A Chat with Hakia’s CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan

February 29th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in CEO Views | 8 Comments »



Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Hakia

Dr. Berkan is a nuclear scientist by training with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. After a decade long career in the nuclear field working on projects ranging from nuclear safety to control & diagnostics, Dr. Berkan founded hakia.com, a first-of-its-kind semantic search engine.

ASE: Describe Hakia’s special niche.

Dr. Berkan: hakia’s goal is to offer the shortest time to reach quality information, i.e. relevant, credible, and fresh content.

ASE: What is semantic search and how does it compare to the searches we’re used to?

Dr. Berkan: The underlying principles of the current search engines do not include “understanding”, but instead they rely on keyword retrieval by “approximation” i.e. popularity driven statistics. Hence, when referral statistics is not available, they fail. This happens when (1) the query is a long-tail query, and (2) the pages are dynamic so that there is no time to collect statistics. What does all this mean for the user? On average it takes 11 minutes for a searcher to get to information and half of the searches are abandoned. There is search fatigue.

Semantic search introduces “understanding” where the algorithm analyzes both the Web page and the query to match and rank meaning. To give an example, if you are looking to find out the answer to the question, “What drug treats headache?,” you have to enter various combinations of these words to be able to search all relevant text, such as “drug, treat, headache” ; “drug treat migraine”; “drug help headache”; “Tylenol treat headache”: etc. You get the drift. When responding to the same question, semantic search can deliver a search result that states “aspirin helps migraine” where no words match but the concepts do.

ASE: Please give us some cool sample searches.

Dr. Berkan: hakia Galleries Let you Do 10 searches at Once.
For short, discovery type queries, hakia brings categorized results (galleries) to offer a wide range of aspects of the search term.
Jaguar
Madonna
Breast Cancer
Piano
Cats
hakia offers deep search in verticals.
Try the query, “what causes dizziness,” and you will see that we bring results from selected databases including Wikipedia. When you click on “more+” you can take this query and search within Wikipedia.
We are adding more databases as we speak.
Try your long tail searches and compare us to your favorite search engine. You can do such comparison at the hakia Club.

ASE: What does hakia mean?

Dr. Berkan: The word hakia does not literally mean anything. However, as an international company, we wanted to create a name that works worldwide, is simple to pronounce and does not have any negative connotations.

ASE: Where were you born?

Dr. Berkan: Istanbul, Turkey.

ASE: What did you study in college?

Dr. Berkan: Physics. Once your undergraduate degree is in physics, you are a physicist for life, no matter what else you pretend to be.

ASE: What drew you to search engines specifically?

Dr. Berkan: Information technologies have been my interest area for more than two decades now. Especially fuzzy logic where we design algorithms that can operate in gray-shaded areas like the human brain. For example, if the weather is “bad” I will wear “thick” clothes.. This decision comes from processing “bad” and “thick” in our brains which is quite opposite to how traditional computers operate (either zero or one). If your specialty is fuzzy logic like me, you will be attracted to different forms of “computing with words”. A semantic search engine is just that. So, it was a natural evolutionary-path.

ASE: Who inspires you?

Dr. Berkan: Winston Churchill. I am not sure why, but perhaps he won the second world war just by using words. Language is powerful, and his mastery of it impresses me. His life style also rings a bell (except the whiskey)

ASE: Which languages do you speak?

Dr. Berkan: Two. Turkish version of English, and English version of Turkish. Or I can say zero because none of these languages I speak are the real thing. This is the unavoidable outcome of living half of your life in another culture. I sometimes wonder in which language I dream.

ASE: What are your hobbies?

Dr. Berkan: Genetics research. Sounds strange but true. It is like the life’s longest crossword puzzle.

ASE: Do you like to travel? Where?

Dr. Berkan: I have been in (probably) 46 states and a dozen of countries. I like to go historical places and archeological sites and to imagine the past. That’s if I find time.

ASE: Anything else you’d like to share?

Dr. Berkan: Semantic technologies will change the way we interact with computers. This is an undisputed reality of the future. I would ask people to give a try to hakia, if not for solving their tough search problems, then perhaps just to be part of something new and to be able to say one day “I was one of the first users, I was there when it happened.”

ASE: Thanks for joining us, Dr. Berkan. Best of luck with hakia!

Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.

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A Look at Image Search Engine NetVue

February 29th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Reviews | No Comments »


Netvue allows users to search the internet for graphics, clipart, and photos. Netvue’s slide show presentation of results allows users to see the images in full size.

While other image search sites restrict you to looking at a page of tiny thumbnails, Netvue simply retrieves the originating image itself. Other image search engines are fallible because they show thumbnails for content which may be inaccessible to you. Quite often, a user spends their time looking at “Page Not Found” errors and is forced to go ‘back’ and try their luck with clicking another thumbnail. Netvue is free of these hassles because it retrieves the full-sized image itself, skipping those that no longer exist.

The idea for an image search slide show began in 2003 with a program called Netvue Image Finder. It was quite popular and reached some small fame in international publications. The original application was written in Visual Basic .NET™ and therefore was not compatible across operating systems. Now they’re employing the same idea, but putting it in a web page and making it compatible with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems. Now everyone can enjoy their image search technology without installing any separate software.

The Star Challenge 2008

February 29th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News | No Comments »

The Star challenge is a race to build the next-generation of multi-media search engines. A US$100,000 cash prize awaits the winners of this world-class competition. The objective of the search challenge is to encourage participation from international teams to develop new, interesting and practical search techniques.

The voice search challenge consists of three subtasks, as outlined below:

1. Search by IPA
The query is given in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the task is to retrieve all segments that contain the query IPA sequence regardless of its spoken languages;
2. Search by example
The query is an utterance spoken by different speakers, the task is to retrieve all segments that contain the query word/phrase/sentence regardless of its spoken languages;
3. Search for recurrent voice segments In the voice archive, certain word/phrase/sentences are repeated more than once in the content. The task is to extract all recurrent segments which are at least 15 seconds in length. No query is given in this case. The number of unique recurrent segments for each document is given.

The video search challenge consists of three subtasks, as outlined below:

1. Search by (Single) Query Image
The query is provided in the form of a single image. The task is to retrieve all visually similar segments. Note that the similarity is at the perceptual level. That is, the expected results should contain video segments that contain images that look similar to the query image, as opposed to the video content being semantically similar. There are 30 query image types.
2. Search by Video Shot
The query is a short video shot (<10sec). The task is to retrieve video shots that are perceptually similar to the query video clip. Note that compared to VT1, there is now additional motion information in the query video shot and the matching criteria should also take into consideration similarity in the motion trajectory. There are 30 query shot types.
3. Object/Scene Categorization
A list of object/scene classes will be defined. For each class, a set of images/videos depicting the objects/scenes will be provided. The participants are expected to develop a model of the class by visually learning on the sample images/video. Then, given a new, unseen test set of images/video the task is to categorize the test set into the classes. Note that the set of test queries will necessarily be a very large set in the order of 10K queries. Also, about 10% of these queries will not belong to any of the object/ scene classes, and the desired output result is a “Reject” class. There are 30 object/scene classes.

For more details, get the White Paper here: The Star Challenge 2008

Or read this good summary from the Get Updated blog.

A global competition for evolving next generation search engine:

Singapore’s A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) has received an overwhelming response to its global competition with an idea of conceiving technologies for a rich, dynamic media search engine. The new search engine would be smart enough for identifying text, audio & video containing any word – even if that particular word, or relevant search term, hasn’t been tagged yet in the internet material. Millions of online search engine users across the globe stand to benefit from such advanced technologies, which will help them in navigating the abundant material on the Internet.

Termed ‘The Star Challenge 2008’, this eight-month contest has a prize of USD100,000. The Star Challenge 2008 is open to people all over the world. The top software engineers, researchers and amateur search media enthusiasts taking part in it have embarked on an enchanting discovery of the new search technology. The contest is part of the Fusionopolis, Singapore’s science and technology powerhouse, which looks to shape or alter the lifestyles & economy of the future.

Slated to be held in October 2008, Fusionopolis will attract over 1500 talented people from a diverse scientific domains integrating their amazing capabilities for jointly creating the complex technologies. Developing such advanced search capabilities will radically alter the way individuals interact with large amount of multi-media information, thus creating seamless, accessible platforms across different online communities.