Make Case-Based Approximate Reasoning a Reality
October 23, 2011
I stumbled across an interesting book on Amazon.com that has received a great deal of attention over he past few years. The book is called Case-Based Approximate Reasoning (CBR) by Eyke Hullermeier.
CBR has established itself as a core methodology in the field of artificial intelligence. The key idea of CBR is to tackle new problems by referring to similar problems that have already been solved in the past. One reviewer wrote:
In the last years developments were very successful that have been based on the general concept of case-based reasoning. … will get a lot of attention and for a good while will be the reference for many applications and further research. … the book can be used as an excellent guideline for the implementation of problem-solving programs, but also for courses in Artificial and Computational Intelligence. Everybody who is involved in research, development and teaching in Artificial Intelligence will get something out of it.
The problem with CBR can be the time, effort, and cost required to create and maintain the rules. Automated systems work well if the inputs do not change. Flip in some human unpredictability and the CBR system can require baby sitting.
Jasmine Ashton, October 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Enterprise Search Silliness
October 23, 2011
I am back in Kentucky and working through quite a stack of articles which have been sent to me to review. I don’t want to get phone calls from Gen X and Gen Y CEOs, chipper attorneys, and annoyed vulture capitalists, so I won’t do the gory details thing.
I do want to present my view of the enterprise search market. I finished the manuscript for “The New Landscape of Search”, published in June 2011, before the notable acquisitions which have taken place in the discombobulated enterprise search market. Readers of this blog know that I am not too fond of the words “information,” “search”, “enterprise”, “governance”, and a dozen or so buzzwords that Art History majors from Smith have invented in the sales job.
In this write up I want to comment on three topics:
- What’s the reason for the buy outs?
- The chase for the silver bullet which will allow a vendor to close a deal, shooting the competitors dead
- The vapidity of the analyses of the search market.
Same rules apply. Put your comments in the comments section of the blog. Please, do not call and want to “convince” me that a particular firm has the “one, true way”. Also, do not send me email with a friendly salutation like “Hi, Steve.” I am not in a “hi, Steve” mood due to my lousy vision and 67 year old stamina. What little I have is not going to be applied to emails from people who want to give me a demo, a briefing, or some other Talmudic type of input. Not much magic in search.
What’s the Reason for the Buy Outs?
The reasons will vary by acquirer, but here’s my take on the deals we have been tracking and commenting upon to our paying clients. I had a former client want to talk with me about one of these deals. Surprise. I talk for money. Chalk that up to my age and the experience of the “something for nothing” mentality of search marketers.
The HP Autonomy deal was designed to snag a company with an alleged 20,000 licensees and close to $1.0 billion in revenue, and not PriceWaterhouseCooper or Deloitte type of consulting revenue stream. HP wants to become more of a services company, and Autonomy’s packagers presented a picture that whipped HP’s Board and management into a frenzy. With the deal, HP gets a shot at services revenue, but there will be a learning curve. I think Meg Whitman of eBay Skype fame will have her hands full with Autonomy’s senior management. My hunch is that Mike Lynch and Andrew Kantor could run HP better than Ms. Whitman, but that’s my opinion.
HP gets a shot at selling higher margin engineering and consulting services. A bonus is the upsell opportunity to Autonomy’s customer base. Is their overlap? Will HP muff the bunny? Will HP’s broader challenges kill this reasonably good opportunity? Those answers appear in my HP Autonomy briefing which, gentle reader, costs money. And Oracle bought Endeca as a “me too” play.
dtSearch Teams Up with Cirrus Nova
October 22, 2011
Another partnership has been announced in the world of search earlier this week. Cirrus Nova, a recruitment software provider, has announced a partnership with online search specialist dtSearch. This will had Boolean searching to Cirrus Nova’s already present Prism software.
Recruiter’s article, “Contracts/Deals: Cirrus Nova and dtSearch pair up” gives us feedback from the companies regarding the partnership:
Cirrus Nova’s managing director says: ‘We pride ourselves on our relationships with our customers, so when we had feedback that the majority would like to also perform Boolean searching, we were only too happy to assist.’ Toby Goddard, managing director of technical recruiter and Cirrus Nova client TG Resourcing, adds: ‘We frequently need to identify very complex skills within CVs that are also closely connected to certain industries and being able to search to those parameters…is just perfect.
The addition of Boolean search to the company’s current software will allow recruiters to use Boolean logic to perform more accurate candidate searches based on specific criteria. Why else would the two companies pair up? Couldn’t the software be used without such a large business transaction? Sales, ah yes.
Andrea Hayden, October 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Brainware Holds Dominion over Paper to Bits
October 22, 2011
Old Dominion Freight Lines, a leading motor freight carrier saw a large increase in shipments and in tonnage in the last quarter of 2010. This put a significant amount of stress on the accounts receivable (AR) process at the company. Even if employees were doing good work, they were starting to get backed up, risking cutting off customers who had paid on time but whose accounts just hadn’t been attended to yet. Business Finance’s article, “Touchless AR Processing Boosts Productivity,” tells us more about the company’s solution:
Old Dominion’s answer was to automate receivables processing by implementing software called ‘Brainware Distiller for Remittances.’ Brainware specializes in intelligent data capture and enterprise search solutions to help large organizations rapidly process large volumes of documents and retrieve data from across the enterprise. Brainware Distiller validates information against known data sources in an organization’s information systems.
Since the implementation of the automated AR, Old Dominion has boosted productivity by 500 percent. They can now avoid more irritated customers, but the processing staff was cut from eight to two and processes more work than ever possible with their old system. The process has been a valuable change to the company’s productivity, but at the cost of more job cuts. Is this the best solution in today’s economic crisis? May continue to be a win-lose situation for most businesses and individuals. If Brainware continues with its back office wins, maybe Oracle will buy another search vendor. Never too many search systems is the old saying at Oracle and OpenText.
Andrea Hayden, October 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google and the Perils of Posting
October 21, 2011
I don’t want to make a big deal out of an simple human mistake from a button click. I just had eye surgery, and it is a miracle that I can [a] find my keyboard and [b] make any function on my computers work.
However, I did notice this item this morning and wanted to snag it before it magically disappeared due to mysterious computer gremlins. The item in question is “Last Week I Accidentally Posted”, via Google Plus at this url. I apologize for the notation style, but Google Plus posts come with the weird use of the “+” sign which is a killer when running queries on some search systems. Also, there is no title, which means this is more of a James Joyce type of writing than a standard news article or even a blog post from the addled goose in Harrod’s Creek.
To get some context you can read my original commentary in “Google Amazon Dust Bunnies.” My focus in that write up is squarely on the battle between Google and Amazon, which I think is more serious confrontation that the unemployed English teachers, aging hippies turned consultant, and the failed yet smarmy Web masters who have reinvented themselves as “search experts” think.
Believe me, Google versus Amazon is going to be interesting. If my research is on the money, the problems between Google and Amazon will escalate to and may surpass the tension that exists between Google and Oracle, Google and Apple, and Google and Viacom. (Well, Viacom may be different because that is a personal and business spat, not just big companies trying to grab the entire supply of apple pies in the cafeteria.)
In the Dust Bunnies write up, I focused on the management context of the information in the original post and the subsequent news stories. In this write up, I want to comment on four aspects of this second post about why Google and Amazon are both so good, so important, and so often misunderstood. If you want me to talk about the writer of these Google Plus essays, stop reading. The individual’s name which appears on the source documents is irrelevant.
1. Altering or Idealizing What Really Happened
I had a college professor, Dr. Philip Crane who told us in history class in 1963, “When Stalin wanted to change history, he ordered history textbooks to be rewritten.” I don’t know if the anecdote is true or not. Dr. Crane went on to become a US congressman, and you know how reliable those folks’ public statements are. What we have in the original document and this apologia is a rewriting of history. I find this interesting because the author could use other methods to make the content disappear. My question, “Why not?” And, “Why revisit what was a pretty sophomoric tirade involving a couple of big companies?”
2, Suppressing Content with New Content
One of the quirks of modern indexing systems such as Baidu, Jike, and Yandex is that once content is in the index, it can persist. As more content on a particular topic accretes “around” an anchor document, the document becomes more findable. What I find interesting is that despite the removal of the original post the secondary post continues to “hook” to discussions of that original post. In fact, the snippet I quoted in “Dust Bunnies” comes from a secondary source. I have noted and adapted to “good stuff” disappearing as a primary document. The only evidence of a document’s existence are secondary references. As these expand, then the original item becomes more visible and more difficult to suppress. In short, the author of the apologia is ensuring the findability of the gaffe. Fascinating to me.
3. Amazon: A Problem for Google
Online Literacy Makes Information Warfare Easier
October 21, 2011
If you are a fan of information warfare, disinformation, and weaponized data—you will find that opportunities for “shaping” content are going to become more plentiful.
Common Dreams reported on a thought-provoking study about just the opposite of that. The article entitled, “Study: Many College Students Not Learning to Think Critically,” provides an overview of research that once again says U.S. education isn’t making the grade.
New York University Sociologist Richard Arum conducted a study which followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring on 2009 from 24 different colleges and universities–all ranging in selectivity. He took into account their testing data and survey responses.
Fort-five percent did not have any significant improvement in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing skills after the initial two years. Even after four years the percentage held strong at thirty-six percent remaining stagnant.
These depressing results are not because the curriculum has stayed the same in changing times: a common misconception. In fact much of education theory centers around collaborative learning. However, Arum’s study shows that independent students make more gains.
The article states:
I’m not surprised at the results,” said Stephen G. Emerson, the president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “Our very best students don’t study in groups. They might work in groups in lab projects. But when they study, they study by themselves.
The fact that this is the first study that has followed a cohort of undergraduates to determine if they are learning specific skills is meaningful in and of itself. We as a society don’t feel the need to analyze and research what we perceive to be successful. Everyone from teachers, taxpayers, politicians, to students are spending too much time criticizing and analyzing our education system instead of investing in it–emotionally and financially.
Interesting and somewhat disconcerting. But since we don’t do news and are owned by an addled goose, the Beyond Search staff wouldn’t know good information if it fell in the goose pond. That’s okay for us in rural Kentucky. For others, hmmmm.
Megan Feil, October 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Microsoft Gets Some Open Source Ideas
October 21, 2011
Wired reported on some good news for the open source community recently with their article, “Microsoft Embraces Elephant of Open Source.”
Even though Microsoft had an inaugural Hadoop back in 2008, we could hardly say they had an affinity for the open source giant then. In fact, I don’t even think we could say that about them now, even with their plan to integrate the platform with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications.
This does however, show they are serious about Hadoop, unlike their relationship last year with OpenStack. Microsoft’s engineers are even investing by providing the coding for this Hadoop integration.
According to the article, the strengthening of this Microsoft-Hadoop partnership isn’t just coming out of nowhere. Wired reports that general manager of product management for SQL Server Doug Leland said:
There have certainly been requests from our [SQL Server and Windows Azure] customers to embrace Hadoop and deliver an enterprise-class distribution of the platform that’s built into the Windows infrastructure and is easily managed within that infrastructure,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.
It appears that this is set to be a steady long-term relationship; we can hear Open Source advocates cheering from all around. The question, of course, is, “Will open source survive Microsoft’s love and attention?”
Megan Feil, October 20, 2011
Modus Operandi and Smart Content for War Fighting
October 21, 2011
Search is not longer key word searching. The engineers at Modus Operandi have know this for a long time. We just learned that Modus Operandi has netted a deal to develop Anti-Submarine warfare technology.
The project is called The Anti-Submarine Warfare Find-to-Forecast (ASW F2F) methodology, architecture and prototype research project and is meant to improve mission commanders’ situational understanding. What makes this project interesting is that “smart” content technology will help operators find available ASW information sources, filter out irrelevant information quickly; format relevant information as a standardized knowledge representation; fuse normalized intelligence based on mission parameters; and forecast potential courses of action based on advanced, hybrid reasoning techniques.
According to an October 19 news release, “Modus Operandi Awarded U.S. Navy Anti Submarine Warfare SBIR Contract,” Dr. Kent Bimson, Modus Operandi vice president of research, said:
The objective of this research is to greatly improve anti-submarine warfare commanders’ decision-making capabilities by providing the ability to help operators more rapidly find, filter and fuse mission-specific information from multiple data sources to support focused decisions and intelligent forecasting. The anti-submarine warfare environment is fast-moving, complex and dynamic, requiring split-second life-or-death decisions. This technology, if successful, will provide commanders the most relevant fused knowledge available to support their decision making.
Here at Beyond Search we find it more interesting to learn about real world applications of smart information technology than systems that display laundry lists of results. Answers, not open-scan-close-open-scan-browse methods are needed. It is 2011, not 1980, search engineers. Are you listening? Ping, ping, ping.
Jasmine Ashton, October 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Too Much Data? Digital Reasoning Has a Solution
October 21, 2011
More and more businesses are turning to companies specializing in analytics to simplify the massive amounts of data and turn that data into meaningful information. Digital Reasoning is one such company and a recent interview with Robert Metcalf, president, as found on the company’s website sheds light on Digital Reasoning’s past, present and optimistic future.
The company was born in 2000 in Franklin, Tennessee, and has had some impressive accomplishments in its first decade. Synthesys, its technology’s name, was chosen in 2009 by the United States Army Intelligence as the core of its INSCOM Enterprise Platform.
Alongside government entities, Digital Reasoning also supplies analytics to the commercial sector. One of the questions asked during the interview was what are the challenges servicing both government and commercial industries. According to Metcalf that challenge of providing a service that can be made applicable across several industries is one of the components that makes Synthesys unique and gives Digital Reasoning an edge in the market.
When asked about the accomplishments over the last year, Metcalf said:
…we are very pleased with the course over the last number of months, and particularly over the course of this year, the strides we’ve made with regard to our technology, particularly with respect to the work we’ve done with our analytics, our algorithms, and our approach to unstructured data, and leveraging some great technologies in Hadoop and Cassandra and seeing those things continue to mature and scale as our product and product roadmap continues to be developed.
Metcalf also reported that he believes the last ten years have been spent trying to sort through all the data that companies by which companies are bombarded. While that is a useful process and quite necessary he sees the next ten years moving toward finding meaning within the data. That is where Digital Reasoning comes in useful and Metcalf anticipates a surge in interest in the company as a result.
All and all, Digital Reasoning is poised to explode in the market of data analysis and vertical filing. With its ducks seemingly in a row and successes already under its belt, this sophomore company gets a big thumbs up from us.
Catherine Lamsfuss, October 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Avoid SharePoint Burnout With Efficient Planning
October 21, 2011
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