What are known uses of AI/machine-learning in web development? And what would be some fields that, currently don't use AI, but could possibly benefit from AI?
Note: I've worked on AI for academics, simulations and games before, and I'm currently doing some informal/personal research right now, so I'm looking for some new fields to draw ideas and models from.
Thanks!
We once had a bot for natural language understanding and web navigation. Based on a knowledge base, neural network, and NLP it would navigate through the page of a company based on the questions asked:
To have greater binding with humans, all our bots also had a hobby. If the user was inactive for a while, the bot would either ask a question to keep the conversation alive or start chatting about his favorite topic. That might have been skying f.e. (we were located in Switzerland).
There is an open source project like that: Alice
Some Examples of Practical Use of Machine Learning
Online Store Suggestions (like Amazon)
Providing Targeted Ads (like Google AdSense)
Grouping Similar News Stories (like Google News)
An interesting book was recently written on this subject:
Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
If you're looking for something to explore as a personal project there's always the Netflix competition
It's open to anyone and they're offering $1 million to anyone that can come up with a solution that outperforms their current movie recommendation algorithm by 10%.
Obviously there are some big name teams taking part and they've got a head start (the leader at the moment is at 9.44%), so the chances of winning are slim - but it means you get hold of a large dataset to play around with (which is usually a problem), and you've got other algorithms to measure your attempts against.
... and you never know ;)
In the context of an online store you can perform association analysis to discover patterns of purchasing behavior.
Last.fm uses aggregate music play data to work out which artists are related to which others, in order to provide relevant listening suggestions and recommendations. No doubt this is similar to the systems used by Amazon etc. I don't know if it qualifies as AI but it is certainly doing some interesting number-crunching.
How about Google? Brin and others came out of the Stanford AI Lab, with well-known AI Researcher Terry Winograd as their advisor.
The head of google research is Peter Norvig, author of a popular Lisp programming textbook and well-versed in AI.
Most of the google stuff has AI approaches/underpinnings.
Another example of an AI approach to web development is Yahoo stores, originally developed by Paul Graham in Lisp. He comments that his competitors were puzzled by how quickly he could develop new features - it was the meta-programming features of Lisp that enabled this quick turnaround.