thinkingmachine
Learning/Data Mining
Learning Models of Human Behavior

Wouldn't it be great if someone could develop a way to mine the web to figure out which activities are typically used in a given activity? Maybe one way that they could do it would be to look at how often an object term shows up in a Google query when paired with the related activity. If you compared that to how often the object showed up in general then maybe you could get a probability of the object's use when performing that activity.

Of course this would completely fail if there were web-pages that mentioned activities in the same breath as objects which were completely unrelated. For example, if there were a web-page somewhere that suggested "I like to eat tea-bags when I use the toilet", or "I frequently find that my television viewing is enhanced by sleeping with a vacuum", or "last night I changed a baby's diaper with a wooden spoon and a jar of peanut butter strapped to my dog" Fortunately for such a hypothetical research project though, there aren't any web-pages that say things like that....

www2004 talk

My research group at Intel had a paper titled Mining Models of Human Activities from the Web in WWW 2004. I gave the talk at the conference on Friday. Here is the powerpoint.