SolveIT: Fancy Math
June 5, 2008
Several years ago I found myself in a meeting. I was paid to attend a session in North Carolina; otherwise, I wouldn’t go to Charlotte. The city is too sophisticated for this Kentuckian.
In the meeting, a soft-spoken mathematician, his son, a couple of cousins, and maybe an uncle explained sparse sets, assigning probabilities to boundaries, and ant algorithms. As I struggled to dredge definitions about these concepts from my admittedly poor memory, the soft-spoken mathematician asked me a word problem. A waiter had 12 customers and ended up with an extra dollar. Why? I just sat there and looked my normal stupid self.
Later, he explained that his inspiration was a mathematician named Stanis?aw Le?niewski. Okay, early 20th century wizard. That was the end of my knowledge. Puzzles are the key to learning math he told me. In his spare time, this fellow has set up a Web site to make this concept more widely known. You can see it here.
I had no clue who these fellows were, but I was getting paid to listen so I listened.
A Super Guru: Who Says He’s Just a Regular Guy
The super guru is a fellow named Zbigniew Michalewicz, a highly regarded mathematician everywhere except in Harrod’s Creek. The relatives were also mathematicians. The crowd could finish one another’s sentences and equations. Math, it turns out, is something that runs in the Michalewicz family and has for decades.
Dr. Michalewicz is an expert in generic algorithms and data structures. When added together, the mathematical recipe yield evolution programs. You can read more about this approach to some tough data problems in Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs, published by Springer-Verlag ISBN: 3-540-60676-9. No, your local book store won’t stock it. Amazon does.
The group sold its US enterprise and Dr. Michalewicz and a family member or two moved to Australia.
After losing track of these fellows, I learned that Dr. Michalewicz, his son, and a handful of mathematical gurus set up shop as SolveIT Software. Click here to navigate to the company’s Web site.
The new company uses new math to solve old problems. The company is in the business of delivering solutions that deliver “adaptive business intelligence”. The company’s range of technology is remarkable and it may be meaningless to you unless you took a couple of advanced math classes; for example:
- Agent-based systems
- Ant systems (my favorite)
- Evolutionary strategies
- Evolutionary programming
- Fuzzy systems
- Genetic algorithms
- Neural networks
- Rough sets (great stuff!)
- Swarm intelligence
- Simulated annealing (does with math to data what oil quenching does to low-grade steel)
- Tabu search (I have no clue what this numerical method yields).
You can figure out most of these notions by dipping into Peter Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence or E. J Borowski’s and J. M. Borwein’s Web-Linked Dictionary Mathematics. (Note: there is a subtle difference between the Norvig approach and the Michalewicz method. Google uses humans. Humans play an optional role in the Michalewicz recipes. No big deal, but you can explore the differences yourself by reading each guru’s text book.)
A Case Example
Equations are not likely to raise my Google ranking. Let me describe an outcome of Dr. Michalewicz’s skills.
Here’s the set up. You are Ford, Honda, or Toyota. Each week you get a couple of thousand lease cars back. You want to sell the cars quickly. You want to minimize how much you have to spend to truck these white elephants to a location where a particular model will sell. Pink convertibles don’t fly in Nome, Alaska, but are hot items in Scottsdale, Arizona. Your resale team would rather go to a bowling convention that work Excel models.
You want to maximize return, minimize expenses, and get the decisions out of your resale team’s “instinct” and into something fungible like a SolveIT solution.
SolveIT’s analysts beaver their way through the data, the work flow, and the exogenous factors that you and your resale team did not consider. The company builds from its mathematical Lego blocks, a computerized system that prints out a map and report telling your sales team where to ship which car.
You use the SolveIT system for a couple of months, and you notice that your expenses go down and your net goes up. SolveIT removed the guess work and let the “fancy math” do the heavy lifting. When I spoke with the company several years ago, one beta client was generating cash positives in six figures within six weeks.
Like most sophisticated companies run by serious math geeks, there’s not much information available on the company’s Web site. I did dig through my files, and I found an example of the company’s outputs. Keep in mind that this diagram is probably out of date, but it will give you a flavor of what the SolveIT operation does.
The system “shows” the resale team where certain cars will sell. Then the system prints out a report that says, “Send the pink convertible to Chicago and the truck to Paducah.” The math does the heavy lifting. The resale team looks at simple diagrams. The math remains safely hidden away.
Observations
SolveIT is one of a handful of companies pushing the envelope in analytics. If you want to tap into some serious math, contact this company. I have one tip. Don’t ask, “How does this work?” The explanation requires a solid foundation if traditional mathematics and post-doctoral work in set theory. How complicated is the math. I found in my files one example which I had to scan and convert to an image. I kept it as a reminder of how little I know about the next big things in mathematics; for example, in my notes I had this pair of statements:
If these statements speak to you, then you can dig more deeply into the SolveIT systems and methods.
Based on my personal experience with Dr. Michalewicz, he’s a capable mathematical thinker. For more about his company’s approach to problem solving, you will find useful How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics, also by Springer Verlag. You can get a copy here.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2008
Google: No Game Changer … Just Yet
June 5, 2008
Imagine my surprise when Computerworld picked up on information in my April 2008 Gilbane Group study, Beyond Search. You can read the Computerworld story here. (Hurry. Computerworld content can be hard to find if you dally. I won’t try to summarize the article nor will I comment on it beyond one modest observation.)
The GOOG bought Transformic. Transformic has some very prescient innovations. These are not new. In fact, the core insights date from the early 1990s. With the Google plumbing in place, XML and semi structured content processing in the bag, Google has to look beyond today. Never mind that Google’s competitors don’t have a clue what Google does on a day-to-day operational basis. The GOOG is the future.
The killer comment in the nice article by Chris Kanaracus is:
Inside an enterprise, and maybe unlike the Internet, you can know a lot about a user,” such as who they report to, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google’s enterprise division. “There’s a lot of empirical information you can derive. All of that can be used to create a very, very rich profile about the user, which can then be used to create a really rich search experience.” Do not expect Google to suddenly bring a game-changing product to market, according to Glotzbach. “The model is not these kind of big-bang approaches where we work for multiple years and then roll something out. In terms of what we do in enterprise search, you’ll see a constant flow, as opposed to one sort of big bang — here’s a whole new thing,” he said.
Mr. Glotzbach was on a panel billed as a debate late last year. Ah, he’s a canny wordsmith that wizard be.
Mr. Glotzbach’s comment comes from the belly of a company planning to start building housing in the year 2013 on prime NASA real estate in Mountain View, Calif.
Time, to Google, means right now and really fast. Time also means the drip drip of incremental functions slipstreamed in apparently meaningless droplets. The pace will be Googley slow. You will need a time lapse camera to note the changes.
Should IBM, Oracle, and other giants in data management worry? Nope, executives at the companies told me that their knowledge of Google is rich, deep, and wide. I do have a nifty briefing about the Transformic technology. Interested? Write me at sa at arnoldit dot com.
A chipper quack to Computerworld for the reference to my new study.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
More Google Transparency… A Googley Transparency
June 5, 2008
I loathe search engine optimization, the folks who sell snake oil to hapless souls desperate for traffic, and the media for covering this alleged discipline. But I’m 64 and schooled in Model T notions like consistent content, meaningful indexing, and regular additions to the information stock pile.
For the 99 percent of the people who love SEO, you will want to read this Googley post from super Googler Matt Cutts. He provides some candor, some new information, and some spin. The full post is here. The Web log post is “Improved SEO documentation galore!”
The Googler writes:
Google just added a bunch of nice documentation in various places. We even did it in official places — much better than doing it on my personal blog.
Then in the comments, a person identifying himself / herself as “James” cut right through the Googzilla’s clouds of steam. “James” wrote:
What about a place a webmaster can go to communicate with Google about said penalties or changes? Check out webmaster central. It’s littered with webmasters who had great organic traffic one day.. and none the next. This has got to be the most frustrating thing for webmasters trying to do the right thing and follow all Google’s guidelines
Not long ago, a journalist with a nationally-syndicated column called me. The parent company had received some legal instruction to remove a certain article from the Google index. Why this person called me I don’t know. The caller–an ace reporter, mind you–could find the name, email, or phone number of a person at Google to discuss this issue. In fact, the ace reporter told me, “I called a dozen numbers. No one calls back.”
So that’s standard Googley procedure for people who aren’t Googley. The GOOG wants to vaporize Harrod’s Creek geese like me, and it has ignored my requests for comments, queries, and input for several years. But I do keep a collection of super-Googlers on my trusty Treo 650. I was a good person. I provided the ace reporter with some names of people who, in theory, might recall my name much in the way I remember that my barber’s name.
Well, one of my magic Googley names worked. The GOOG listened and allowed the ace reporter to dodge a coronary.
But until the average goose can access lines of communication that work, I’m skeptical. When I read a reassuring statement, I’m inclined to put my head under my wing. Here’s a snippet from Mr. Cutts’ essay:
We do appreciate getting suggestions and feedback from users, webmasters, and SEOs. I’m especially interested when people want to report spam, including paid text links….No search engine is perfect, and everyone will have different opinions about what a search engine should focus on. But I appreciate the feedback that we get from users, webmasters, and SEOs. I know that the suggestions that we get help to make Google a better search engine.
I’m not ready to believe that James’ rejoinder is not dead on and completely transparent. Does the GOOG talk to you? Can you get a Googler on the phone? Does your Google engineer call you back to explain why your Web site has been put in purgatory? Let me know in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Ontos: a Text Processing Company, Not a Weapon
June 5, 2008
In a conference call yesterday (June 4, 2008), someone mentioned “Ontos”. Another person asked, “What’s an Ontos?” I answered, “An anti-tank vehicle” What I remembered about the Ontos is that it was a tank loaded down with so many weapons I a turtle was speedier. Big laugh. Ontos is a company engaged in text and content processing with a product called ObjectSpark. To fill in the void in my knowledge, I navigated to the GOOG, plugged in “Ontos” and found a link to a 2001 article in Intelligent Enterprise, a very good Web site now that the print magazine has been put out to pasture. You can read the description here.
The company’s English language Web site is at www.ontos.com. The product line up no longer relies on the ObjectSpark name. You can license:
- OntosMiner, which “analyzes natural language text. It recognizes objects and their relations and adds them as annotations to the related text parts. The technology is based on semantic rules, i.e. NLP (Natural Language Processing). It uses ontologies to define the area of interest.”
- LightOntos for Workgroups, which “helps to organize and search information and documents. It allows the user to process and annotate PDF, Word, RTF, Text or HTML files using OntosMiner.”
- Ontos SOA, which “realizes the whole cycle of semantic-syntactical processing, management and analysis of unstructured information located in the Internet and large corporative data banks.”
- TAIS Ontos, which is “created as an Application Package using ORACLE technologies and Java. The system uses a semantic designed for building and maintaining object oriented databases. Additional components are effective engines for the search of explicit and hidden relations between objects. A visualization environment (interface) supports the analysts when analyzing a domain of interest. The product is adapted for the segment of law enforcing structures and attributed to the class of anti-criminal analytical systems”
The display of tagged text uses color to identify specific elements. When I saw this display, it reminded me to the output from Inxight Software’s text processing system.
The company’s Russian partner–ZAO AviComp Services–participated in the recent German technical extravaganza, CEBIT 2008.
You will find a handful of white papers on the Ontos Web site. I found “Ontos Solutions for the Semantic Web” quite interesting and informative. You can download it here.
I wasn’t able to locate any pricing or licensing information. If you have some of these data points, please, use the comment form below this essay to share the information with other readers. My email to the company went unanswered.
Based on my clicking through the Web site, you might want to take a look at this system. The white papers and technical descriptions use the buzz words that other vendors bandy about. The one drawback to a system that lacks a high profile in the US is this question, “Does the system meet US security guidelines?” My hunch is that the system is industrial strength; otherwise, the Brussels customer would not have signed a deal to use the Ontos technology.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
Blekko: More Dough, Same Splash Page
June 5, 2008
In a phone call today, a 20-something complained about my failure to write about Blekko. I said I would check my files. There’s not much information about this new search engine. The few facts in my files peg the company to Rich Skrenta. He was involved in a news site called Topix.net that I used a couple of years ago and then dropped from my “A” list. (More about this above my signature block.)
His new company attracted some Silicon Valley incredible hulks with money; for example, Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Ning, and several other high profile ventures).
The major news, which I overlooked until today, is that the company has raised about $3 million. Among the backers are Baseline Ventures and some ex-Googlers (a better term is Xoogler, which some Googlers prefer). This information came from the very useful Web log PaidContent.org here. TechCrunch does it usual very good job of providing the basics with some intriguing color here.
The Blekko Web site here features a modest amount of information. There’s a link for the press and one for jobs. Oh, the Web site has a snapshot that puts my data bunny to shame. My hunch is that the whimsical will annoy certain tight collar MBAs, but I like the picture.
This is either a “blekko” or a very interesting programmer from MIT or CalTech.
I haven’t been given a demo. I did hear that the company will be using “advanced algorithms” and “semantic technology”. I’m not sure what this means exactly, but I have added Blekko.com to my watch list.
Attensity: Packaging Text Processing for Higher Value Applications
June 5, 2008
Enterprise search is like a poinsettia three weeks after the holidays. The form of the lovely plant remains, but the color is gone. Poinsettia look unhealthy, and my mother callously tossed them in the trash.
Attensity has been working to take its core content processing technology and apply it to problems where search-and-retrieval won’t work or have already failed. With a modest cash infusion from the CIA’s not-so-secret venture arm, Attensity refined its “deep extraction” technology and looked for big problems remained unresolved by other vendors.
For example, customer support is a sore spot. It’s expensive. It’s hard to manage because turnover often soars to 50 to 60 percent per year. Automation remains blind to import clues in a customer email or voice call. Many systems can figure out that “I’m going to sue you” is a negative message. But most don’t know what 🙁 means.
Attensity has taken its rocket science technology and created MarketVoice. According to Insurance Technology, a CMP Publication, and created:
a new solution enabling insurers to track, analyze and act on customer conversations in blogs, Web forums, product review comments, and other forms of online customer exchanges
Please, read the original story by Kristi Cattafi here. Do this quickly. CMP, like other traditional publishers, takes some interesting angles on its own search and retrieval system. Sometimes it is very good. Other times, it is a bit disappointing.
MarketVoice uses the deep extraction technology, but the system figures out where problems may be warming to a boiling point. Attensity has made its system easier to set up than some of the others that claim to do similar functions. You may be familiar with ClearForest, now part of Reuters, which is now part of Thomson, a multi-national professional information company. Attensity’s appraoch strikes me as easier to set up and more nimble. Your perception may differ from mine, but I think Attensity’s MarketVoice is a wake up call to vendors of text processing systems that are designed to do one function, leaving the licensee to the job of integrating the system’s outputs. Attensity delivers a product. Others deliver programming tool kits.
The company has also swizzled its deep extraction invention to process content on Web logs. Web log content is often hard to figure out. Some comments are declarative. Some are tongue in cheek. Others are spoofs; for example, today I received a comment from a person claiming to be a Googler. Google does not interact directly with me. This is an “old” Google-conceived rule. This spoofer tipped his hand by contacting me directly. That type of context is beyond the ken of text processing systems. Not even Attensity can figure out the sub text for the alleged Google post and my remarks in this paragraph.
Most text processing systems can’t figure out the context of the information, so indexing these primary and secondary components of an article and figuring out what the link means is not trivial. Atensity’s system grinds through text on a Web log and generates reports about customer sentiment. Attensity’s approach is useful, and it works quite well. You can read more about this system here. If the link 404s, just navigate to www.attensity.com and poke through the information on the site.
Dr. David Bean, a wizard with a passion for language, has been aggressive in his push to make rocket science useful to mere mortals.
Attensity’s productizing of content analysis is a good example of how to grow a market without making your customers withhold their licensing fees. The company is focusing on large back office specialists. More information about this MarketVoice application is here.
As the screws tighten on vendors of pure search or stand alone text processing software, studying Dr. Bean’s retooling of his rocket science technology may be useful. Attensity is a bit ahead of some of its competitors. Companies will sagging revenues may want to bone up on Attensity’s business model sooner rather than later.
I flagged Attensity as a company to watch in my April 2008 study Beyond Search.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
Why Google Can Land Its Jets at Moffett Field and Oracle Can’t
June 4, 2008
The San Jose Mercury News ran a story with the fetching title, “Google to Build Employee Housing at Huge New Complex at NASA’s Ames Research Center.” You can read the story here. Do this now. Traditional media often make the data bunny go on an egg hunt to find a news story moved to a hidden place on the Web site. Moffett Field is the expanse of flat land adjacent Highway 101 north of San Jose. Let’s just say that it’s prime real estate and skip trying to assign it a value.
The most intriguing passage for me in Brandon Bailey article was:
The company says it will build up to 1.2 million square feet of offices, research and development space, company housing, recreation – and possibly even retail shops for Google employees – on 42 acres of the former Moffett Field property, which it will lease initially for $3.66 million a year. The project is part of Google’s plan for long-term growth, according to company representatives, who said details of the development are still being decided. Construction would start in 2013 and proceed over the next decade.
Several thoughts popped into my mind as I mulled over the implications of this story:
- Messrs Brin and Page will not suffer the indignity that Larry Ellison must tolerate when he tries to land his jet after the San Jose airport closes. $3.66 buys a pretty good parking place I surmise.
- The hopes of Microsoft, Verizon, and other companies who have hoped that Google would self destruct in the next year suffered a set back. This deal says that Google is planning for the long haul. The Googlers won’t kick their plan in gear until 2013 which, if the company’s growth rate continues at its present pace, will occur when the GOOG is in the $50 to $60 billion revenue range.
- Well, that solves the recruitment problem. Japanese companies built dormitories. If you know what the Google song, exercise program, and warm up suit will be, let me know.
Outfits like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon are probably scratching their heads and asking, “What’s with these guys? Did Google switch from advertising to real estate?”
My reminder is that the GOOG is 18 months to 36 months ahead of these companies and, by extension, their executives. I anticipate a joint venture among IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon to buy Los Alamos National Laboratories where there is a great deal of open land available for development.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Does This Mean Users Can Downgrade from Fast ESP to MOSS or ESS?
June 4, 2008
I snagged this post from Apple Insider. One part of my mind says, “It’s a spoof.” Anther part says, “Maybe it’s true and will apply to other Microsoft software?”
Apple Insider writes:
Speaking at an event Tuesday in the nation’s capital, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said his company’s licensing policy allows for customers to install the previous generation of Windows should Vista not impress.
“Customers get both,” he said. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both.”
You should read the full post here.
The devilish voice said to me, “Will a disenchanted Fast Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) be able to downgrade to SharePoint’s built in Express / MOSS / ESS technology?”
Agree or disagree, a happy quack to the folks at Apple Insider.
Stephen Arnold, May 4, 2008
A Wizard Tells It Straight: The Web Is Not an Operating System
June 4, 2008
Straight up Tim Bray’s post here is one of the best things I have read today, maybe in the last few months. Dr. Bay may not be as well known at Paris Hilton, but he’s been a contributor and innovator for many years. One example: He teamed with Dr. Ramanathan Guha to whack out the document that defined some of the semantic Web’s more interesting bits.
The most important point for me in his excellent essay was:
Lots of modern business is all about pumping information. The classic example would be finance; banks are giant information pumps with cash machines at the edges. Organizations (business, governments, clubs, political parties, religions) who figure out how to surf the new information flow will succeed and prosper; those who push back will be swept away. And it won’t have anything to do with whether anything’s like an OS or not.
Highly recommended, and he hits the theme “the Internet is about people” dead on as well. If you don’t recall any other innovations from Dr. Bray, think SGML. He contributed to that as well. For a fuller bio, click here.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Wikia Search: Social Search Is Blooming
June 4, 2008
I haven’t done much thinking about social search. Years ago when I saw a demonstration of Eurekster, now Euereksterswicki. I thought sites suggested by users was interesting. As the Internet expanded, a small collection of recommended sites would be useful. We built Point (Top 5% of the Internet) in 1993, eventually selling the property to CMGI’s Lycos unit. Social search was a variation on Point without the human editorial staff we relied upon 15 years ago.
Wikia: User-Modifiable Results
The big news in the last 24 hours is the sprucing up of the Wikia Search system. The venture is a result of Jim Wales’ creative nature. If you have not tried the system, navigate here and fire several queries at the system. It’s much more comprehensive than the system I tested several months ago. I still like the happy cloud logo.
I ran the query “enterprise search” on the system. The result was a pointer to Northern Light. The second result was a pointer to the enterprise search entry in Wikipedia. So far so good. What sets Wikia apart is that I can use an in-browser editing function to change a hit’s title. I can also move results up and down the page. I can see how that would be useful, but I save interesting hits to a folder. I then return to these saved files and conduct more in-depth investigations. So, the system generates results that are useful to me, contains a dollop of community functionality, and sports a larger index. You can read more about the system on Webware.com, which has a useful description of the service here.
Vivisimo’s Social Search
In New York at the Enterprise Search Summit, someone asked me, “Have you seen Vivisimo’s new social search system?” My answer was, “No, I don’t know much about it.” When I returned to my office, I have a link to Vivisimo’s explanation of social search. Vivisimo announced this function in October 2007, and I think that the catchphrase hooked some people at the New York show, and You can read the announcement here.
The point that resonated with me is:
Enabling users to vote on, rate, tag, save and share content within the search interface is just the first step in creating a collaborative information-enriching environment. Velocity 6.0 allows users to add their own knowledge about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation.
In this context, social search means that I can add key words or tags to an item processed by Vivisimo. The term is added to the index. If I provide that term to a colleague, the index term can be used to retrieve the document. An interactive tagging feature is useful, but it was not the type of functionality that I use. Others may find the feature exactly what is needed to make behind-the-firewall search less frustrating.
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Social search taps into the wisdom of crowds. Some crowds are calm, even thoughtful. Others can be a management opportunity.
Baynote
Today I received an email from a colleague asking, “Did you see the social search study published by Baynote, Inc. Once again, the answer was, “No, I don’t think so.” I clicked on a link and went through a registration process (easily spoofed) to download PDF of the six-page report.
Baynote is a company specializing in “on demand recommendations and social search for Web sites.” You can explore the company’s Web site here. I didn’t read the verbiage on the Web page. I clicked in the search box and entered my favorite test query, beyond search. No joy The three hits were to information about Baynote. (The phrase beyond search sent to Clusty.com delivers a nice link to this Web log, however.)
I clicked back to the PDF report and scanned it. The main idea I garnered from the white paper is:
Baynote combines a site’s existing search engine results with community wisdom to produce a set of optimized results that is proven to yield greater conversions, longer engagement, and improved satisfaction. Thus, Social Search can be thought of as a community layer on top of the site’s existing search engine. The original search results may be re-ordered in the process, and the augmented results may include additional results that weren’t originally produced by the search engine, but proven to be valuable to your Web site visitors. Because Baynote is delivered as SAAS (software as a service), it can be live on a Web site in as little as 30 days with little or no development, installation or configuration.
If you have an existing search system, you can use Baynote as an add-on. With minimal hassle, you can rank results using the Baynote algorithms, monitor user behavior to shape search results, generate See Also references, and merge results from different collections.
I’m going to update my mental inventory about search, adding social search to list of search types that I lug around in my head.
Observations
I do have reservations about social anything. I’m 85 percent convinced that the Vivisimo and Baynote approaches have merit. But I want to end this short item with these observations:
- Social anything can be spoofed. When I visited Los Alamos National Labs, people with access to the facility fiddled with hard drives and other digital assets. If this stuff can happen at a security-conscious facility, imagine what a summer intern can do with social search in your organization.
- Users often have very good ideas about content. Other users have very bad ideas about content. When there are lots of clicks, then the likelihood of finding something useful edges up. The usefulness of Delicious and StumbleUpon are evidence of this. However, when there are comparatively few clicks, I’m inclined to exercise some extra caution. Tina in the mail room is a great person, but I’m not sure I trust her judgment on the emergency core cooling system schematics.
- The lightweight approach to tagging is not going to yield the type of information that a system like Tacit Software’s provides. If you want social, then take a look at Tacit’s Active Net system here.
- My hunch is that nearly invisible monitoring systems will yield more, higher quality insights about information. In some of my work, I’ve had access to outputs of surveillance systems. The data are often quite useful and generally bias-free. Human systems have humanity’s fingerprints on the data, which can obscure some important items.
Social search can be quite useful. Its precepts work quite well in high traffic environments. In more click sparse environments, a different type of tool is required to ferret out the important people and information.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
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