Modeling Surprise

From a Technology Review article on 10 emerging technologies for 2008:

http://www.technology...

Intelligence is for prediction: so is SmartPhlow. An excerpt:
"Although none of the technologies involved in SmartPhlow is entirely new, notes Daphne Koller, a probabilistic-modeling and machine-learning expert at Stanford University, their combination and application are unusual. "There has been a fair amount of work on anomaly detectio­n in large data sets to detect things like credit card fraud or bio­terrorism," she says. But that work emphasizes the detection of present anomalies, she says, not the prediction of events that may occur in the near future. Additionally, most predictive model­s dis­regard statistical outliers; H­orvitz's specifically tracks them. The thing that makes his approach unique, though, is his focus on the human factor, Koller says: "He's explicitly trying to model the human cognitive process."