The Wall Street Journal article Walked Into a Lamppost? Hurt While Crocheting? Help Is on the Way describes the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision that is used to describe medical problems.

“Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers. Apparently, that doesn’t allow for quite enough nuance. A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—adding codes that describe precisely what bone was broken, or which artery is receiving a stent. It will also have a code for recording that a patient’s injury occurred in a chicken coop.”

We want to see the search engine companies develop and support a Microdata vocabulary for ICD-10. An ICDM-10 OWL DL ontology has already been done, but a Microdata version might add a lot of value. We could use it on our blogs and Facebook posts to catalog those annoying problems we encounter each day, like W59.22XD (Struck by turtle, initial encounter), or Y07.53 (Teacher or instructor, perpetrator of maltreat and neglect).

Humor aside, a description logic representation (e.g., in OWL) makes the coding system seem less ridiculous. Instead of appearing as a catalog of 140K ground tags, it would emphasize that it is a collection of a much smaller number of classes that can be combined in productive ways to produce them or used to create general descriptions (e.g., bitten by an animal).

A story in yesterday’s NYT, Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars, reports that Google has hired a Nevada lobbyist to promote two bills related to autonomous vehicles that are expected to be voted on this summer.

“Google hired David Goldwater, a lobbyist based in Las Vegas, to promote the two measures, which are expected to come to a vote before the Legislature’s session ends in June. One is an amendment to an electric-vehicle bill providing for the licensing and testing of autonomous vehicles, and the other is the exemption that would permit texting.”

Arguments the lobbyist offered included that “the autonomous technology would be safer than human drivers, offer more fuel-efficient cars and promote economic development.”

I’d add that the Google Bot has a clean driving record, exhibits an excellent sense of direction, will obey any laws inserted into a state’s robots.txt, and does not drink. However, the Google Bot’s current cars are all Toyotas and an Audis. Maybe the Nevada legislator should find a way to encourage it to support the US auto industry and buy some American cars.

I liked project leader Sebastian Thrun’s example of a potential benefit of autonomous vehicles.

“In frequent public statements, he has said robotic vehicles would increase energy efficiency while reducing road injuries and deaths. And he has called for sophisticated systems for car sharing that, he says, could cut the number of cars in the United States in half. “What if I could take out my phone and say, ‘Zipcar, come here,’ ” he asked an industry conference last year, “and a moment later the Zipcar came around the corner?””

Many people now use the Web to find recipes rather than their own collection of cookbooks and it is estimated that about one percent of all Google searches are for recipes. This past Thursday, Google released Recipe View in the US, letting you limit results to pages that are recipes and further narrow your search by ingredients, cooking time and calories. This feature is powered by semantic metadata encoded in RDFa and other formats

Google describes the new recipe search in a post on the Official Google Blog:

“Recipe View lets you narrow your search results to show only recipes, and helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], or more open-ended topics—like [strawberry] to find recipes that feature strawberries, or even a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo]. In fact, you can try searching for all kinds of things and still find interesting results: a favorite chef like [ina garten], something very specific like [spicy vegetarian curry with coconut and tofu] or even something obscure like [strange salad].”

Recipe View extracts data embedded in Web pages that is encoded in Google’s rich snippets format. This includes both the W3C Semantic Web standard RDFa as well as microformats. Google recognizes a simple recipe vocabulary with fourteen properties.

This is a great example of the potential of semantic web technology that can be understood and appreciated by anyone with an interest in cooking. Or eating.

Google is looking for some people who “Live on the Web” to take part in a pilot program for their new Chrome-48 notebook. If you are accepted, you get a free Chrome notebook in return for providing feedback.

“We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. It should take about 15 minutes. We’ll review the requests that come in and contact you if you’ve been selected. This application will be open until 11:59:59 PM PST on December 21, 2010.”

The Cr-48′s features are said to include:

• 12-inch display
• Built-in Wi-Fi and 3G service via Verizon
• Full-sized keyboard w/o function keys
• Oversized clickable touchpad
• ~3.8 pounds
• Solid state hard drive
• Eight hours of active usage with a week of standby power

See Google Chrome OS site for details and to apply.

The Google-supported Planet Wars Google AI Challenge had over 4000 entries that used AI and game theory to compete against one another. C at the R-Chart blog analyzed the programming languages used by the contestants with some interesting results.

The usual suspects were the most popular languages used: Java, C++, Python, C# and PHP. The winner, Hungarian Gábor Melis, was just one of 33 contestants who used Lisp. Even less common were entries in C, but the 18 “C hippies” did remarkably well.

Blogger C wonders if Lisp was the special sauce:

Paul Graham has stated that Java was designed for “average” programmers while other languages (like Lisp) are for good programmers. The fact that the winner of the competition wrote in Lisp seems to support this assertion. Or should we see Mr. Melis as an anomaly who happened to use Lisp for this task?

As TechCrunch and others report, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that the next version of Android (Gingerbread 2.3) will support near field communication. What?

Wikipedia explains that NFC refers to RFID and RFID-like technology commonly used for contactless smart cards, mobile ticketing, and mobile payment systems.

“ Near Field Communication or NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.”

The next iphone is rumored to have something similar.

Support for NFC in popular smart phones could unleash lots of interesting applications, many of which have already been explored in research prototypes in labs around the world. One interesting possibility is that this could be used to allow android devices to share RDF queries and data with other devices.

Recorded Future is a Boston-based startup with backing from Google and In-Q-Tel uses sophisticated linguistic and statistical algorithms to extract time-related information from streams of Web data about entities and events. Their goal is to help their clients to understand how the relationships between entities and events of interest are changing over time and make predictions about the future.

A recent Technology Review article, See the Future with a Search, describes it this way.

“Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future’s software goes a level deeper by analyzing the content of pages to track the “invisible” connections between people, places, and events described online.
   ”That makes it possible for me to look for specific patterns, like product releases expected from Apple in the near future, or to identify when a company plans to invest or expand into India,” says Christopher Ahlberg, founder of the Boston-based firm.
   A search for information about drug company Merck, for example, generates a timeline showing not only recent news on earnings but also when various drug trials registered with the website clinicaltrials.gov will end in coming years. Another search revealed when various news outlets predict that Facebook will make its initial public offering.
   That is done using a constantly updated index of what Ahlberg calls “streaming data,” including news articles, filings with government regulators, Twitter updates, and transcripts from earnings calls or political and economic speeches. Recorded Future uses linguistic algorithms to identify specific types of events, such as product releases, mergers, or natural disasters, the date when those events will happen, and related entities such as people, companies, and countries. The tool can also track the sentiment of news coverage about companies, classifying it as either good or bad.”

Pricing for access to their online services and API starts at $149 a month, but there is a free Futures email alert service through which you can get the results of some standing queries on a daily or weekly basis. You can also explore the capabilities they offer through their page on the 2010 US Senate Races.

“Rather than attempt to predict how the the races will turn out, we have drawn from our database the momentum, best characterized as online buzz, and sentiment, both positive and negative, associated with the coverage of the 29 candidates in 14 interesting races. This dashboard is meant to give the view of a campaign strategist, as it measures how well a campaign has done in getting the media to speak about the candidate, and whether that coverage has been positive, in comparison to the opponent.”

Their blog reveals some insights on the technology they are using and much more about the business opportunities they see. Clearly the company is leveraging named entity recognition, event recognition and sentiment analysis. A short A White Paper on Temporal Analytics has some details on their overall approach.

No, this is not an article from The Onion, but Google is working on a computer-controlled car. Two articles for tomorrow’s New York Times describe a research project at Google on developing an autonomous vehicle. Here is a picture of the prototype.

In the science science section, John Markoff has a story Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic.

“Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving. A self-driving car developed and outfitted by Google, with device on roof, cruising along recently on Highway 101 in Mountain View, Calif. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.”

A companion article, also by Markoff, has some additional material, including this interesting note on the current approach.

“One main technique used by the Google team is known as SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping, which builds and updates a map of a vehicle’s surroundings while keeping the vehicle located within the map. To make a SLAM map, the car is first driven manually along a route while its sensors capture location, feature and obstacle data. Then a group of software engineers annotates the maps, making certain that road signs, crosswalks, street lights and unusual features are all embedded. The cars then drive autonomously over the mapped routes, recording changes as they occur and updating the map. The researchers said they were surprised to find how frequently the roads their robots drove on had changed.”

The project was the idea of Stanford computer science professor Sebastian Thrun who is also a Principal Engineer at Google, where he helped invent the Street View mapping service. Thrun has led the Stanford team that developed the Stanley robot car which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge that was focused on developing autonomous vehicle technology.

It’s not clear what is the business case for this Google research project. But Google has the cash and the intellectual capital that might actually develop something in this space that can make money.

In a Google blog post from earlier today, What we’re driving at, Thrun gives one motivation.

“Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.”

update: Techcrunch has an article speculating on the possible business applications, World-Changing Awesome Aside, How Will The Self-Driving Google Car Make Money?.

Read a good book lately? Why not nominate it for the 2011 UMBC New Student Book Experience, which invites new UMBC students to read the selected book and engage in formal and informal discussions about it as the new year starts.

We are looking for books that (1) are compelling, intellectually stimulating, engaging on multiple levels and capable of generating interesting discussions; (2) address issues meaningful to students of diverse backgrounds; (3) are not widely required in Maryland high schools or made into a recent film; and (4) are available in paperback and not overly long.

You can nominate one or more using this handy Facebook app. The app uses the Google Books API to help identify books given a partial title, so it’s easy to use. After recoding your nomination, you’ll have an opportunity to make an optional post to your Facebook page like the one below, so your friends can see what you suggested. Nominations will close on October 31, 2010 and the selection will be announced in the Spring.

The US Army War College publishes Parameters as the “US Army’s Senior Professional Journal”. The summer issue has an article by Fort Leavenworth analyst Timothy L. Thomas, Google Confronts China’s Three Warfares, that discusses alleged recent Chinese hacking attacks on Google, censorship, Google’s reactions, and other related events. His article concludes:

“The Chinese probes of the world’s cyber domains have not ceased. Recently, Canadian researchers uncovered a massive Chinese espionage campaign targeting India. In their report, Shadow Network, they outlined the massive campaign emanating from Chengdu, China that harvested a huge quantity of data from India’s military and commercial files. China’s activities against Google and India (and their reconnaissance activities in general) portend a much broader pattern, a long-term strategy to hold military and economic assets of various nations hostage. There are a number of Chinese books that support this supposition. Gaining the high ground in international digital competition is becoming a national objective for the Chinese. China’s previous activities certainly afford them a political advantage in any future conflict.”