Two days ago I arrived in Erfurt in order to visit the federal competition young scientists (Jugend Forscht). I reported about the project typology by Till Speicher and Paul Wagner which I supervised over the last half year and which already won many awards.
Saturday night they have already won a special award donated by the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik this award has the title “special award for a contribution which demonstrates particularly the usefulness of computer science for Society.” (Sonderpreis fuer eine Arbeit, die in besonderer Art und Weise den Nutzen der Informatik verdeutlicht.) This award was connected with 1500 Euro in cash!
Yesterday there was the final award ceremony. I was quite excited to see how the hard work that Till and Paul put into their research project would be evaluated by the juryman. Out of 457 submissions with a tough competition the top5 projects have been awared. Till and Paul came in 4th and will now be allowed to visit the German chancelor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
With the use of spreading activation Typology is able to make precise predictions of what you gonna type next on your smartphone. It outperforms the current scientific standards (language models) by more than 100% and has a precision of 67%!
A demo of the project can be found at www.typology.de
The android App of this system is available in the appstore. It is currently only available for German text and is beta. But the source code is open and we are happy for anybody who wants to contribute can check out the code. A mailinglist will be set up soon. But anyone who is interested can already drop a short message at mail@typology.de and will be added to the mailinglist as soon as it is established.
You can also look at the documentation which will soon be available in english. Alternatively you commit bugs and request features in our bug tracker
I am currently trying to improve the data structures and the data base design in order to make retrieval of suggestions faster and decrease the calculation power of our web server. If you have expertise in top – k aggregation joins in combination with prefix filtering drop me a line and we can discuss about this issue!