Big Data Joins The Justice League
September 1, 2013
The Justice League’s headquarters, either the Hall of Justice or the Watch Tower, has state of the art equipment to track bad guys and their criminal activities. We puny mortals might actually have a tool to put Batman’s own deductive skills to shame with big data, says The News Factor in the article, “Watch Out, Terrorists: Big Data Is On The Case.” Big data is nothing new, we just finally have the technology to aggregate the data and follow patterns using data mining and data visualization.
The Institute for the Study of Violent Groups is searching through ten years of data about suspected groups and individuals involved with terrorism and other crimes. The Institute is discovering patterns and information that was never possible before. Microsoft’s security researchers are up to their eyeballs in data on a daily basis that they analyze for cyber attacks. Microsoft recently allocated more resources to develop better network analytical tools.
The article says that while these organizations’ efforts are praiseworthy, the only way to truly slow cyber crime is to place a filter over the entire Internet. Here comes the company plug:
“That’s where new data-visualization technology, from vendors such as Tableau and Tibco Software, hold potential for making a big difference over time. These tools enable rank-and-file employees to creatively correlate information and assist in spotting, and stopping, cybercriminals.”
Big data’s superpowers are limited to isolated areas and where it has been deployed. Its major weakness is the entire Internet. Again, not the end all answer.
Whitney Grace, September 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Social Media Can Prevent Death
September 1, 2013
In addition to exercise and therapy, there might be another way to lower the suicide rate among veterans. Benton Pena takes a look at how, “Monitoring Amicable Media To Cut A Troops Self-Murder Rate.” Big data specialists believe that by watching veterans’ amicable social media for despondency signs they will be able to intervene at the proper moment. Using analytics, the specialists would inspect thousands of posts for key terms and other red flags. Dubbed the Durkheim Project, the goal is to build algorithms to track the phrases or words that are predictive of suicide.
The way veterans use social media is a direct reflection of their attitude. It corresponds with doctors’ notes about how veterans behave, such as a healthy patient focusing on hygiene while an unhealthy one will segway the conversation onto restlessness and fears. Monitoring social media over time paints a picture of the patient’s mood.
“This kind of sundry language, as good as a shorthand used on amicable media, can be intensely severe to analyze, pronounced Sid Probstein, a arch record officer for Attivio, that is obliged for that analysis. How those phrases change over time can also be a warning sign, Probstein said, so a outrageous volume of information has to be collected from content messages, Twitter, Facebook, and other amicable media outlets and analyzed.”
Social media has become a cache all of confessions and random thoughts, sort of like journals from the days of old. Unlike private journals, which were usually kept hidden, social media can be monitored and analyzed instantly. Preventing veteran suicides is important to post-war recovery and the work by the Durkheim Projects may indeed contribute to the saving of lives.
Whitney Grace, September 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Clarabridge CEO Reveals Company Strategy
August 30, 2013
The One Million by One Million Blog recently published an interesting piece on the unique tactics one CEM solutions provider is using to distinguish itself from the competition in the article,“Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge.”
In the article, Sid Banerjee, the CEO of Clarabridge, a leading provider of Intelligent Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, offers his take on the ways that his company has utilized big data volumes to its advantage by inventing tools that sift through it and gather actionable intelligence from that data.
Banerjee said:
“We are not primarily selling a marketing solution, but a customer experience management solution that helps keep customers happy. You can use the same technology and apply it to marketing – providing a service to a customer or predicting what a customer might want to buy.”
Clarabridge is not the only company offering predictive analytics tools but it one that offers a customer centered experience and that is continuing to evolve to match an international market.
Jasmine Ashton, August 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Zylab Becomes First Provider to Offer Visual Classification in eDiscovery
August 29, 2013
Big Data is strongly impacting the way that we do business today and companies are continually coming out with better, more encompassing products to effectively utilize this unstructured data. The recent IDM article “ZyLAB offers visual classification for eDiscovery” explains how ZyLAB, a provider of eDiscovery and information management tools, will now be including visual classification and audio search within its suite of multi media data analytics tools.
The article states:
“ZyLAB’s Visual Classification automatically recognises pictures and identifies amongst others: people, babies, elderly people, flowers, cars, planes, in- and outdoor scenes, and many other concepts. The new functionality is perfectly usable for the identification of images of personal identifiable information (PII), potential intellectual property, handwritten notes, check’s, ID’s, and other information that otherwise cannot be recognised automatically.”
Zylab is currently the first provider to market this technology in the eDiscovery space and this helps streamline workflow processes.
Jasmine Ashton, August 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Lucene Solr Has First Female Committer
August 28, 2013
CMS Wire has a new edition of Big Data Bits that features a lot of exciting news for the open source community. Read the latest in their article, “Big Data Bits: Featuring Facebook, Apache Giraph, Continuuity, LucidWorks, Hortonworks & Infochimps.”
The article begins:
“Talk about leaning in, Apache Lucene/Solr’s newest core-commiter is female! Out of the 43 individuals in this prestigious group, Cassandra Targett is the only woman. From what we can tell, she didn’t have to break through a glass ceiling to claim her place, instead she used a great deal of her talent and time to create the Solr reference guide and to update it after each release. While Targett did much of this work as an employee of LucidWorks, now that the company has donated the Lucene/Solr documentation to the Community, she’s ‘volunteering’ there.”
This is good news for women in the open source community. It also bodes well for LucidWorks. They are the commercial entity behind the Apache Lucene Solr community and they employ one-quarter of the core committers on the Apache Lucene Solr project. They build LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data on top of the foundation of Apache Lucene Solr, which leads to an agile, cost-effective solution that is renowned in the industry for its support.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Here Comes Another Buzzword
August 27, 2013
By reading the title, you might be asking what the new buzzword is. Take a look at Information Week’s article, “Big Data Ushers In ‘Virtuous Cycle Of Computing’” for the answer. The beginning of the article mentions that we are heading into an age of cloud computing that increase the amount of users and devices. Intel is responsible for the term “virtuous cycle of computing” that means a “system of events that reinforces itself in a continuous loop. Right now this refers to big data. Intel senior VP Diane Bryant that recent big data surge is because of the growing demand of end-user and machine-to-machine devices.
Business-to-business hardware is in high demand, which then causes the sharing of large data amounts of data.
“Bryant estimated that more than 14 billion devices will come online by 2016. Five billion of them will be consumer machines such as tablets and smartphones; the other 9 billion will be machine-to-machine hardware. ‘As those devices come online, they require a connection back to the data center,’ she said. ‘For every 600 phones, you’re going to need another server in a data center. For every 120 tablets, you’ll need a server.’ “
Data in the palm of your hand with reliable Internet services everywhere. Can anyone else say magic? At least it feels like it. The perpetuation of the virtuous cycle of computing only means more reliable devices and better transference of data. Wait until they develop the holographic UI.
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Do Not Disregard Salience
August 27, 2013
Here is a story for all of you object relational fans out there from the Lexalytics Development Blog: “Exploratory Text Analytics Using Object-Relational Mappings.” The post starts out explaining how salience, a process that examines content such as mention of a specific item or detecting a document’s tone, is a business intelligence tool with a lot potential. Many users, however, do not know what salience can actually do with their data. There is another problem is that salience is a low-level engine in any customer application and the user needs to design a better application to extract and analyze the data.
The good news is that there is a viable solution:
“…[A] couple of enabling technologies have been developed that allow customers to take the initial data analysis phase back into their own hands. The first enabling technology is that of automated object/relation mapping (ORM) frameworks. ORM frameworks store the internal data objects produced by object-oriented programming languages (like Java or C#) into a relational database, where they can be made accessible to any application. ORM frameworks have been around for decades, but they required (painful) manual configuration to set them up. Modern ORM frameworks now have automated mapping capabilities that them to configure themselves from the structure of the data objects. What this means for Salience is that is now easy to dump everything that Salience extracts—everything—into a database.”
The post runs through an ORM implementation and how to get a salience application set up. Salience sounds a lot like big data. Could this be the next big data trend, salience detection apps?
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Artificial Intelligence is no Threat to Analytics Jobs
August 21, 2013
As the fields of artificial intelligence and big data analytics continue to grow greater every year, the idea that their paths will converge is not totally farfetched. While this has some worried, we are not among them after reading a recent Extreme Tech article, “Artificial Intelligence Has the Verbal Skills of a Four-Year-Old, Still No Common Sense.”
According to the story:
An artificial intelligence like >this one might have access to a lot of data, but it can’t draw on it to make rational judgements by leveraging implicit facts — things that we all know, but are so obvious we wouldn’t even consider them relevant information. ConceptNet might know that water freezes at 32 degrees, but it doesn’t know how to get from that concept to the idea that ice is cold. This is basically common sense — humans (even children) have it and computers don’t.
This should come as a comfort for anyone working in the analytics field. There is still a strong need for human intellect to interpret all the raw data floating around out there. As this article recently pointed out, right now is actually the best time to start networking in the analytics field. We totally agree.
Patrick Roland, August 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Next Generation Content Processing: Tail Fins and Big Data
August 19, 2013
Note: I wrote this for Homeland Security Today. It will appear when the site works out its production problems. As background, check out “The Defense Department Thinks Troves of Personal Data Pose a National Security Threat.” If the Big Data systems worked as marketers said, the next generation systems would these success stories provide ample evidence of the value of these Big Data systems?]
Next-generation content processing seems, like wine, to improve with age. Over the last four years, smart software has been enhanced by design. What is your impression of the eye-popping interfaces from high-profile vendors like Algilex, Cybertap, Digital Reasoning, IBM i2, Palantir, Recorded Future, and similar firms? ((A useful list is available from Carahsoft at http://goo.gl/v853TK.)
For me, I am reminded of the design trends for tail fins and chrome for US automobiles in the 1950s and 1960s. Technology advances in these two decades moved forward, but soaring fins and chrome bright work advanced more quickly. The basics of the automobile remained unchanged. Even today’s most advanced models perform the same functions as the Kings of Chrome of an earlier era. Eye candy has been enhanced with creature comforts. But the basics of today’s automobile would be recognized and easily used by a driver from Chubby Checker’s era. The refrain “Let’s twist again like we did last summer” applies to most of the advanced software used by law enforcement and the intelligence community.
[Image file: tailfin.png]
The tailfin of a 1959 Cadillac. Although bold, the tailfins of the 1959 Plymouth Fury and the limited production Superbird and Dodge Daytona dwarfed GM’s excesses. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cadillac1001.jpg
Try this simple test. Here are screenshots from five next-generation content processing systems. Can you match the graphics with the vendor?
Here are the companies whose visual outputs appear below. Easy enough, just like one of those primary school exercises, simply match the interface with the company
The vendors represented are:
A Digital Reasoning (founded in 2000 funded in part by SilverLake. The company positions itself as providing automated understanding as did Autonomy, founded in 1996)
B IBM i2 (industry leader since the mid 1990s)
C Palantir (founded a decade ago with $300 million in funding by Founders fund, Glynn Capital Management, and others)
D Quid (a start up funded in part by Atomico, SV Angel, and others)
E Recorded Future (funded in part by In-Q-Tel and Google, founded by the developer of Spotfire)
Useful Suggestion For The Magic Bullet Hadoop
August 13, 2013
Downloading Hadoop and expecting it to solve all your problems is dumb way to use the software. Silicon Angle has some suggestions on how to use Hadoop in, “To Succeed With Hadoop: Find Specific Problem Areas And Solve Them.” The advice comes from Datameer CEO/Founder Stefan Groschupf at the recent Hadoop Summit 2013.
Groschupf acknowledged that Hadoop is another tool in the big data toolbox and the real power of a company does not come from just its tools, build its customer base, quality products with an edge that no one else has, and to stay in the black. Most importantly is to find a problem no one else has resolved and do it yourself.
That seems to be the only advice the article offers. The rest is an advertisement for Datameer 3.0, which is the newest tool for big data analytics:
“Datameer 3.0 adds new Smart Analytic functions. With a single click, it automatically identifies patterns, relationships, and recommendations based on data stored in Hadoop. For the first time, four advanced machine learning techniques become self-service and accessible for data-driven business users: Clustering, Decision Trees, Column Dependencies and Recommendations. Until now, these advanced analytics required highly specialized data scientists to build custom functionality, which was a costly and time-consuming process.”
So get a gimmick kids! Once you have that you will succeed. It worked for Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, and Lady Gaga.
Whitney Grace, August 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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