In an article in the August 4 issue of Nature, UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. In the article, he writes that the main obstacle to progress “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination.” Etzioni proposes that instead of simply looking for strings of text, a web search engine would identify basic entities – people, places, things – and uncover the relationships between them. This is the goal of the UW’s Turing Center, which he directs.
Read the Nature article here. Read an excellent New York Times followup here. Read a UW press release here. Learn about the Turing Center’s research program here.