Microsoft and Its Don Quixotesque Deep Learning
July 15, 2014
I know that artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, digital brains, and the other next generation technology will revolutionize search and then everything. I will be pushing up daisies when the future arrives.
I just read “Microsoft Research Reveals Project Adam, A New Deep-Learning System That Trumps Google Brain.” Maybe the future is here. Even though I have a Windows Lumia 925, I don’t have the Windows 8.1 update. I can’t control the colors of the nifty yet obscure icons. I can’t reliably access my email. Yep, the future of Project Adam awaits me.
Wired Magazine, on the other hand, is excited:
Microsoft even brought dogs on to the stage and demoed the system in which the mobile camera recognized the dog breed when pointed at the dog.
I need to do this with my mobile phone.
Here’s another passage I liked:
Lee believes Adam could be part of what he calls an “ultimate machine intelligence,” something that could function in ways that are closer to how we humans handle different types of modalities—like speech, vision, and text—all at once. The road to that kind of technology is long—people have been working towards it since the 50s—but we’re certainly getting closer.
Yep, closer. I am looking forward to news releases and demonstrations from Microsoft’s many competitors. For me, I will be happy with a 925 upgrade that improves the rocket science of getting an email message.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2014
Date Your Computer In 2029
July 15, 2014
Admit it, you have flirted with a chatbot before. You do not need to feel ashamed; everyone has tested a chatbot’s sentience before with love confessions and flirting. Most of the time the chatbot’s remarks are smart aleck or state that the relationship would be impossible. That might change says Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence in the article “Search Engines Will Be Able To Flirt With Users By 2029.” Director of Google Engineering spoke at the recent Exponential Finance Conference about computers gaining near human intelligence. He claims that within fifteen years, people will be able to have an emotional relationship with a computer. The new science-fiction movie Her is a good example of how humans and computers will interact in the future.
Dr. Kurzweil’s comment alludes that Google is making process on a natural language search engine that will allow users to ask questions and get a meaningful response.
“ ‘That is the cutting edge of human intelligence,’ Dr. Kurzweil said. He was less impressed with claims that a chatbot emulating a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman had passed the Turing test. Dr. Kurzweil said, ‘Eugene does not keep track of the conversation, repeats himself word for word, and responds with typical chatbot non sequiturs.’ “
It sounds like Google has something sequestered in its vaults, but people are still stuck flirting with chatbots. While you might have to wait before you can date an AI, at least these improvements will make speaking to an automated recording better.
Whitney Grace, July 15, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Is it Possible, A Search Engine for Apps?
July 15, 2014
This cannot be true, a complicit search engine across multiple apps? Technology Review says that Quixey is working on such a beast in the article “Search Startup Quixey Aims To Be The Google Of The App Era.” More people are using applications over spending time on the Web and they’re using multiple apps as entryways to Internet content. It is bothersome to open one app to find one spec of information, and then do the same in another. Quixey wants to be the Google of applications and they have $74 million, 150 employees, and an old appliance store in Mountain View, CA to work on the idea.
Quixey’s wants the search box on a device to take queries and actively take the user to the exact information and action in an app to answer it. They have released a demo that searches for food and drink information using Yelp and Urbanspoon.
“ ‘The way people interact with the third-party apps installed on their phones is broken,’ says Liron Shapira, a cofounder and CTO of the company. It doesn’t make sense for people to hunt through a clutter of icons to find the app they need and to have to memorize how to navigate inside each one, he says. ‘A search bar is the better way to use third party apps—and the Quixey vision is to put that search bar on every device.’ That approach should be able to offer broader functionality than voice operated assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, he claims.”
Quixey’s search engine is different from Web search engines. Instead of building a Web site index, its index is built on app store information, review sites, and deep links. Deep links are a hyperlink type that points to a specific place or function inside a mobile app. Deep links are mostly used for advertising, but Quixey wants to use them for function over advertisement. The company is still working out the project’s kinks and they are competing with Google, but what Google lacks Quixey is moving into the territory.
Whitney Grace, July 15, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Prepare for Double Life with Office 365
July 15, 2014
Microsoft is pushing all SharePoint clients toward Office 365 for obvious reasons. In fact, they announced discontinuing certain payment plans last month in an effort to consolidate some services. And while some organizations, particularly smaller ones, are hesitant for the transition, even early adopters are finding it is not completely seamless. The Register covers the story in their article, “Face Up to a Double Life with Hybrid Office 365.”
The author sums up the situation:
“The vision is of businesses using Office 365, running in Microsoft’s Global data centres, for collaborating, conferencing, messaging and calendaring . . . If you are migrating to Office 365 from on-premises you will need to set up a hybrid deployment to get your services migrated to the cloud. Once you have done that you can decommission your on-premises environment. But it often turns out that businesses with Exchange, SharePoint and Lync deployed on-premises will need to keep a small portion of that environment running.”
These are the sorts of hiccups that happen often with large implementations like SharePoint, especially SharePoint. Stephen E. Arnold has made his career out of following and analyzing all things search, including SharePoint. His Web service, ArnoldIT.com, is a one-stop-shop for all things search. Check out his SharePoint feed to stay on top of the latest news, tips, and tricks.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 15, 2014
SoftLayer Provides IBM a Lift: Can It Hoist Watson and Chip Bets?
July 14, 2014
I read “SoftLayer Cloud Business Thriving Inside IBM.” Thrive is not the word I would use to describe how iPhrase and Vivisimo have fared. A number of IBM acquisitions have just disappeared into the tummy of the gentle giant, Big Blue. Here’s how the “real” news outfit InformationWeek views the SoftLayer information:
Over the last 12 months, SoftLayer has gained 6,000 new customers. IBM purchased SoftLayer for $2 billion in July 2013. Kandis says SoftLayer’s customer base was composed primarily of small and midsized companies, with some verging on becoming much larger companies. The thing they had in common was they did not have big IT departments, but were looking to expand infrastructure rapidly, Kandis told InformationWeek.
There are some questions.
- Will SoftLayer be able to compete with the WalMart-like tactics of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for cloud happiness?
- Will SoftLayer deploy a version of Watson that makes sense to potential licensees? (Recipes for Bon Appétit do not count. Sorry.)
- Will SoftLayer pump out enough cash to cover the money IBM wants to invest in next generation computing chips?
My view is that SoftLayer may not be up to the task. Amazon can cut prices quickly. Google, when it gets focused, is still sprightly, just not as zippy as it was in the 2002-2006 era. Microsoft may surprise even the anti Redmond contingent. There is a new, although somewhat muddled, CEO after all.
But SoftLayer has to content with bureaucracy, wild and crazy marketing, and the IBMness of its new work environment. The IDC “experts” don’t trouble themselves with some of the realities I notice. That’s for the best. More sophisticated analyses may shine in comparison.
One plus for the write up, was a reference to Watson as a “general purpose big data analytical engine.” That’s an improvement over a recipe generation system or a sluggish medical diagnostic system. Progress.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2014
Will Germany Scrutinize Google Web Search More Closely?
July 14, 2014
Several years ago, I learned a hard-to-believe factoid. In Denmark, 99 percent of referrals to a major financial service firm’s Web site came via Google. Figuring prominently was Google.de. My contact mentioned that the same traffic flow characterized the company’s German affiliate; that is, if an organization wanted Web traffic, Google was then the only game in town.
I no longer follow the flips and flops of Euro-centric Google killers like Quaero. I have little or no interest in assorted German search revolutions whether from the likes of the Weitkämper Clustering Engine or the Intrafind open source play or the Transinsight Enterprise Semantic Intelligence system. Although promising at one time, none of these companies offers an information retrieval that could supplant Google for German language search. Toss in English and the other languages Google supports, and the likelihood of a German Google killer decreases.
I read “Germany Is Looking to Regulate Google and Other Technology Giants.” I found the write up interesting and thought provoking. I spend some time each day contemplating the search and content processing sectors. I don’t pay much attention to the wider world of business and technology.
The article states:
German officials are planning to clip the wings of technology giants such as Google through heavier regulation.
That seems cut and dried. I also noted this statement:
The German government has always been militant in matters of data protection. In 2013, it warned consumers against using Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system due to perceived security risks, suggesting that it provided a back door for the US National Security Agency (NSA). Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that German chancellor Angela Merkel was one of the first high-profile victims of NSA surveillance, with some reports saying that the NSA hacked her mobile phone for over a decade.
My view is that search and content processing may be of particular interest. After all, who wants to sit and listen to a person’s telephone calls. I would convert the speech to text and hit the output with one of the many tools available to attach metadata, generate relationship maps, tug out entities like code words and proper names. Then I would browse the information using an old fashioned tabular report. I am not too keen on the 1959 Cadillac tail fin visualizations that 20 somethings find helpful, but to each his or her own I say.
Scrutiny of Google’s indexing might reveal some interesting things to the team assigned to ponder Google from macro and micro levels. The notion of timed crawls, the depth of crawls, the content parsed and converted to a Guha type semantic store, the Alon Halevy dataspace, and other fascinating methods of generating meta-information might be of interest to the German investigate-the-US-vendors team.
My hunch is that scrutiny of Google is likely to lead to increased concern about Web indexing in general. That means even the somewhat tame Bing crawler and the other Web indexing systems churning away at “public” sites’ content may be of interest.
When it comes to search and retrieval, ignorance and bliss are bedfellows. Once a person understands the utility of the archives, the caches, and the various “representations” of the spidered and parsed source content, bliss may become FUD (a version of IBM’s fear, uncertainty and doubt method). FUD may create some opportunities for German search and retrieval vendors. Will these outfits be able to respond or will the German systems remain in the province of Ivory Tower thinking?
In the short term, life will be good for the law firms representing some of the non German Web indexing companies. I wonder, “Is the Google Germany intercept matter included in the young attorneys’ legal education in Germany?”
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2014
HP Silicon Silliness
July 14, 2014
Now this is quite the claim. Bloomberg Businessweek declares, “With ‘The Machine’ HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer.” At the heart lies something HP Labs has developed and dubbed memristor. This use of the historical term has been a bit controversial, but, whatever the case, they’ve claimed the name now. Writer Ashlee Vance explains:
“At the simplest level, the memristor consists of a grid of wires with a stack of thin layers of materials such as tantalum oxide at each intersection. When a current is applied to the wires, the materials’ resistance is altered, and this state can hold after the current is removed. At that point, the device is essentially remembering 1s or 0s depending on which state it is in, multiplying its storage capacity. HP can build these chips with traditional semiconductor equipment and expects to be able to pack unprecedented amounts of memory—enough to store huge databases of pictures, files, and data—into a computer.”
While more and more memory is always better and better, we’re not sure this counts as a “new kind of computer.” This seems more like the front edge of Moore’s law’s successor to me. Be that as it may, the development does promise to speed processing significantly. The new computers will also need a new OS. Unlike the OS’s we know and love, this Machine OS will assume the availability of the high-speed, constant memory store provided by the new tech. Linux and Android OS versions are also in the works. The write-up goes on to note that memristor fibers could conceivably replace Ethernet cables.
Vance says the engineering community is impressed with this development at HP, and that it has helped with recruitment for the company. According to a representative, we could see the Machine on shelves between 2017 and 2020, but the article points out that HP has missed earlier self-imposed deadlines around this project. We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Introverted Brin Happier Tinkering in Proverbial Garage
July 14, 2014
Well, maybe this was the problem. We learn that one of the creators of social media dud Google+, who also happens to be a Google co-founder, is actually not so social in Techeye.net’s, “Brin: I Am Too Weird for Google+.” The very brief write-up explains:
“Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that it was probably a silly move for him to have worked on the social networking arm Google+. Speaking at Recode’s Code Conference Brin said he’s ‘not a very social person’ and does not like people much. According to the Verge, Brin called himself ‘kind of a weirdo’ and said that he only used Google+ to post pictures of his kids to his family. He now thinks that any previous professional focus on the social network was misguided. ‘It was probably a mistake,’ he said, ‘for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with.’”
The shy exec now works in what the article calls the company’s “semi-secret skunkworks group,” Google X. The research department is working on such fun and social-free projects as glucose-measuring contact lenses, self-driving cars, and (of course) Google Glass.
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Useful Glossary to Search Short Text
July 13, 2014
The Daily Mail published a list of 60 new abbreviations. If you have access to short message content, the list may be helpful for some queries. You can find the list at http://dailym.ai/1kQpyrm. My faves allow me to say, “DGAF about the vendor’s OOTD. Very classy stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, July 13, 2014
YouTube: What Does Google Need? Money?
July 13, 2014
I read an exclusive to Thomson Reuters. I must admit I was a bit confused about what Google is or is not doing with YouTube.
You can find the “exclusive” (for the time being) at “YouTube Weighs Funding Efforts to Boost Premium Content—Sources.” This is, because it carries the Reuters’ logo, a “real” news story I presume.
The story jumps out of the gate with the suggestion that Google needs money. Digital video is the new living room for couch potatoes. If Google needs money, it the firm’s ad revenue flow insufficient to realize Hollywood-style fancies.
Here’s a passage I marked:
YouTube is by far the world’s most popular location for video streaming, with more than 1 billion unique visitors a month, far surpassing Netflix Inc and Amazon. But it is trying to lure more marketers for premium video advertising, boosting margins as overall prices for Google’s advertising declines.
There you go. But we learn that the special channel investment was a less than stellar success:
YouTube set aside an estimated $100 million in late 2011 to bankroll some 100 channels, though it never confirmed amounts spent or other details. Beneficiaries of that largesse included Madonna and ESPN, as well as lesser-known creators. Reuters was one of the companies that received funds for a channel. But few of those have garnered much mainstream attention
Is it possible that the write up suggests that when Thomson Reuters tried out the dedicated channel thing with YouTube, the test was a belly flop.
I find video ads are sort of an annoyance. In fact, I can’t figure out how to make them go away. My solution is to not look at the video. I browsed some videos of the SU 27 and did not encounter ads one day. Try this query on YouTube and on Google Video:
“su-27”.
Here’s what I saw today.
Link is http://bit.ly/1ycyteQ.
Variable ads. Errors. Then a few videos of the only fighter aircraft that can do a cobra. Unfamiliar with the move? Ask around for a fighter pilot up on slick moves.
I was baffled. Is Google hunting for investments or is Google just doing Google moon shot thinking? My take on the write up is that Google is flipping rocks, looking for money.
Why?
When the online ad world shifts more aggressively from online search ads to other types of marketing, Google has to find a way to deal with its looming crossover of revenue and costs. Amazon is struggling with the same issue. I find giant, dominant, digital entities interesting. One is never sure of their motives whether it is a “real” journalism outfit or an online ad company.
What’s happened to search? Oh, right, I forgot. The new Google was Google Plus and social search. How did that approach to search (text and video) work out? Why are there two video search systems available? Is Google in sync with the couch potato market and the hot buttons of Hollywood moguls? I don’t know.
Stephen E Arnold, July 13, 2014
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