1. Heroku + Gradle + Graffiti + AI 2. ? 3. Profit!

Very nice. James Ward came to evangelize Heroku at our local usergroup. Thanks, James! Armed with a better understanding of Heroku, I set out to provide a simple web-service on heroku while at the usergroup post-talk bar visit. So, here it is:

GenderService! Okay. It's a dubious name, but it does something useful. You can hit the webservice and provide a name and it will infer the gender for you. You can make up a name that doesn't even exist and it will do a reasonable job of determining the gender. Give it a shot!

Here are some that I tried: (if you browser behaves strangely, it may be detecting that it's JSON and trying to be helpful)

• /resolve?name=bob
• /resolve?name=pieter
• /resolve?name=henryetta
• /resolve?name=san+juilliana
• /resolve?name=pezra

In case you're curious, I'm using ngramms, laplace smoothing, and a smallish labelled dataset to estimate male/female probabilities for a name. If that's interesting to you, and you're local to PDX, consider joining pdxai on googlegroups.

Edit: I've added a confidence to the response. Clearly it's certain that I'm female: {"name":"merlyn","male":false,"confidence":0.995}