years has diminished to 4 since
reddit, HN and two others.

the issue to be solved for other sites to grow is not that they can summarize,
but how well they curate a community around the results.

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augustiner
<http://topicmarks.com/> is already available for quite some time now

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artichokeheart
16 yo get $250k for technology that pushes us even closer to a Farenheit 451
distopian future.

~~~
lukifer
Hypothesis: There is more to be gained intellectually by reading 10 novel
synopses on Wikipedia that reading any one of the novels all the way through.

I'm aware of the dangers of soundbyte-ism, but it needn't be inherently evil.
In fact, the internet is the best place for summarization to take place; you
can't click through on a TV news ticker, but you can on a linkbaiting blog.

~~~
wladimir
"Hypothesis: There is more to be gained intellectually by reading 10 novel
synopses on Wikipedia that reading any one of the novels all the way through."

That depends completely on what your goal is. What do you "gain
intellectually" when knowing the overall story? Aren't novels more about the
experience you get while reading them?

For news I can understand summaries can be as good as the whole thing,
especially if you're not _that_ interested but want to know what is going on.

