Medical Surveillance: Numerous Applications for Government Entities and Entrepreneurs
March 16, 2020
With the Corona virus capturing headlines and disrupting routines, how can smart software monitoring data help with the current problem?
DarkCyber assumes that government health professionals would want to make use of technology that reduced a Corona disruption. Enforcement professionals would understand that monitoring, alerting, and identifying functions could assist in spotting issues; for example, in a particular region.
What’s interesting is that the application of intelware systems and methods to health issues is likely to become a robust business. However, despite the effective application of established techniques, identifying signals in a stream of data is an extension of innovations reaching back to i2 Analyst Notebook and other sensemaking systems in wide use in many countries’ enforcement and intelligence agencies.
What’s different is the keen attention these monitoring, alerting, and identifying systems are attracting.
Let’s take one example: Bluedot, a company operating from Canada. Founded by an infectious disease physician, Dr. Kamran Kahn. This company was one of the first firms to highlight the threat posed by the Coronavirus. According to Diginomica, BlueDot “alerted its private sector and government clients about a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases happening around a market in Wuhan, China.”
BlueDot, founded in 2013, combined expertise in infectious disease, artificial intelligence, analytics, and flows of open source and specialized information. “How Canadian AI start-up BlueDot Spotted Coronavirus before Anyone Else Had a Clue” explains what the company did to sound the alarm:
The BlueDot engine gathers data on over 150 diseases and syndromes around the world searching every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. This includes official data from organizations like the Center for Disease Control or the World Health Organization. But, the system also counts on less structured information. Much of BlueDot’s predictive ability comes from data it collects outside official health care sources including, for example, the worldwide movements of more than four billion travelers on commercial flights every year; human, animal and insect population data; climate data from satellites; and local information from journalists and healthcare workers, pouring through 100,000 online articles each day spanning 65 languages. BlueDot’s specialists manually classified the data, developed a taxonomy so relevant keywords could be scanned efficiently, and then applied machine learning and natural language processing to train the system. As a result, it says, only a handful of cases are flagged for human experts to analyze. BlueDot sends out regular alerts to health care, government, business, and public health clients. The alerts provide brief synopses of anomalous disease outbreaks that its AI engine has discovered and the risks they may pose.
DarkCyber interprets BlueDot’s pinpointing of the Corona virus as an important achievement. More importantly, DarkCyber sees BlueDot’s system as an example of innovators replicating the systems, methods, procedures, and outputs from intelware and policeware systems.
Independent thinkers arrive at a practical workflow to convert raw data into high-value insights. BlueDot is a company that points the way to the future of deriving actionable information from a range of content.
Some vendors of specialized software work hard to keep their systems and methods confidential and in some cases secret. Now a person interested in how some specialized software and service providers assist government agencies, intelligence professionals, and security experts can read about BlueDot in open source articles like the one cited in this blog post or work through the information on the BlueDot Web site. The company wants to hire a surveillance analyst. Click here for information.
Net net: BlueDot provides a template for innovators wanting to apply systems and methods that once were classified or confidential to commercial problems. Business intelligence may become more like traditional intelligence more quickly than some anticipated.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2020
Import.io and Connotate: One Year Later
March 3, 2020
There has been an interesting shift in search and content processing. Import.io, founded in 2012, purchased Connotate. Before you ask, “Connotate what?”, let me say that Connotate was a content scraping and analysis firm. I paid some attention to Connotate when it acquired Fetch, an outfit with an honest-to-goodness Xoogler on its team. Fetch processed structure data and Connotate was mostly an unstructured data outfit. I asked a Connotate professional when the company would process Dark Web content, only to be told, “We can’t comment on that.” Secretive, right.
Connotate was founded in 2000 and required about $25 million in funding. The amount Import.io paid was not revealed in a source to which DarkCyber has access. Import.io, which has ingested about $38 million. DarkCyber assumes that the stakeholders are confident that 1 + 1 will equal 3 or more.
Import.io says:
We are funded by some of the greatest minds in technology.
The great minds include AME Cloud Ventures, Open Ocean, IP Group, and several others.
The company explains:
Starting from a simple web data extractor and evolving to an enterprise level solution for concurrently getting data that drives business, industry, and goodness.
What’s the company provide? The answer is Web data integration: Identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume content from a user-provided list of urls. To illustrate the depth of the company’s capabilities, Import.io defines “prepare” this way:
Integrate prepared data with a library of APIs to support seamless integration with internal business systems and workflows or deliver it to any data repository to develop robust data sets for advanced analytics capabilities.
The firm’s Web site makes it clear that it serves the online travel, retail, manufacturing, hedge fund, advisory services, data scientists, analysts, journalists, marketing and product, hospitality, and media producers. These are a mix of sectors and industries, and DarkCyber did not create the grammatically inconsistent listing.
Import.io offers videos which provide some information about one of its important innovations “interactive extractors.” The idea is to convert script editing to point-and-click choices.
The company is growing. About a year ago, Import.io said that it experienced record sales growth. The company provided a link to its Help Center, but a number of panels contained neither information nor links to content.
The company offers a free version and a premium version. Price quotes are provided by the company.
Like Amplyfi and maybe ServiceMaster, Import.io is a company providing search and content processing with a 21st century business positioning. A new buzzword is needed to convey what Import.io, Amplyfi, and Service Master are providing. DarkCyber believes that these companies are examples of where search and content processing has begun to coalesce.
The question is, “Is acquiring, indexing, and analyzing OSINT content a truck stop or a destination like Miami Beach?”
Worth monitoring the trajectory of the company.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2020
An Interesting View of Snowden
October 2, 2019
DarkCyber noted “Looking Back at the Snowden Revelations.” This essay highlights the “cryptographic” angle of the leaked documents. Key points in the essay are:
- Explanation of the collect everything method
- The importance of signals intelligence
- The “problem” of encryption.
The write up states:
…the world that Snowden brought to our attention isn’t necessarily a world that Americans have much say in. As an example: today the U.S. government is in the midst of forcing a standoff with China over the global deployment of Huawei’s 5G wireless networks around the world. This is a complicated issue, and financial interest probably plays a big role. But global security also matters here. This conflict is perhaps the clearest acknowledgement we’re likely to see that our own government knows how much control of communications networks really matters, and our inability to secure communications on these networks could really hurt us. This means that we, here in the West, had better get our stuff together — or else we should be prepared to get a taste of our own medicine.
Interesting write up. Should the focus be on government collection and analysis?
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2019
Is Google Aiding the Chinese Government?
July 17, 2019
DarkCyber does not know if Google is aiding the Chinese government. Axios published this story — “Peter Thiel says FBI, CIA should probe Google” — which seems to suggest that the fun loving Googlers are up to something. Here’s the segment of the write up which we circled in red:
“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
“Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?”
These appear to be allegations wrapped in a question bundle. Who can get upset with a few questions?
One thing is certain: Google needs big, new revenue to keep the system rolling. With costs of infrastructure skyrocketing, Google has to generate revenue or face the unpleasant task of curtailing spending. Add to the mix the Bezos bulldozer; that is, the system which gets people to pay for the Amazon plumbing as the company expands its online advertising, policeware, and services businesses. Facebook — despite its self inflicted wounds — continues to push forward. Libra, the proposed digital currency for the country of Facebook, seems more innovative than Google’s new social media meet up service.
Who can answer the Peter Thiel questions? Perhaps Palantir Gotham armed with the “right” data? Will Google trip on its shoelaces?
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2019
Another List of Business Intelligence Missteps
June 3, 2019
AI has the business intelligence field booming, but not every company uses these tools as well as they could. ITWeb shares a white paper titled, “The Top Five Worst Practices in Business Intelligence,” produced by Information Builders. We wonder—why only five? Oh well, perhaps there will be a sequel. The paper’s introduction states:
“Companies of all sizes suffer from countless oversights and poor judgment calls during planning, tool selection, and rollout – mistakes that can be detrimental to BI success. Even the smartest, best-run businesses in the world commit the common missteps that doom BI projects to shelfware and failure.
The list below, culled through the real-world experiences of Information Builders’ BI experts, comprises what we consider the five worst practices leading to poor results in BI deployments. … This white paper discusses these five worst practices in business intelligence, outlines their negative impact from both a technology and a business perspective, and serves as a guide for avoiding them.”
The first worst practice listed is Depending on Humans to Operationalize Insights; be sure analytics are embedded alongside insights, we’re warned. Next is Expecting Self-Service BI to Address All Your Needs. Though some users can make use of self-service BI, advanced users need more flexibility, while executives require summaries and alerts. Then we have Underestimating the Importance of Data Preparation, which we agree cannot be over emphasized. (The old adage garbage-in-garbage-out comes to mind.) At number four is Using Tactical BI Tools to Support Broad BI Strategies—a hodgepodge of specific tools will fail to address the needs of the larger organization; both discovery tools and summary apps are required. Finally, Ignoring Important Data Sources rounds out the list; specifically, we’re told:
“BI initiatives tend to focus on the information contained in ERP and CRM applications, relational databases, data warehouses and marts, and other enterprise systems. However, important other data sources, such as machine-generated, mobile, location, social media, and web monitoring data, which contain a wealth of crucial insight, have emerged. Today, IDC estimates that as much as 90 percent of available content is unstructured, residing in various formats and places.”
See the white paper, downloadable for free here, for more details on each point. It is worth noting the paper concludes by promoting Information Builders’ own platform, WebFOCUS, to guard against such mistakes. Still, the list could be helpful if taken with that salt grain.
Cynthia Murrell, June 3, 2019
15 Reasons You Need Business Intelligence Software
May 21, 2019
I read StrategyDriven’s “The Importance of Business Intelligence Software and Why It’s Integral for Business Success.” I found the laundry list interesting, but I asked myself, “If BI software is so important, why is it necessary to provide 15 reasons?”
I went through the list of items a couple of times.Some of the reasons struck me as a bit of a stretch. I had a teacher at the University of Illinois who loved the phrase “a bit of a stretch, right” when a graduate student proposed a wild and crazy hypothesis or drew a nutsy conclusion from data.
Let’s look at four of these reasons and see if there’s merit to my skepticism about delivering fish to a busy manager when the person wanted a fish sandwich.
Reason 1: Better business decisions. Really? If a BI system outputs data to a clueless person or uses flawed, incomplete, or stale data to present an output to a bright person, are better business decisions an outcome? In my experience, nope.
Reason 6. Accurate decision making. What the human does with the outputs is likely to result in a decision. That’s true. But accurate? Too many variables exist to create a one to one correlation with the assertion and what happens in a decider’s head or among a group of deciders who get together to figure out what to do. Example: Google has data. Google decided to pay a person accused of improper behavior millions of dollars. Accurate decision making? I suppose it depends on one’s point of view.
Reason 11. Reduced cost. I am confident when I say, “Most companies do not calculate or have the ability to assemble the information needed to produce fully loaded costs.” Consequently, the cost of a BI system is not the license fee. There are the associated directs and indirects. And when a decision from the BI system is wrong, there are some other costs as well. How are Facebook’s eDiscovery systems generating a payback today? Facebook has data, but the costs of its eDiscovery systems are not known, nor does anyone care as the legal hassles continue to flood the company’s executive suite.
Reason 13. High quality data. Whoa, hold your horses. The data cost is an issue in virtually every company with which I have experience. No one wants to invest to make certain that the information is complete, accurate, up to date, and maintained (indexed accurately and put in a consistent format). This is a pretty crazy assertion about BI when there is no guarantee that the data fed into the system is representative, comprehensive, accurate, and fresh.
Business intelligence is a tool. Use of a BI system does not generate guaranteed outcomes.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2019
Business Intelligence: Some Worst Practices
April 16, 2019
AI has the business intelligence field booming, but not every company uses these tools as well as they could. ITWeb shares a white paper titled, “The Top Five Worst Practices in Business Intelligence,” produced by Information Builders. We wonder—why only five? Oh well, perhaps there will be a sequel. The paper’s introduction states:
“Companies of all sizes suffer from countless oversights and poor judgment calls during planning, tool selection, and rollout – mistakes that can be detrimental to BI success. Even the smartest, best-run businesses in the world commit the common missteps that doom BI projects to shelfware and failure.
The worst practices have been shaped by subjective methods. Accurate? Judge for yourself.
The first worst practice listed is Depending on Humans to Operationalize Insights; be sure analytics are embedded alongside insights, we’re warned. Next is Expecting Self-Service BI to Address All Your Needs. Though some users can make use of self-service BI, advanced users need more flexibility, while executives require summaries and alerts. Then we have Underestimating the Importance of Data Preparation, which we agree cannot be over emphasized. (The old adage garbage-in-garbage-out comes to mind.) At number four is Using Tactical BI Tools to Support Broad BI Strategies—a hodgepodge of specific tools will fail to address the needs of the larger organization; both discovery tools and summary apps are required. Finally, Ignoring Important Data Sources rounds out the list; specifically, we’re told:
“BI initiatives tend to focus on the information contained in ERP and CRM applications, relational databases, data warehouses and marts, and other enterprise systems. However, important other data sources, such as machine-generated, mobile, location, social media, and web monitoring data, which contain a wealth of crucial insight, have emerged. Today, IDC estimates that as much as 90 percent of available content is unstructured, residing in various formats and places.”
See the white paper, downloadable for free here, for more details on each point. It is worth noting the paper concludes by promoting Information Builders’ own platform, WebFOCUS, to guard against such mistakes. Still, the list could be helpful if taken with that salt grain.
Is business intelligence an oxymoron?
Cynthia Murrell, April 16, 2019
Deep Fakes: Technology Is Usually Neutral
December 18, 2018
Ferreting out fake news has become an obsession for search and AI jockeys around the globe. However, those jobs are nothing compared to the wave of fake photos and videos that grow increasingly convincing as technology helps to iron out the wrinkles. That’s a scary prospect to more than a few experts, as we discovered in a recent MIT Technology Review article, “Deepfake Busting Apps Can Spot Even A Single Pixel Out of Place.”
According to the story:
“That same technology is creating a growing class of footage and photos, called “deepfakes,” that have the potential to undermine truth, confuse viewers, and sow discord at a much larger scale than we’ve already seen with text-based fake news.”
Deepfakes are fun and possibly threatening to some. The “experts” at high tech firms will use their management expertise to reduce any anxieties the deepfakes spark. But some Luddites think these videos and images have the potential to disrupt governments and elections in countries where online is pervasive. Beyond Search is comforted by the knowledge that bright, objective, ethical minds are on the case. One question: What if these whiz kids are angling for a more selfish outcome?
Patrick Roland, December 18, 2018
Business Intelligence: A Priority for 2019
December 12, 2018
Despite the emergence of what look like monopolies, many companies want to know what their competition is doing. If you have the cash and expertise, you can use tools from Tibco or Quid. But what if money is not flowing like cash into Facebook and Google?
We noted Business 2 Community’s article: “5 Free Tools To Help You Spy On Your Competitors.”
One tool is Google Alerts that can be set up to email you whenever your competition has new online results, while Social Mention is a search engines that specializes in searching social media and other user generated content Web sites. BuzzSumo is probably one of the best tools:
“Want to create content that gets a ton of engagement like your competition does? BuzzSumo is one of the best tools available for content marketing and spying on your competition. With this tool you can enter the domain of your competition and see what content is performing the best for them. BuzzSumo will display how many shares they get on social media and who their biggest influencers are. This valuable information will help you analyze the top performing content topics and formats so that you can step up your content marketing game.”
Likealyzer is a Facebook analyzer that generates reports on well a Facebook page is doing and how it can be improved, while Woorank does the same except for the competition’s Web site.
Will these tools answer your business questions? Probably not in a comprehensive manner. But the free stuff is worth checking out.
Whitney Grace, December 12, 2018
The Obvious: Business Intelligence Tools May Need Clarity
August 14, 2018
Artificial intelligence and business have been a natural pair since the moment we began speculating about this technology. However, we are currently in a sort of golden age of AI for business (or drowning in a swamp of it, depending who you ask) and we could all use a little help sorting through the options. That’s why a recent Data Science Central story “A Comparative Analysis of Top 6 BI and Data Visualization Tools in 2018” seemed so relevant.
According to the story:
“It is often hard to separate the facts from fiction when evaluating various business intelligence (BI) tools, as every BI vendor markets their product as the only “best” solution, often flooding the Internet with biased reviews. If you want to understand the functional product value, avoid the hype and useless clicking through endless pages of partial reviews, you’ve come to the right place.”
This is a very important breakdown and it goes over some really compelling programs, depending on your needs. This seems to be a trend in the industry as we become awash in BI choices. Recently, we also discovered a valuable contrast looking at augmented analytics versus business intelligence tools. What seems obvious is that developers are trying to provide point and click math insight and expertise to individuals who may lack a firm foundation in evaluating data quality, statistics, and other disciplines. No, majoring in medieval literature is not what is needed to make sense of data. To be fair, some find art in proofs.
Insight from slick interfaces? Maybe.
Patrick Roland, August 14, 2018
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