Most of my interview is going to be straightforward, but I'd love to throw at least one tech Q in somewhere.
- if they're leveraging any new algorithms (categorical, semantic, or otherwise) and hopefully he could briefly explain the new ideas involved.
- any shifts in research and development regarding semantic search algorithms, semantic web and how Wolfram|Alpha plans to contribute to these trends.
- specific types of research information (DNA, relevant research information) and use cases for businesses (i find that the service is novel, but not particularly useful to businesses)
- how frequent they will be updating the existing data, and how frequenty they will be adding data
- shout out to U of I?
btw - can you guys focus more on the startups instead of how-to's? i miss the days when sites actually reported on new startups and not about gossip or top 10 lists.
Wolfram|Alpha works by way of a new search paradigm: rather than simple data-mining it seeks to construct /new/ information based on a query. What do you foresee as the social consequences of a computational search engine?
Alpha definitely does some interesting things, but all the material I've seen from them is either complete fluff (we don't just index, we compute knowledge) or not anywhere near production ready (natural language processing). Also the part about having reviewed information becomes completely useless when they refuse to cite where specific information came from and instead cite a cloud of fuzzy sources.
My hunch is that his approach to knowledge engineering doesn't scale very well in terms of breadth and depth of knowledge and its rate of change. Not even considering very far reaching inferencing capabilities. Of course it's difficult to know that without knowing how exactly he does it. It's just a hunch.