Collective Intelligence in Action (Paperback)

~ (Author), Richard MacManus (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

There's a great deal of wisdom in a crowd, but how do you listen to a thousand people talking at once? Identifying the wants, needs, and knowledge of internet users can be like listening to a mob.

In the Web 2.0 era, leveraging the collective power of user contributions, interactions, and feedback is the key to market dominance. A new category of powerful programming techniques lets you discover the patterns, inter-relationships, and individual profiles-the collective intelligence--locked in the data people leave behind as they surf websites, post blogs, and interact with other users.

"Collective Intelligence in Action" is a hands-on guidebook for implementing collective intelligence concepts using Java. It is the first Java-based book to emphasize the underlying algorithms and technical implementation of vital data gathering and mining techniques like analyzing trends, discovering relationships, and making predictions. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches.

This book is for Java developers implementing Collective Intelligence in real, high-use applications. Following a running example in which you harvest and use information from blogs, you learn to develop software that you can embed in your own applications. The code examples are immediately reusable and give the Java developer a working collective intelligence toolkit.

Along the way, you work with, a number of APIs and open-source toolkits including text analysis and search using Lucene, web-crawling using Nutch, and applying machine learning algorithms using WEKA and the Java Data Mining (JDM) standard.

About the Author

Satnam Alag, PhD, is currently the Vice President of Engineering at NextBio, a vertical search engine and a Web 2.0 collaboration application for the life sciences community. He is a seasoned software professional with over fifteen years of experience in machine learning and over a decade of experience in commercial software development and management. Dr. Alag worked as a consultant with Johnson & Johnsons's BabyCenter where he helped develop their personalization engine. Prior to that, he was the Chief Software Architect at Rearden Commerce and began his career at GE R&D. He is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) for the Java Platform. Dr. Alag earned his PhD in engineering from UC Berkeley and his dissertation was in the area of probabilistic reasoning and machine learning. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles.

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Product Details Paperback: 397 pages Publisher: Manning Publications; Pap/Onl edition (October 1, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1933988312 ISBN-13: 978-1933988313 Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.4 inches Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #189,670 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in these categories: (What's this?) #20 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning #23 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Neural Networks #33 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Theory of Computing

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	52% buy the item featured on this page: Collective Intelligence in Action 4.6 out of 5 stars (16) $29.69
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Customer Reviews

16 Reviews 5 star:  (10) 4 star:  (6) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.6 out of 5 stars (16 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 15 of 15 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Adding Smartness made easy in your Enterprise Application by "Collective Intelligence in Action", November 12, 2008 By  Sopan M. Shewale "Collaboration Software Deve... (Pune, India) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    I was not surprised to see "Hello, Sopan. We have recommendations for you" line at the top when I logged into the Amazon.com site. Yes, this kind of functionality is very easy to implement into your application after reading Satnam's Collective Intelligence in Action Have you ever wonder how Netflix is able to recommend movies, what are the latest trends in the making search more intelligent or how you can intelligently gather new content and present it to your application? In this book, Santnam does an excellent job providing the answers to all these questions The book covers the wide breadth of the topics with amazing focus and detail-architecture for adding intelligence, tagging and tag clouds, content aggregation through focused web crawling and from the blogospare, leveraging machine learning techniques such as clustering and predictive modeling, intelligent search and building recommendation engine. I particularly liked the approach to explain the mathematical concepts with simple examples, followed by implementing it in simple Java and then leveraging open-source software. This book can be very useful if you are interested in integrating different Open Source Softwares to deliver Enterprise Class Application. I also liked the authors style of providing summary at the end of each chapter. He also provides huge set of very useful resources for reading further on the topics covered into the chapters. You must pickup this book if you are [1]. serious (developer/manager/architect type of Eng) on adding search or intelligent/smartness into your Application [2]. person involved in developing (programmer, tester, manager) Social Networking Application. [3]. involved in managing "Knowledge Management Infrastructure" of any size organization This Book will provide you a great foundation for developing Enterprise Class Features. I highly recommend it. 11 of 11 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A must for all Web engineers, November 25, 2008 By  Daniel Lemire (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    I was recently asked by the publisher to review Collective Intelligence in Action. The author is Satnam Alag, a Bay area engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Alag is VP of NextBio, a specialized search engine. The first chapter is free and so is the source code used in the book. The book is for Java developers who want to implement "Collective Intelligence" applications in Java. It tells us about extracting and applying data from blogs, wikis and social network applications. I am not one to praise, but this book succeeds brilliantly. If you are a Java engineer and work with Web technologies, you must get this book. It covers topics such as computing similarity measures using vector models, Naive Bayes Classifiers, inverse document frequency (idf), Machine Learning (using the Weka API), building a crawler with regular expressions, collaborative filtering (with links to open source tools), and so on. Even if you do not work with Java, if you care for high-end Web applications, this book is for you. It reminds me of Lyon's Java¿ Digital Signal Processing book. It offers the gist of what academia knows, but focuses on what people (engineers and researchers) do in practise. The book is not meant for academia however. There are references, but no theorem. Disclaimer. I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author. Further reading. A competing book is Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran. It uses Python instead of Java. 10 of 12 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A great book!, November 8, 2008 By  Kevin Xiao - See all my reviews This is a great book! It is a hands-on guidebook for implementing collective intelligence concepts. It is the first Java-based book to emphasize the underlying algorithms and technical implementation of scalable data mining techniques, such as, trend analyzing, relationship discovering, and predictive modeling. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches. The concepts and code examples in the book have been practically used in a life science search engine named NextBio, which proves to be a great success. I strongly recommend this book.		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars Good , well written and good overview of available tools The best thing about the book is that it revealed many other open source toolkits relevant to the topic. Provided good topic background. Read more Published 1 month ago by Vasko Yordanov 4.0 out of 5 stars Survey Level Introduction for Engineers Collective Intelligence is a big topic so the title of this book is very ambitious. The author is too. Read more Published 5 months ago by Glenn 4.0 out of 5 stars A practical book on machine learning The publisher has fixed the most errata listed on O'reilly website in the edition I got from Amazon. Read more Published 7 months ago by Jun Zhang 4.0 out of 5 stars Review by Chabli Faisel In my opinion, this book is intended for people with good knowledge in Business Intelligence as well as Java to understand the examples provided, but this is a practical book for... Read more Published 7 months ago by Developpez.com writers 5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for everyone developing apps in Web 2.0 Collective Intelligence in Action delivers an in depth account and perspective on scalable data mining techniques. Read more Published 8 months ago by Jan Krivocheia 5.0 out of 5 stars THE essential book on Collective Intelligence I've been interested in CI for quite some time now and I've read a lot of books on it, including the other Python book. Read more Published 8 months ago by Kevin Hoffman 5.0 out of 5 stars Skillfully integrates machine learning, statistics, text processing, AI I don't review many books, but this one clearly stood out as an example of an author successfully providing a range of related topics, with good Java code provided to get the... Read more Published 8 months ago by Jeffrey S. Risberg 4.0 out of 5 stars Collective Intelligence in Action review Collective intelligence is very popular these days. Thanks to the Internet companies we can use this concept every day. Read more Published 9 months ago by M. Wrzos 5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on this topic out there After going through this book I can say that this book has the best coverage of the details for building web sites on social networking/reviews/search engines etc. Read more Published 9 months ago by Shiva Paranandi 5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book on Collective Intelligence "Collective Intelligence in Action" is a fantastic book to read and understand the complex area of data mining and unstructured data, I have used many of the technologies... Read more Published 9 months ago by Krishna Mayuram Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 397 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications; Pap/Onl edition (October 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933988312
• ISBN-13: 978-1933988313
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #189,670 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #20 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning
  #23 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Neural Networks
  #33 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Theory of Computing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adding Smartness made easy in your Enterprise Application by "Collective Intelligence in Action", November 12, 2008

By	Sopan M. Shewale "Collaboration Software Deve... (Pune, India) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was not surprised to see "Hello, Sopan. We have recommendations for you" line at the top
when I logged into the Amazon.com site. Yes, this kind of functionality is very easy to
implement into your application after reading Satnam's Collective Intelligence in Action

Have you ever wonder how Netflix is able to recommend movies, what are the latest trends
in the making search more intelligent or how you can intelligently gather new content and
present it to your application?

In this book, Santnam does an excellent job providing the answers to all these questions
The book covers the wide breadth of the topics with amazing focus and detail-architecture
for adding intelligence, tagging and tag clouds, content aggregation through focused web
crawling and from the blogospare, leveraging machine learning techniques such as clustering
and predictive modeling, intelligent search and building recommendation engine.

I particularly liked the approach to explain the mathematical concepts with simple examples,
followed by implementing it in simple Java and then leveraging open-source software.

This book can be very useful if you are interested in integrating different Open Source Softwares
to deliver Enterprise Class Application.

I also liked the authors style of providing summary at the end of each chapter.
He also provides huge set of very useful resources for reading further on the topics
covered into the chapters.



You must pickup this book if you are

[1]. serious (developer/manager/architect type of Eng) on adding search or
intelligent/smartness into your Application
[2]. person involved in developing (programmer, tester, manager) Social
Networking Application.
[3]. involved in managing "Knowledge Management Infrastructure" of any size organization

This Book will provide you a great foundation for developing Enterprise Class
Features.


I highly recommend it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for all Web engineers, November 25, 2008

By	Daniel Lemire (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was recently asked by the publisher to review Collective Intelligence in Action. The author is Satnam Alag, a Bay area engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Alag is VP of NextBio, a specialized search engine.

The first chapter is free and so is the source code used in the book.

The book is for Java developers who want to implement "Collective Intelligence" applications in Java. It tells us about extracting and applying data from blogs, wikis and social network applications. I am not one to praise, but this book succeeds brilliantly. If you are a Java engineer and work with Web technologies, you must get this book. It covers topics such as computing similarity measures using vector models, Naive Bayes Classifiers, inverse document frequency (idf), Machine Learning (using the Weka API), building a crawler with regular expressions, collaborative filtering (with links to open source tools), and so on.

Even if you do not work with Java, if you care for high-end Web applications, this book is for you. It reminds me of Lyon's Java¿ Digital Signal Processing book. It offers the gist of what academia knows, but focuses on what people (engineers and researchers) do in practise.

The book is not meant for academia however. There are references, but no theorem.

Disclaimer. I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.

Further reading. A competing book is Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran. It uses Python instead of Java.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book!, November 8, 2008

By	Kevin Xiao - See all my reviews

This is a great book! It is a hands-on guidebook for implementing collective intelligence concepts. It is the first Java-based book to emphasize the underlying algorithms and technical implementation of scalable data mining techniques, such as, trend analyzing, relationship discovering, and predictive modeling. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches.

The concepts and code examples in the book have been practically used in a life science search engine named NextBio, which proves to be a great success. I strongly recommend this book.