List of Acquisitions Related to Smart Software
April 20, 2016
I loathe the buzzwords “artificial intelligence,” “cognitive,” and their ilk. I am okay with smart software or, better yet, semi smart software. If you want a listing of the outfits acquiring smart software companies in the last few years, navigate to “The Race For AI: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple In A Rush To Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups.” Mid tier consulting firms will be charging big bucks for their round up of these deals. The list contains the names of 21 outfits and their new owners. Don’t you wish you were a start up owned by IBM or Yahoo?
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2016
Software That Contains Human Reasoning
April 20, 2016
Computer software has progressed further and keeps advancing faster than we can purchase the latest product. Software is now capable of holding simple conversations, accurately translating languages, GPS, self-driving cars, etc. The one thing that that computer developers cannot program is human thought and reason. The New York Times wrote “Taking Baby Steps Toward Software That Reasons Like Humans” about the goal just out of reach.
The article focuses on Richard Socher and his company MetaMind, a deep learning startup working on pattern recognition software. He along with other companies focused on artificial intelligence are slowly inching their way towards replicating human thought on computers. The progress is slow, but steady according to a MetaMind paper about how machines are now capable of answering questions of both digital images and textual documents.
“While even machine vision is not yet a solved problem, steady, if incremental, progress continues to be made by start-ups like Mr. Socher’s; giant technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google; and dozens of research groups. In their recent paper, the MetaMind researchers argue that the company’s approach, known as a dynamic memory network, holds out the possibility of simultaneously processing inputs including sound, sight and text.”
The software that allows computers to answer questions about digital images and text is sophisticated, but the data to come close to human capabilities is not only limited, but also nonexistent. We are coming closer to understanding the human brain’s complexities, but artificial intelligence is not near Asimov levels yet.
Whitney Grace, April 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Lessons to Learn from Instagram Translation Systems
April 20, 2016
Social media services attempt to eliminate the publishing of pornographic content on their sites through a combination of user reporting and algorithms. However, Daily Star reports Shock as one million explicit porn films found on Instagram. This content existed on Instagram despite their non-nudity policy. However, according to the article, much of the pornographic videos and photos were removed after news broke. Summarizing how the content was initially published, the article states,
“The videos were unearthed by tech blogger Jed Ismael, who says he’s discovered over one million porn films on the site. Speaking on his blog, Ismael said: “Instagram has banned certain English explicit hashtags from being showed in search. “Yet users seem to find a way around the policy, by using non English terms or hashtags. “I came across this discovery by searching for the hashtag “?????” which means movies in Arabic.” Daily Star Online has performed our own search and easily found hardcore footage without the need for age verification checks.”
While Tor has typically been seen as the home for such services, it appears some users have found a workaround. Who needs the Dark Web? As for those online translation systems, perhaps some services should consider their utility.
Megan Feil, April 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Chinese Restaurant Names as Journalism
April 19, 2016
I read an article in Jeff Bezos’ newspaper. The title was “We Analyzed the Names of Almost Every Chinese Restaurant in America. This Is What We Learned.” The almost is a nifty way of slip sliding around the sampling method which used restaurants listed in Yelp. Close enough for “real” journalism.
Using the notion of a frequency count, the write up revealed:
- The word appearing most frequently in the names of the sample was “restaurant.”
- The words “China” and “Chinese” appear in about 15,000 of the sample’s restaurant names
- “Express” is a popular word, not far ahead of “panda”.
The word list and their frequencies were used to generate a word cloud:
To answer the question where Chinese food is most popular in the US, the intrepid data wranglers at Jeff Bezos’ newspaper output a map:
Amazing. I wonder if law enforcement and intelligence entities know that one can map data to discover things like the fact that the word “restaurant” is the most used word in a restaurant’s name.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2016
Content Marketers at Risk
April 19, 2016
I read “Goldman Sachs Leads a $30 million Round for Persado’s AI-Based, Automated Copywriting Service.” My first reactions:
- Search engine optimization wizards will have a tool to increase the flow of baloney search and content marketing to people who write blogs
- Journalists, who have been subject to reduction in force actions, may face fierce competition from a smart software
- Teachers of college composition will have a tough time figuring out if the student essays are coming from fraternity and sorority reference files or from a cloud based writing service.
According to the write up, the service is a “cognitive one.” Poor IBM. The company wants Watson to be the cognitive champion. Now an outfit which uses software to create articles has embraced the concept. I noted:
The company [Persado] has cataloged 1 million words and phrases that marketers use in their copy, and scored those words based on sentiment analysis and the structure of marketing pitches defined by a message’s format, linguistic structure, description, emotional language, and its actual call to action. The software can create a message, optimize its language, and then translate that message into any of 23 language…
There is a bright side. IBM could purchase Persado and then use the system to flog its confection of Lucene, acquired technology, and home brew code into a system which tirelessly promotes IBM.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2016
The Marketing Case for Value from Dark Web
April 19, 2016
For marketers crying for more user data, the Dark Web may present a challenge — or not. A longread article, Bitcoin Remains Most Popular Digital Currency on Dark Web from Coin Desk reiterates the landscape of the Dark Web is more nuanced than the headlines screaming cybercrime suggest. Despite the inability to know users’ locations, identities and interests, which may worry marketers, several points are raised asking marketers if there is possibility for value in the Dark Web. Explaining more about the potential benefits to marketing and sales, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs is quoted,
“‘Plenty of would-be, legitimate consumers come from regions of the world where perhaps governments don’t want their consumers visiting certain places or buying certain items. And for those consumers, [the Dark Web] can be a boon, and potential positive for retailers and marketers,’ Krebs writes in an e-mail. Krebs goes on to say that much of the supposed danger posed by the Dark Web is nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to cybersecurity.”
This useful piece not only provides insights into how the marketing industry views Tor, but also serves as a handy layman’s guide to Dark Web (synonymous with darknet and dark net) terminology and a brief history. Additionally, the founder of Adland presents an interesting case for opening a .onion site to complement a site on the Surface Web, or the “regular” internet.
Megan Feil, April 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Data on Dark Web Not Excused from Fact or Fiction Debate
April 19, 2016
Remember when user information was leaked from the extramarital affairs website AshleyMadison? While the leak caused many controversies, the release of this information specifically on the Dark Web gives reason to revisit an article from Mashable, Another blow for Ashley Madison: User emails leaked on Dark Web as a refresher on the role Tor played. A 10-gigabyte file was posted as a Torrent on the Dark Web which included emails and credit card information among other user data. The article concluded,
“With the data now out there, Internet users are downloading and sifting through it for anything – or, rather, anyone – of note. Lists of email addresses of AshleyMadison users are being circulated on social media. Several appear to be connected to members of the UK government but are likely fake. As Wired notes, the site doesn’t require email verification, meaning the emails could be fake or even hijacked.”
The future of data breaches and leaks may be unclear, but the falsification of information — leaked or otherwise — always remains a possibility. Regardless of the element of scandal existing in future leaks, it is important to note that hackers and other groups are likely not above manipulation of information.
Megan Feil, April 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bing: Search Engine for Developers. Git Moving
April 18, 2016
I read “Bing Just Became the Best Search Engine for Developers.” I was surprised that the word “operators” was left out of the headline. DevOps has become a rallying cry for many. According to the write up:
Almost always as developers we end up on Stack Overflow or Mozilla Developer Network, but now Microsoft’s Bing has given us something even better: executable code directly in search results.
I noted this statement:
Thanks to a collaboration with HackerRank, if you search for something like
string concat C#, you’ll get an interactive code editor with a result that can be run directly from that page to see how it works.
My thought is that Bing is nosing into new territory. Is it possible that there could be some unforeseen consequences along the lines of the Microsoft Tay chatbot? Nah, Microsoft would not provide a function that might compromise a searcher’s computer.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2016
Google Is Many Things: Racial Bias in Hair May Be Brushed Aside
April 18, 2016
I read a story about matching up user queries with images. I don’t think Google’s image search is particularly good. Examples range from Google’s obsession with taking a query like “truth” and returning images of pictures with the word “truth” in them. And this image:
What about the query for “watson.” Google showed a picture of a computer, a person named “sherlock,” and images of this guy:
The write up “Do Google’s ‘Unprofessional Hair’ Results Show It Is Racist?” wants to point out that Google’s methods have a nasty side. I noted this passage:
We’ve always conceived of search engines as arcane but neutral creatures, obedient only to our will and to the precious logic of information. Older engines from the advent of the internet reflected this: Remember “Ask Jeeves,” the genteel butler? Dogpile, which would “fetch” things for you? Despite this fantasy, the things engines and their algorithms are able to know and to find are influenced by the content we give them to work with, which means they may reflect our own biases.
AskJeeves was a human powered system. The Google is algorithmic. Google does not “give” its image search system content. The image search system indexes what it finds, within the depth settings for the crawl. Sorry, gentle reader, Google does not index everything available via the Internet. Bummer, right?
I circled this statement:
is its [image search’s] purpose to reflect and reinforce what its users feel, do and believe? Or is it to show us a fuller picture of the world and all things contained in it as they really are? Google Images was conceived in response to what people most wanted to see. Maybe it hasn’t decided yet what we most need to see.
The Guardian itself is an interesting legal search. Run the query “guardian” on Google Images and what does one find? Here you go:
The logo of the “real” journalistic thing and the word “truth.” Now is that biased?
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2016
Mindbreeze Breaks into Slovak Big Data Market Through Partnership with Medialife
April 18, 2016
The article titled Mindbreeze and MEDIALIFE Launch Strategic Partnership on BusinessWire discusses what the merger means for the Slovak and Czech Republic enterprise search market. MediaLife emphasizes its concentrated approach to document management systems for Slovak customers in need of large systems for the management, processing, and storage of documents. The article details,
“Based on this partnership, we provide our customers innovative solutions for fast access to corporate data, filtering of relevant information, data extraction and their use in automated sorting (classification)… Powerful enterprise search systems for businesses must recognize relationships among different types of information and be able to link them accordingly. Mindbreeze InSpire Appliance is easy to use, has a high scalability and shows the user only the information which he or she is authorized to view.”
Daniel Fallmann, founder and CEO of Mindbreeze, complimented himself on his selection of a partner in MediaLife and licked his chops at the prospect of the new Eastern European client base opened to Mindbreeze through the partnership. Other Mindbreeze partners exist in Italy, the UK, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the USA, as the company advances its mission to supply enterprise search appliances as well as big data and knowledge management technologies.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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