Google’s Project 10 to the 100th–a contest celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary–asked participants in September 2008 to submit ideas that could help change the world. Google is giving the five winners a collective $10 million to fund their projects. However, because there were more than 150,000 submissions, Google is still deliberating between 16 newly-released finalists. Google says there were many similar ideas, so the 16 finalists are idea themes rather than specific submissions. Google has posted the finalists and is asking users to vote on their favorites over the next two weeks. Their input will be considered when the five winners are selected two weeks from now. Once the winners are picked, Google will ask the individuals and teams to put together project proposals. Ideas include new public transportation technology, a news service updated by regular computer users, a genocide tracking system, and a natural crisis monitoring system. “We hoped to capture the imagination of people around the world and offer a way to bring their best ideas to fruition,” the Google Project 10^100 Team wrote in a blog post. “We were overwhelmed by the response. It took more than 3,000 Googlers in offices around the world to review the submissions.”

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The growth of the Web has facilitated a revolution in translation technologies that are primarily based not on language rules but on vast volumes of text translated by humans into different languages. For example, Google’s Translate project can instantaneously translate text among 41 languages. Google research director Peter Norvig’s vision for Google Translate is to make billions of routine pages more accessible to ordinary people. Norvig says that running a newspaper article through Translate allows the readers to get the gist of the article, although he adds that “it will be very rare that you think a native speaker did the translation.” He foresees the inevitable advent of cell phones that translate conversation, and in November Google unveiled an application to search on any topic by talking into an iPhone. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is testing a universal translator that converts spoken English words into native tongues, and vice versa. It is the agency’s goal to equip each U.S. soldier with an affordable iPod-size interpreter via its Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) project. TRANSTAC program manager Mari Maeda wants the devices to be networked so that if one soldier spots an error in translation, all the devices will learn. Carnegie Mellon University’s Alex Waibel says that translation by machines–even highly accurate translation–is complicated by the fact that most people speak broken English, while speaker/listener bias can add to the difficulty of understanding the machine’s translation.

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Physicist Stephen Wolfram says the goal of his free Wolfram Alpha program, which will be available to the public starting in the middle of May, is to “make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine was recently demonstrated at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It is designed to answer questions directly instead of retrieving Web pages in response to queries. Wolfram Alpha employs natural language processing to enable the use of normal, spoken language queries by users, and Wolfram says the program has addressed many of the challenges of interpreting people’s questions. The program computes many answers on the fly by capturing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds. Wolfram says that trillions of pieces of data were selected and managed by a team of experts at Wolfram Research, and that these experts also tweak the information to ensure that it can be read and displayed by the system. He says the system has become proficient at eliminating “linguistic fluff,” or words that are unnecessary for the location and computation of relevant data. This statement disappointed Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is head of the Start natural language processing project. “I believe [Wolfram] is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organizes concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing,” Katz says.

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