Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140115 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 397 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781933988313
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

Customer Reviews

Adding Smartness made easy in your Enterprise Application by "Collective Intelligence in Action"
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.

A must for all Web engineers
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.

A great book!
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.