Posts Tagged ‘Random’

GroupSwim Favorite Things To Do

January 15, 2009

In our never ending quest to provide solid entertainment for our readers, we thought we would take a break from discussing SaaS, collaboration, etc. and tackle another important issue; what are our favorite things to do.  So, without further ado, the following list has many of the GroupSwim staff and what their favorite things to do are outside of work:

Erik

  1. Being out sailing in a hard breeze. Dressed  up in full rain gear, wet to the bone and zipping coffee.
  2. Enjoying a cold beer with some friends.
  3. Doing some kind of manual labor, often involving being dressed up in working pants and using big tools. Most of the working with  something boat related.

Phillip

  1. Hanging out with friends and/or girlfriend.
  2. Playing guitar or bass guitar – preferably funk on bass guitar and metal on electric guitar.
  3. Working out in gym.

Sten-Erik

  1. Going on trips with my wife and my two grown-up kids must be what I enjoy the most. Unfortunately it is becoming more and more expensive to come up with venues guaranteed to attract everybody.
  2. Playing a board game (or possibly computer game) with other devoted players in a cozy setting (like Luke and Larry in the GS San Francisco office).
  3. And without the constant intake of cultural expression from the likes of book, film, and theater, as well as gastronomy and my dear friends the wines, what life would there be?

Jari

  1. I like playing  and watching my sons play ice hockey and floorball.
  2. I like playing golf with my family and friends.
  3. I like traveling and enjoy trying food from different parts of the world.

Luke

  1. Dancing with my daughter.
  2. On a nice day, going for a bike ride with my wife and daughter, or digging around in the garden.
  3. Talking and laughing with good friends.

Jason

  1. Skiing in the trees with fresh powder on the ground and nobody around except who I’m skiing with.
  2. Playing with my kids and making them laugh.  The sound of their laughter is my favorite thing in the world.
  3. Traveling with Allison, family and friends to new places, and having no agenda or plans once we get there.

Tom

  1. Riding my bike anywhere – Road, Mountain, Single Speed – anything outdoors and on a bike.
  2. Hanging with friends and family – Beers and BBQ.
  3. Hiking and taking pictures with friends and family.
    All involves getting outside in some way, shape or form (even if it standing over a BBQ in the back yard).

What are your favorite things to do?

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Semantic technology actually is rocket science

April 29, 2008

We met up with one of our customers last night to compare notes on semantic technology. This was a great case of two companies trying to accomplish similar goals (making sense of unstructured data) in different ways. They heavily use statistical analysis on massive data sets. By importing and analyzing the data, they can draw mathematical relationships between words, documents and document sets and then use crazy smart algorithms to make sense of them. Their ultimate goal is to make these massive data sets manageable and discover relevant content. We take another approach and use natural language processing to analyze the data our customers put into their sites. Our datasets tend to be much smaller but are high quality since someone doesn’t add something to GroupSwim unless they want to share it. Then, we compare the language used in the content to other semantic sources including WordNet, Wikipedia, etc. to do our automatic tagging and analysis. Our ultimate goal is to make it easy for people to add content and then for others to find it through meaningful semantic relationships and search.

The exercise of comparing the two methods and seeing the high level similarities was fun. We also brainstormed different ways they could use GroupSwim since they are a great customer. I was definitely the least intellectual person in the room, but it was something to behold when our CTO and their scientist guy started throwing around terms like the semantic web, divisive clustering, agglomerative clustering, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t pronounce.

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