# Transparent Text Symposium: Day 2 > Given how intense yesterday was at the Transparent Text symposium, I couldn’t imagine that today would match it. But it did! The morning kicked off with a series of 18 lightning talks in 90 minutes – that was 5 minutes… > URL: https://www.smartdatacollective.com/21516/ > Last modified: 2009-09-23T05:30:00+00:00 Given how intense [yesterday](http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/09/21/transparent-text-symposium-day-1/) was at the Transparent Text symposium, I couldn’t imagine that today would match it. But it did! The morning kicked off with a series of 18 lightning talks in 90 minutes – that was 5 minutes apiece, with a ruthless [gong](http://twitpic.com/ip345) for anyone who went overtime. The presentations were consistently intense, and I had the misfortune to follow one of the best talks – a very passionate presentation about crowd-sourced translation by IBM’s Uyi Stewart. Other notable presenters included design ninja [Alexis Lloyd](http://www.alexislloyd.com/) from the New York Times R&D Lab, Karrie Karahalios from the University of Illinois talking about the experimental [WeMeddle](http://wemeddle.com/) Twitter client,  MIT Media Lab professor and Berkman Fellow [Judith Donath](http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/) showing a stunning gallery of “data portraits,” and Dragon Systems co-founder [Janet Baker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking#History) explaining how the brain recognizes speech – with an skull as a prop! The session was incredible, and I hope other conferences adopt this model. * After the coffee break, there was a session on Text Analysis in the Large, featuring [Dan Gruhl](http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/dgruhl/) (IBM), [Gary King](http://gking.harvard.edu/) (Harvard), and [David Ferrucci](http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/26/technology/ibm_jeopardy_watson_computer/?postversion=2009062616) (IBM). Dan Gruhl talked about web-scale text analysis–a topic up his alley, considering his role in architecting the IBM [WebFountain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_WebFountain) project. Gary King gave a fascinating talk about using ensemble methods to improve on existing clustering methods – the idea is to synthesize a collection of derived clusterings and place them in an explorable metric space. You can read the full paper [here](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/discov.pdf). But the winner for this session was definitely David Ferrucci, who described the work IBM Research is doing to develop a [machine Jeopardy player](http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/04/27/who-wants-to-play-jeopardy/). He spent much of the talk building a case for the difficulty of the problem – and then delivered the punchline: In less then three years of research, they’ve developed a machine player whose performance is comparable to that of jeopardy winners. Hopefully they’ll be competing on live television by next year! #### More Read [](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/5-ways-big-data-making-splash-insurance-industry/) [5 Ways Big Data Is Making a Splash in the Insurance Industry](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/5-ways-big-data-making-splash-insurance-industry/) * [What Really Motivates Us? Insights for your Tech Team](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/what-really-motivates-us-insights-your-tech-team/) ** [Nexidia Brings Compliance and Process Management to Interaction Analytics](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/nexidia-brings-compliance-and-process-management-interaction-analytics/) ** [Regulated Cloud Data: A Day in the Life](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/regulated-cloud-data-day-life/) ** [An Inconvenient Truth: Crowd-Sourced Approaches to Statistical Analysis in Science – and what this means for you](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/inconvenient-truth/) After lunch, there was a session on Investigation, featuring [MAPLight](http://maplight.org/) Research Director [Emily Calhoun](http://maplight.org/staff), UC Berkeley law professor [Kevin Quinn](http://www.law.berkeley.edu/kevinmquinn.htm), and Guardian news editor [Simon Rogers](http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/simonrogers). Emily Calhoun showed how MAPLight illuminates the connections between money and politics – it was great seeing data to correlate who supports and opposes bills with the associated campaign contributions from interest groups. Kevin Quinn’s presentation was a bit more technical, but his [work](http://www.law.berkeley.edu/5957.htm) reminds me a lot of Miles Efron’s work on [estimating political orientation in web documents](http://people.lis.illinois.edu/%7Emefron/papers/efron-libmedia.pdf) – but Quinn’s work is more general and goes beyond co-citation analysis to analyze the actual language of the documents. Great application of topic modeling! But my favorite presentation in this session was the one from Simon Rogers: he told the story of how the Guardian successfully crowd-sourced a project to [investigate the expenses of UK Parliament members](http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/). The final session was a panel discussion about how visualization might elevate or advance the debate over health care policy. The panelists were [Ben Fry](http://benfry.com/), [Marti Hearst](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Ehearst/), [Gary King](http://gking.harvard.edu/), and [Simon Rogers](http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/simonrogers); [Fernanda Vi](http://fernandaviegas.com/)[é](http://fernandaviegas.com/)[gas](http://fernandaviegas.com/) and [Martin Wattenberg](http://www.bewitched.com/) moderated. Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment from the panel was pessimism that anything we could do might actually lead to improved outcomes. Nonetheless, it’s clear that a lot of people are going to try. Again, I want to thank Fernanda, Martin, [Irene Greif](http://domino.watson.ibm.com/cambridge/research.nsf/pages/irene_greif.html), and everyone at IBM for organizing this fantastic event – and for inviting me to attend! I am impressed that anyone could manage to assemble such an impressive set of speakers in one place, and I appreciate the effort that everyone put into making the past two days so worthwhile. I look forward to seeing the videos available online, and I hope those who weren’t able to attend take the opportunity to watch some of them. I also encourage you to check out the live Twitter stream at [#tt09](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23tt09) while it’s still available.