Leptonic Systems
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
by lepton
I’m Mike O’Connor, a software developer living on Long Island, New York. My online nick is Lepton, or occasionally Lepton68. My incredibly tiny corporation is named Leptonic Systems Inc. This is the new home of my blog, here at myallo.com. Two products I’m proud of are Myallo Mobile, the exciting iPhone application that tracks the locations of, and your interest in, people, places, things and events in your world from moment to moment, and Myallo Online, the web site that locates and displays web articles that will be of most interest to you, without you having to search for them. Both use my revolutionary neural-network-like technology that literally learns your interest and improves its performance over time.
I like to chat about technology in general, but more specifically, I have fun predicting what Apple Inc. might do next with their products and software. I’ve been an Apple developer for decades, but have no special inside information. A lot of my posts say what Apple “will do”, but are mere speculation and educated guesses. Keep that in mind - just take a look at the older stuff, to see how very, very wrong I can be! But often enough, I think I’m on the right track.
Like a lot of techies, I’m online a lot. If you go to the “Social Me” page, you can follow my activities on some of the social sites I frequent.
I hope you enjoy the blog!
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Sunday, July 1st, 2007
by lepton
The Myallo Online website at myallo.com has gone mobile with a new version of the site optimized for the iPhone at myallo.mobi .
“Myallo Online displays a personalized collection of news and articles from all around the Web, and we thought this would be great to have on the iPhone” said Michael O’Connor, site creator and longtime Apple software developer. “You can scroll through headlines with your finger, tap to read an article, and tap again to go to the article’s source site.”
“With the iPhone in hand, we are continuing to optimize the site to make the experience seamless. While the iPhone handles the myallo.com version of the site just fine, especially over the fast Wi-Fi network, myallo.mobi greatly reduces the amount of data, which keeps it responsive even over the slower cellular network”, said O’Connor. “ While optimized for the iPhone, myallo.mobi works well with any mobile device” he added.
About Myallo Technology: Myallo’s unique patent pending neural-network-like technology literally learns what you like, predicts your interest in articles of text, and ranks them according to your taste. The technology is currently available in the Myallo for Macintosh application, on the Myallo Online website, and is licensable for commercial use.
Myallo Online, at <www.myallo.com> and <www.myallo.mobi>, pre-reads hundreds of sites from across the Internet, predicts your interest in them, and shows you personalized pages filled with up-to-the-moment articles you’ll want to read.
Leptonic Systems Inc. is a corporation dedicated to creating “Software of Interest” for the Macintosh and the Web.
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Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
by lepton
Not too long ago I completed a major project - a standalone Macintosh application called “Myallo” (a name based on a Greek word meaning “brain”) that used neural network techniques in order to do web searches and rank the results much better than any online search engines could.
If a traditional search engine pulls up a million hits on “gardening”, how does it determine which ones to put at the top of the list? It only has a few things it can do; estimate general popularity by counting how many other sites link to it, see how many matches to the word ‘gardening’ are on the page, check the locations of those matches in the on the page and so on.
But if I gave a program more info on what I’m interested in: gardening yes, but I’m more interested in vegetable gardening than flower gardening. Now it can rank these hits according to my own actual interests!
So in the stand-alone program, you first create an Interest Profile based on a hierarchy of topics. The application can then go to a search engine to pick up hits, then scan the contents of some of those pages to see how they match up with all of the user’s interests.
This works well, but the application was restricted to Mac users, and the user had to set up a profile of all his interests manually. So I determined that making this a website could be good. Any computer user could utilize it, it could scan a large number of articles from around the Web for all site members simultaneously, and by using a large set of topics common to all site members, it could be made so a user wouldn’t have to set up a profile, rather they could just give some feedback on the results, and the profile can be gleaned from that.
The new site, “Myallo Online” at www.myallo.com doesn’t have the user doing any searching at all, and they don’t make up an Interest Profile either. The web site does the searching and interest-tracking, all you do is rate how interesting some of the articles are, and since it pre-scanned articles to see what topics they are relevant toward, it can compute how interested you are in those topics, and makes up your Interest Profile automatically. You can still see and adjust the profile directly, but it’s not necessary. If you rate a bunch of articles about vegetable gardening very high, but those on flower gardening only moderately high, it figures out you are quite interested in gardening, but more in vegetable than flower gardening.
Instead of asking for search terms and running them through search engines, the site just goes out and picks up lots of RSS feeds from around the Web and scans them to see how interested you might be in them. Then, when you come to the main page, it shows you the most interesting stuff first.
Basically, you do no searching and no setting up, yet you get a sort of constantly updated newspaper that automatically gets smarter about what kinds of things should be on your customized front page. As you tweak things by setting a slider next to the article to say this story was more (or less) interesting than Myallo Online predicted, it literally learns and improves.
So i think it’s a pretty cool concept. Take a look!
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Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
by lepton
“I think many of us grew up with the dream of waking up in the morning and having your computer screen display a newspaper fully customized to your tastes and interests,” said Michael O’Connor, president of Leptonic Systems Inc. and developer of Myallo Online at www.myallo.com.
O’Connor says his site uses a sophisticated learning process to find interesting Web articles for you, without you having to search around for them. Myallo does the searching, literally learning, based on your feedback on articles you’ve seen previously.
Like some popular social networking and RSS aggregator sites, Myallo (a name based on the English pronunciation of a Greek word meaning “brain”) gathers thousands of articles from Web pages, Blogs, and News sites that cover all kinds of topics, in text, image, and video media. But unlike those sites, it purpose isn’t to rank articles based on popularity, or make you tag or submit your own articles. Instead, it predicts your interest in each article, and puts the ones it thinks will be most interesting to you at the top of the page.
At first, it just shows you random articles. Alongside each one, a slider control appears where you can set your level of interest in the article. After it sees how you’ve rated a few articles, it begins to get the hang of what you like, and is able to put more of the interesting stuff up front. Over time, it gets quite good at showing you articles you’ll want to see.
How does it do it? Myallo maintains an interlinked network of thousands of topics, associated according to conceptual relation to each other, forming a sort of “neural network”. Myallo’s server pre-scans each article to see how relevant it is to each of the topics. Then, when you rate an article by setting the interest slider, the system learns by propagating this information back through the interlinked topics, adjusting your levels in each topic with which the article is associated, plus those topics to which those topics are related, and so on. Knowing your interests in each topic, it is able to predict your interest in new articles.
O’Connor says “Myallo Online literally learns what you like, and customizes itself to your tastes with almost no work on your part. There’s no searching, no relying on what others think is popular. It brings us closer to the dream of an automatically customized, real-time updated, multimedia, hyperlinked newspaper. That’s our goal!”
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