Web-based AI programming resources

Question

I am interested in learning some AI algorithms that have practical applications in web applications, for example. search, product recommendations, etc. Obviously, since I am asking this question, I am looking for another entry-level material.

Any useful material on the topic is good - books, blogs, textbooks, whatever. My language of choice is C #, so everything in this would be awesome, but I'm glad to see examples in other languages.

Answer 1

Toby Segaran Programming Collective Intelligence is not an AI book that I guess, but it covers topics that you are interested in (for example, product recommendations, forecasts, price modeling), and as a newbie in this area, I found it quite accessible. He sometimes misses an algorithmic detail in favor of "here, how to use this technique through an existing library"; also the code examples are written in Python, although this is clearly explained and easily translated into C #. It has a strong Web focus because, as the name implies, it processes production data from user-provided content, especially on external sites such as eBay, etc.

Answer 2

I use AForge.NET in several projects. There are fairly simple and fast implementations of genetic algorithms, neural networks, machine learning, etc.

This is an open source project, so I can recommend it as a source structure for any project using AI.

Answer 3

There is an excellent Google Talk series that will cover the basics called Statistical Data Mining . This is the same class of graduates that David Mese gives at Stanford.

Answer 4

In the book Intelligent Internet Algorithms, Charalambos Marmanis and Dmitry Babenko (Manning ed., 2009) provide a primer for such things.
This book covers a fairly wide range of areas where smart can be applied to web applications. Because of this, many topics are obtained with a rather superficial treatment, BUT each chapter contains very important links for further digging. In addition, by code, the working examples found in the book are available in the code.google.com project (sorry, however, mostly java, not C #, as suggested in the question)

I can’t think of other AI resources that are specifically focused on web applications, but in many areas of AI in general, the “smart network” is important, in particular:

• Natural Language Processing
• [some] neural networks
• Machine Science and Classifiers

Answer 5

"Algorithms of the intellectual network" Marmanisa and Babenko. Hands down the best links for what you need (based on your description). Yes, the code is written in Java, but it is so clean and simple that you can probably translate it to the one you need pretty quickly.

In terms of search functionality, it goes beyond indexing and describes, in detail, PageRank, user click improvements and a ranking algorithm based on PageRank for simple documents (ASCII, Word, PDF), which the author called DocRank.

The book also contains perhaps the best, practical coverage of recommendation mechanisms, for example. user-user, item-item, based on content.