I was wondering if you creative minds out there could think of some situations or applications in the web environment where Neural Networks would be suitable or an interesting spin.
Edit: Some great ideas here. I was thinking more web centric. Maybe bot detectors or AI in games.
Search! Recognize! Classify! Basically everything search engines do nowadays could benefit from a dose of neural networks and fuzzy logic. This applies in particular to multimedia content (e.g. content-indexing images and videos) since that's where current search technologies are lagging behind.
If you screen scrap or accept other sites item sales info for price comparison, NN can be used to flag possible errors in the item description for a human to then eyeball.
Often, as one example, computer hardware descriptions are wrong in what capacity, speed, features that are portrayed. Your NN will learn that generally a Video card should not contain a "Raid 10" string. If there is a trend to add Raid to GPUs then your NN will learn this over time by the eyeball-er accepting an advert to teach the NN this is now a new class of hardware.
This hardware example can be extended to other industries.
There is the old idea of internally classifying your news/magazine stories. Tracking users click through via cookies can allow you to modify your home page paste-up to present stories that said users appear to prefer.
A NN will give you a better profile of the percentage mix of subjects a user enjoys to read about over other methods. If you include date and time you can adjust for if the person has been paid or not. (World domination to follow)
Surfer 1. Economy 50%, alcohol 20%, skin mags 20%
Surfer 2. Shoes 80%, Rich celebrities 20%
Good luck
Ignoring the "Common web problems" angle request but rather "interesting spin" view.
One of the many ways that a NN can be viewed/configured, is as a giant self adjusting, multi-input, multi-output kind of case flow control.
So when you want to offer match ups that are fuzzy, (not to be confused directly with fuzzy logic per say, which is another area of maths/computing) NN may offer a usable alternative.
So to save energy, you offer a lift club site, one-offs or regular trips. People enter where they are, where they want to go and at what time. Sort by city and display in browse control.
Using a NN you could, over time, offer transport owners to transport seekers by watching what owners and seekers link up. As a owner may not live in the same suburb that a seeker resides. The NN learns over time what variances in owners, seekers physical location difference appear to be acceptable. So it can then expand its search area when offering a seekers potential owners.
An idea.
Web advertising based on consumer choice prediction
Forecasting of user's Web browsing direction in micro-scale and very short term (current session). This idea is quite similar, a generalisation, to the first one. A user browsing Web could be proposed with suggestions with other potentially interesting websites. The suggestions could be relevance-ranked according to prediction calculated in real-time during user's activity. For instance, a list of proposed links or categories or tags could be displayed in form of a cloud and font size indicates rank score. Each and every click a user makes is an input to the forecasting system, so the forecast is being constantly refined to provide user with as much accurate suggestions, in terms of match against user's interest, as possible.
How about connecting users to the closest DNS, and making sure there are as few bounces as possible between the request and the destination?
To name a few:
One thing that always amazes me is that we still don't have any pseudo-intelligent firewalling technology. Something that says "hey his range of urls is making too much requests when they are not supposed to", blocks them, and sends a report to an administrator. That could be done with a neural network.
On the nasty part of things, some virus makers could find lucrative uses to neural networks. Adaptative trojans that "recognized" credit card numbers on a hard drive (instead of looking for certain cookies) or that "learn" how to mask themselves from detectors automatically.
Suppose EBay used neural nets to predict how likely a particular item was to sell; predict what the best day to list items of that type would be, suggest a starting price or "buy it now price"; or grade your description based on how likely it was to attract buyers? All of those could be useful features, if they worked well enough.
Neural net applications are great for representing discrete choices and the whole behavior of how an individual acts (or how groups of individuals act) when mucking around on the web.
Take news reading for instance:
Back in the olden days, you picked up usually one newspaper (a choice), picked a section (a choice), scanned a page and chose an article (a choice), and read the basics or the entire article (another choice).
Now you choose which news site to visit and continue as above, but now you can drop one paper, pick up another, click on ads, change sections, and keep going with few limits.
The whole use of the web and the choices people make based on their demographics, interests, experience, politics, time of day, location, etc. is a very rich area for NN application. This is especially relevant to news organizations, web page design, ad revenue, and may even be an under explored area.
Of course, it's very hard to predict what one person will do, but put 10,000 of them that are the same age, income, gender, time of day, etc. together and you might be able to predict behavior that will lead to better designs. Imagine a newspaper (or even a game) that could be scaled to people's needs based on demographics. An ad man's dream !
The game located at 20q.net is one of my favorite web-based neural networks. You could adapt this idea to create a learning system that knows how to play a simple game and slowly learns how to beat humans at it. As it plays human opponents, it records data on game situations, the actions taken, and whether or not the NN won the game. Every time it plays, win or lose, it gets a little better. (Note: don't try this with too simple of a game like checkers, an overly simple game can have every possible game/combination of moves pre-computed which defeats the purpose of using the NN).
Any sort of classification system based on multiple criteria might be worth looking at. I have heard of some company developing a NN that looks at employee records and determines which ones are the least satisfied or the most likely to quit.
Neural networks are also good for doing certain types of language processing, including OCR or converting text to speech. Try creating a system that can decipher capchas, either from the graphical representation or the audio representation.