A collaborative filtering system would allow software agents to take into account the opinions of large numbers of people – friends, co-workers, professional opinion leaders and members of other communities – to determine the relevancy of new documents to the agents’ owners. By observing correlations among peoples’ opinions, such agents are expected to offer predictive data without having to solve the much more difficult problems associated with understanding causality or why a particular new document, such as a news report, might be interesting to the agent’s owner.
Predictor: Arnett, Nick
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 online essay “Massively Parallel Wetware,” Nick Arnett writes:”One of the first projects likely to be tackled by Internet users on a massively parallel basis is the evaluation of newly available documents, an approach dubbed ‘social filtering’ and ‘collaborative filtering’ by its proponents. ”A collaborative filtering system would allow software agents to take into account the opinions of large numbers of people – friends, co-workers, professional opinion leaders and members of other communities – to determine the relevancy of new documents to the agents’ owners. By observing correlations among peoples’ opinions, such agents are expected to offer predictive data without having to solve the much more difficult problems associated with understanding causality or why a particular new document, such as a news report, might be interesting to the agent’s owner.”
Biography:Nick Arnett was president of Multimedia Computing Corp., the leading market research and consulting firm tracking multimedia technologies and markets, from 1988 through August of 1994. He later became the World-Wide Web product manager at Verity Inc. Earlier in the 1980s, he was a journalist with publications including InfoWorld and American City Business Journals. He was author of “The Internet and the Anti-net: Two Public Internetworks are Better than One.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI
Name of publication: Essay: Massively Parallel Wetware
Title, headline, chapter name: The Internet as an Agentof Creative Collision
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.mccmedia.com/html/wetware.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Beckett, Angela