Collective Intelligence in Action

Hi Satnam,

the book looks like it covers a lot of ground. How does it compare to the O'reilly Press "Programming Collective Intelligence"?

regards,

Aaron

The book is really meant for developers (basic level of Java understanding helps) who are looking to add intelligence to their applications, especially user-centric Web 2.0 applications. A lot of work has been done by the open-source community in Java in the areas of text processing and search (Lucene), data mining (WEKA), web crawling (Nutch), and data mining standards (JDM). This book leverages these frameworks; presents examples and develops code that you can directly use in your Java application.

This is a practical book and I present a holistic view on things required to apply these techniques in the real-world. Consequently, the book discusses the architectures for implementing intelligence � you will find lots of diagrams, especially UML diagrams, lots of screen shots from well-known sites, in addition to code listings, and even database schema designs.

There are a plethora of examples. Typically, concepts and the underlying math for algorithms is explained via examples with detailed step-by-step analysis. Accompanying the examples is Java code that demonstrates the concepts by implementing the concept and/or using open-source frameworks.

There are a number of exciting topics that you will find interesting and are typically not covered by other books: harvesting information from the blogosphere, analyzing content � especially user-generated content, intelligent web crawling, intelligent search, building recommendation systems. In the last chapter, I also cover three real-world examples of personalization by Amazon, Google News, and Netflix � the BellKor solution from the Netflix competition is also covered. At the end of this you should be familiar with text analysis using Lucene, web crawling using Nutch, building content-based and collaborative-based recommendation engines, and data mining using WEKA and JDM.

Thanks for the detailed response. One thing already learnt thanks to you is about WEKA. It looks very interesting. The Java specific nature is also useful.

Thanks