Incorporating Machine Learning into Firefox 2.0?

blakeross asks: "I will be doing research this summer at Stanford with Professor Andrew Ng about how we can incorporate machine learning into Firefox. As we work to finish up Firefox 1.0, we're also seeking ideas that will make Firefox 2.0 blow every other browser out of the water. People who come up with the best 3-5 ideas that involve the use of machine learning will win Gmail accounts, and if we implement your idea you'll be acknowledged in both our paper and in Firefox credits. Your idea will also be appreciated by the millions of people who use Firefox. We'll also entertain Thunderbird proposals. See my weblog post for more details; I'll read all comments posted in response to this story or to my weblog."

Comments

FYI

[grammar fascist]

(Undisclaimer: I do machine learning research at BYU.)

Machine learning, in general, is getting computers to generalize based on data instances. The two main flavors are classification (inferring classifications of data instances based on previous instances) and regression (inferring a function based on input/output pairs).

A lot of people incorporate artificial intelligence into the category "machine learning," though it's not strictly correct. Machine learning is more a branch of AI than anything. One way to keep them straight is to think AI = deduction, ML = induction. (That's vastly simplifying, but it helps to classify them roughly.)

I wonder which way the author leans? Could he possibly post to clarify his meaning? :)

You can do an awful lot with machine learning that you can't do with conventional techniques. You can often get great results for otherwise NP-hard problems. Slashdot had a story a while back about using machine learning to do mesh compression, in which their algorithm comes up with a close approximation to the real answer to an NP-hard problem in polynomial time.

I'm currently using it to interpolate 2D images, and kicking bicubic B-spline interpolation all to heck. (Paper pending...) The machine learning algorithm infers shapes from the pixels, and keeps edges sharp.

If I come up with an idea, I'll post it later. In the meantime: isn't Firefox supposed to be lean and mean? :)

Re:The top five ideas

[omaha]

2. Create a full-text index in real-time of every page that has been browsed. When the user visits any web page, display a sidebar of "Related previously-viewed pages."

see http://pychelsea.sourceforge.net/

Re:Screw machine learning...

[jeffehobbs]

I've been waiting for searchable bookmarks for about a decade now and it is yet to appear in any web browser.

Your decade is at a close! As of version 5, available today, Omniweb has both searchable bookmarks and history, Launchbar (also available now) can search across all browser bookmarks simultaneouslt, and Safari 2.0 will have this kind of functionality as well next year in Mac OS X "Tiger".

~jeff

Re:Just when you thought firefox was complete...

[wersh]

I would suggest you get involved with the Mozilla project directly if you want to contribute.

Wow, he followed that suggestion fast:

Who is working on Firefox? Currently Ben Goodger (working for the Mozilla Foundation), Brian Ryner (for IBM), Pierre Chanial, Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt, Benjamin Smedberg, Darin Fisher and the wider community contributing to the Mozilla codebase.

From Mozilla Firefox 0.9 (One Tree Hill) Release Notes

I don't know if he's a "programming god," but I seriously doubt he's "some highschool kid with all summer to screw around."

Re:ideas

[hab136]

Accelerator for narrowband connections. Predict which pages the user is more likely to visit next, and start loading them as the user still reads the previous page.

This is the only suggestion so far that really seems worth making the browser larger (and hence, slower).

Link Prefetching is already in Mozilla/Firefox.