PhysOrg.com reports on an effort by Israeli researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to, “give computers encyclopedic knowledge of the world to help them “think smarter,” making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does. The new method will help computers filter e-mail spam, perform Web searches and even conduct intelligence gathering at more sophisticated levels than current programs.” The researchers have developed a program which uses data from Wikipedia’s ~1 million english language articles as “background information” to help computers understand the context of words and fragments of text entered into a search, for example.