Lots of people have pointed out that the Studio Sandi site had broken links in Firefox or on most Macintoshes. We don't know how this happened - we never had problems with the site before, and don't remember changing anything - but we do know how to fix it, and gave the site a mild makeover to boot. So go check it out! It will be changing over the next two weeks to incorporate more art.

-the Centaur

Labels: Edgeworks

... if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it. And one thing I missed is that my favorite breakfast joint, West Egg Cafe, had a showing of art by my favorite artist, Sandi Billingsley, and I didn't even announce it here.

Well, Sandi's show was called Egg of the Phoenix, featuring herself and her friend Donnie Ripner, and if you had seen it, you would have seen things like this:



Sorry you missed it! I guess you'll have to come to California to see her next show.

-the Centaur

Labels: We Call It Living

SO as some of you know I just moved to California to start work with some search engine company that starts with a G. They're fun but kind of skulky so I won't tell you what I'm doing other than to admit, well, no, this isn't really My First Search Engine.



My first job working for a search engine company was as a consultant for the ELITE project, an innovative federated search engine design out of Emory University that was far ahead of its time. The ELITE vision - to enable all sites to both contribute to and benefit from search by making them both publishers and clients in a hierarchical chain of search engines - has still not been realized, resulting in massive inefficiencies and redundancies throughout the web as search engines process and regurgitate what web sites ought to be telling us directly.

The next was as one of the founders of Enkia, an applied artificial intelligence research company that turned its eyes to the web with a search product, Enkion, based (in part) on my thesis research and commercialized by the hard work of a team of sharp guys from Georgia Tech and elsewhere. The Enkion found information relevant to your immediate context, using feedback from what you were doing. We did well, even landing one big contracts before the Internet was pulled out from beneath us. Oh well.

SO I spent some time in industry ... first in police software, then in public health. All that was well and good, but I wanted to get back to research. Back to information retrieval. Back to artificial intelligence. Which led inevitably forward, to some search engine company that starts with a G. Will we be able to make a difference this time? Will we be able to make an advance that will stick?

Hey. Third time's the charm.
-the Centaur

Labels: Webworks