Nov 30 2018 78 mins 1
What makes Ujjain searchable? When did you last use a thesaurus? Does all search presuppose a structure, & can this structure be implicit? Is labeling necessary; when? How can one say if a text is structured? Are we all unique; but are we all also searchable because we belong to ‘groups’? Are all search problems matching problems? Is all search correlational? Can we search in different ways and find the same thing? Can different documents/texts/languages be coherent vis-à-vis each other? Is the final arbiter eventually the (human) searcher? Are you able to walk into any ‘library’ and use it with ease straightaway? To what extent can one determine (or estimate?) the identity of an unknown decomposed dead body? Does everything revolve around bones? Could our footprint give our face away? Are fingerprints gendered? How do we identify bird species? Why is image (or, even, sound) search difficult? How much can one disguise oneself? Could one search ambiguously and without, precisely, knowing what one is looking for? &, what kinds of searches are likely to remain very difficult in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from forensic anthropology (Dr. Kewal Krishan, Panjab University, Chandigarh), computational linguistics (Prof. Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & information sciences (Prof. Stephen Robertson, City University of London, London). Listen in…
