This presentation is about a project I and Samuel Håkansson did for ISSIP while we were interns at IBM Research Almaden. Hopefully there will be more presentations with updates in the future.

1. Making a company searcher
or how two Swedes conquered the west

2. About us…

3. In common
• College freshmen
• Likes programming
• From Sweden

4. • 19 years old
• Makes electronic music
Samuel

5. • 18 years old
• Plays the guitar
Sebastian

6. What have we done whilst being here?

7. So far, we’ve written a program in
Python…

8. Its purpouse is to help ISSIP in the
search for new members…

9. It does so by searching the list for the company the
user want to search for, and writes to a local list...

10. The list contains basic information, such as
current rank, and some other numbers.

11. The idea for it sprung from the mind of
Jim Spohrer, our mentor…

12. We had a meeting, brainstorming about
functionality and elaborating the idea.

13. Then we got to work…

14. Writing lines of codes, and trying to
figure out why it wasn’t working…

15. After a while we decided to split the
work, amplifying the effectivity…

16. Which it did. We figured out the
problems much faster…

17. And almost two weeks after we started, we
had a functional program.

18. But how does it work?

19. Let’s explain the program without
complex words…

20. It starts by asking the user for a
company name…
Program UserWhich company?
User input

21. Then it checks if the company is on the
Forbes Global 2000 list…
Program Company on list? Forbes.com
Yes

22. If it’s a match, the program extracts
the useful data…
Program Forbes.comInformation

23. After that, it checks the company’s wikipedia page and
extracts the summary and all the links in the
summary…
Program
Give me the
summary and links
Wikipedia.org
Summary
and links

24. Then, it opens all the links from the
summary and extracts their summaries…
Program
Give me the
summary
Wikipedia.org
Give me the
summary
Give me the
summary
Give me the
summaryGive me the
summary
Give me the
summary
Summaries

25. Finally it writes everything all to a local *.txt, where * is
the company’s name as it is written on forbes.com.
Program *.txt computer

26. Here’s a complete visualization of the
process.
What company
do you want to
search for?
User Input
Is it on the
Forbes Global
2000 list?
Yes
No
Exit
Check Wikipedia
Extract summary and
links Open links and extract
summary
Extract information
Write to *.txt file
Exit

27. What about the future of the
program?

28. The future holds a lot of bug-fixing,
but also additional features…

29. Like adding a way for the program to read text files
using Natural Language Processing to further enhance
the capability…

30. We’re also planning features that makes it easier
for people to use…

31. Such as adding speech-to-text and text-to-
speech, and porting it to mobile devices…

32. But before that, we’ll add a pretty user
interface, to make it easier to use…

33. When we’ve done all that we’ll maybe even expand it
to not search only Wikipedia and Forbes, but all of the
web.

34. The end
By Sebastian Grunditz and Samuel Håkansson