Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery. We're on track to have a basic automated content classification (tagging) mechanism in early 2007, using more or less "cookbook" naive bayes methods. Beyond that we see lots of interesting extensions and problems that can only be tackled with far more statistical modeling expertise than we have. Conversely, we expect the system as it gets deployed to produce a great deal of user tagging data for various content. So we'd also like to work with statistical research projects that can use that data. Of course this raises privacy issues, but we will try to deploy the system under terms that will give researchers access to as much data as possible.
We're seeking part time or full time contractors to build statistical modeling components for an online content filtering service. We are funded by a foundation and can pay competitive consulting rates. As a distributed, web coordinated development team, we have no geographical constraints and already have a non-US developer. Since we're developing open source software, developers who work for us will be able to use the code we create in other environments. Please read our job description.
We have chosen to work first on collaborative moderation and tagging.
This has shown itself to be a very powerful set of ideas, but even users of sites
that depend heavily on collaborative moderation, such as Slashdot, are relatively
unsatisfied with the current state of the art. We have some ideas that we think
can help such sites work significantly better. —Detailed
discussion of collaborative moderation.
Project updates: Peerworks' tagging project updates can be found in the Peerworks blog. Read the latest update on the status of our tagging project, along with detailed information about our project's goals and plans.