From WWW to SSS: Search, Screen, Select
The World Wide Web is is the greatest invention ever, right? That is until you are tasked to keep up-to-date with new trends on the topics of “deep learning” and “autonomous vehicles” in today’s era. Typing “deep learning” on Google returns 18 million results on a given day. How is anyone supposed to keep up with that? This is where you have to bring out your (absolutely necessary) scanning skills and take the bull by its horns.
Search
Searching is simple if you are smart about it. You can either spend hours scrolling down a Google results page and never be able to narrow down your search on a few sources, or perform your search once your have narrowed down your sources. Both “deep learning” and “autonomous vehicles” can be traceable within categories such as #tech, #interactivemedia or #artificialintelligence. So it would be logical to start your search by looking at resources that incorporated these hashtags.
To make this easier, you can follow publications using a RSS feed such as Feedly. In my account you will see I followed The Verge, MIT Technology and VentureBeat among others. Now, I can scroll down a personalized feed of stories focused on these specific categories.
Screen
Perhaps the most important step in your research process is to establish a system that gets rid of all the junk and just keeps the edible material. This is where we finally understand why placing dozens of hashtags on a Twitter tweet is worth it. Upon searching for “#autonomousvehicles” on Twitter I came across this handy, little tweet with this great statistic. Apparently, autonomous vehicles have quite a prospective outlook for the following years, yet mobile Internet is going nowhere.
It is undeniable how much disruption drones are starting to make as we keep hearing how the masses are eager to learn news from Tesla and Amazon choosing to utilize this technology. Nissan is even using slippers to advertise the auto-parking features of their new 2018 Nissan Leaf.
This got me interested, so I then set up a Google Alert to capture any recent news for self-driving technologies. This alert will notify me by email whenever specific terms appear in a publication on the Internet. Just a few hours later, my alert reported that navigantresearch.com had produced a report with the top 10 vendors in the industry investing on autonomous vehicles. Now I know that I have to keep an eye for GM and Waymo also taking a bite into the cake.
Select
Even after all this hard work to search and screen your information, you’ll likely still have a crap load of information that needs to be organized. This is where Evernote comes into place. Evernote is that little cabinet you use to store all that important information you want to keep safe, organized and easy to retrieve. I created two notebooks and then added the little widget to my browser before sharing my findings with my team members. Whenever I came across a key piece of information I quickly tagged it and saved it into the correct folder. Voilà, safe and sound!
If you had asked me what does “deep learning” mean, I would have guessed that it revolved around diving deep into a learning topic. Boy, was I wrong. Saved in my Evernote folder is an article that has the answers to my questions. Bronwlee (2016) states, “Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks”. We are essentially bringing brain function and machine operation closer together.
In the statement above I highlighted two terms because these will help me narrow my search. If I now tell Google to alert me about this entry “deep learning AND machine learning”, my results will take me closer to my research goal by eliminating irrelevant uses of these terms. Through this system, I also came across an article claiming that “merging AI with human minds could make the workforce smarter” (Croman, 2018). And we can all begin by making our research choices smarter.
The world wide web can be a wonderful resource; but it can hide as scary black hole unless we use the correct tools.
References
Brownlee, J. (2016). What is Deep Learning. Retrieved February 2nd, 2018, from https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-is-deep-learning/
Croman, J. (2018). Merging AI and human minds could make the workforce smarter. Retrieved February 3rd, 2018, from https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/29/merging-ai-and-human-minds-could-make-the-workforce-smarter/
