Hello everyone.
Wanted to give you advance notice of a great new way to view in the future to view the content of this site.
Some of you know that I have a programming background. So a few months ago I decided to tackle a problem no one has: how do you only see the posts you want and no other? "Ignore" feature doesn't do it as it filters by person. What you want is a filter by content as if there was a person who was screening the posts for you, telling what you would want to look at, and what to ignore.
As a way of example, a quick search will show you Bill Gates' likely email address. If you send him anything to that address externally, it will be read by a screener, not him. The person reads the messages and if appropriate, would forward the email to someone to address, including Bill himself. Wouldn't it be great to have the same capability when you read the forum? An agent which would scour the whole forum, only bringing you the subjects you would be interested in? And get rid of what you don't like?
With Bill literally getting millions of spam emails a day -- you know, folks reaching out to him with "get rich schemes" , Microsoft research (MSR) was working on a tool to automate the process of filtering, reducing the ever increasing human manpower that was necessary to handle all the traffic.
When I left Microsoft, they were not even close to being finished. As Bill used to say, the intelligence of our computers is still well below that of a dog, let alone a human! Having kept good relationship with MSR folks, I thought I ping them to see if they had made any progress. To my amazement, they had! I went and saw a demo and it was remarkable.
You would go through a 20-question interview that would take about 10 to 15 minutes. After that simple training, it was remarkable to see how fast and accurately it would filter Bill's emails. For example, by saying you are already wealthy, it would smartly know to get rid of all spams related to that. But not for example your friend asking to take you out to lunch and offering to pay for it. Existing solutions would be too dumb, and look at the word "pay" and throw out the good with the bad.
Even more interesting for the subject at hand was their willingness to license the code to me. MSR wants to justify their cost to the company and instead of just waiting for internal groups to utilize their research, they are now free to license to anyone. And seems like ex-Microsoft employees get a break in licensing cost .
So I took a snapshot of the code back in November and have been working on it nights and weekends. Integrating it with forum software took some doing as unlike MSR code, Vbulletin code is not written to the same standard (no jokes guys about Microsoft's ability to write code ). Last night I managed to get it all working around 2:00am in the morning. It still has a lot of bugs but boy, the potential is incredible. It instantly showed me posts I had missed, and filtered out the "What's new" section to a handful of threads for me to see -- right on the money.
Next is to have Steve, Ron and Lee test it out before I roll it out to everyone. After than internal testing, you will be able to play with it. For now, I was so excited I thought I should share the development with you all.
Wanted to give you advance notice of a great new way to view in the future to view the content of this site.
Some of you know that I have a programming background. So a few months ago I decided to tackle a problem no one has: how do you only see the posts you want and no other? "Ignore" feature doesn't do it as it filters by person. What you want is a filter by content as if there was a person who was screening the posts for you, telling what you would want to look at, and what to ignore.
As a way of example, a quick search will show you Bill Gates' likely email address. If you send him anything to that address externally, it will be read by a screener, not him. The person reads the messages and if appropriate, would forward the email to someone to address, including Bill himself. Wouldn't it be great to have the same capability when you read the forum? An agent which would scour the whole forum, only bringing you the subjects you would be interested in? And get rid of what you don't like?
With Bill literally getting millions of spam emails a day -- you know, folks reaching out to him with "get rich schemes" , Microsoft research (MSR) was working on a tool to automate the process of filtering, reducing the ever increasing human manpower that was necessary to handle all the traffic.
When I left Microsoft, they were not even close to being finished. As Bill used to say, the intelligence of our computers is still well below that of a dog, let alone a human! Having kept good relationship with MSR folks, I thought I ping them to see if they had made any progress. To my amazement, they had! I went and saw a demo and it was remarkable.
You would go through a 20-question interview that would take about 10 to 15 minutes. After that simple training, it was remarkable to see how fast and accurately it would filter Bill's emails. For example, by saying you are already wealthy, it would smartly know to get rid of all spams related to that. But not for example your friend asking to take you out to lunch and offering to pay for it. Existing solutions would be too dumb, and look at the word "pay" and throw out the good with the bad.
Even more interesting for the subject at hand was their willingness to license the code to me. MSR wants to justify their cost to the company and instead of just waiting for internal groups to utilize their research, they are now free to license to anyone. And seems like ex-Microsoft employees get a break in licensing cost .
So I took a snapshot of the code back in November and have been working on it nights and weekends. Integrating it with forum software took some doing as unlike MSR code, Vbulletin code is not written to the same standard (no jokes guys about Microsoft's ability to write code ). Last night I managed to get it all working around 2:00am in the morning. It still has a lot of bugs but boy, the potential is incredible. It instantly showed me posts I had missed, and filtered out the "What's new" section to a handful of threads for me to see -- right on the money.
Next is to have Steve, Ron and Lee test it out before I roll it out to everyone. After than internal testing, you will be able to play with it. For now, I was so excited I thought I should share the development with you all.