IBM on Cognitive Computing Safari in South Africa
February 9, 2017
The article on ZDNet titled IBM to Use AI to Tame Big Data in Its Second African Research Lab discusses the 12th global research unit IBM has opened. This one is positioned in South Africa for data analytics and cognitive computing as applied to healthcare and urban development. Dr. Solomon Assefa, IBM’s Director of Research for Africa, mentions in the article that the lab was opened in only 18 months. He goes on,
Assefa said the facility will combine industrial research with a startup incubator, working closely with Wits’ own entrepreneur accelerator in the same innovation hub, known as the Tshimologong Precinct. Tshimologong is part of a major urban renewal project by Wits and the City of Johannesburg.
Nowhere else in the world is there an innovation hub that houses a world class research lab,” Assefa said. “One thing we agreed on from the start is that we will make the lab accessible to startups and entrepreneurs in hub.
The lab is funded by a ten-year investment program of roughly $60M and maintains an open door policy with the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits), The Department of Trade and Industry, and the Department of Science and Technology. The immediate focuses of several early applications include Cape region forest fire prevention, disease monitoring, and virtual reality.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 9, 2017
Presenting Watson as a Service
February 9, 2017
Every now and then, interest in Watson re-emerges. Forbes published a long-read recently entitled How IBM Is Building A Business Around Watson. After gaining press during Watson’s victorious Jeopardy face-off with Ken Jennings, Watson’s first commercial applications took off. IBM sold it to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Wellpoint to design an advisory system for its medical staff. Other medical institutions have purchased it since then. The author asserts,
Still, the potentially is undeniable. Think about how much more effective an ordinary doctor can be with Watson as an assistant. First, even before the patient enters the room, it can analyze their personal medical history, which often runs to hundreds of pages. Then, it can compare the case history with the 700,000 academic papers published every year as well as potentially millions of other patient records. All of this is, of course, beyond the capabilities of human doctors, who typically only get a few minutes to prepare for each examination. So being able to consult with Watson will be enormously helpful.
The real value is offering Watson as a service by providing its API, so that developers in organizations can develop their own applications using its technology. Over 550 partners are utilizing this currently for everything from retail to geolocation to travel agencies. Certainly, with all the hype Watson receives, we can only expect usage to grow.
Megan Feil, February 9, 2017
Gradescope Cuts Grading Time in Half, Makes Teachers Lives 50% More Bearable
February 8, 2017
The article titled Professors of the World, Rejoice: Gradescope Brings AI to Grading on Nvidia might more correctly be titled: TAs of the World, Rejoice! In my experience, those hapless, hardworking, underpaid individuals are the ones doing most of the grunt work on college campuses. Any grad student who has faced a stack of essays or tests when their “real work” is calling knows the pain and redundancy of grading. Gradescope is an exciting innovation that cuts the time spent grading in half. The article explains,
The AI isn’t used to directly grade the papers; rather, it turns grading into an automated, highly repeatable exercise by learning to identify and group answers, and thus treat them as batches. Using an interface similar to a photo manager, instructors ensure that the automatically suggested answer groups are correct, and then score each answer with a rubric. In this way, input from users lets the AI continually improve its future predictions.
The trickiest part of this technology was handwriting recognition, and the Berkeley team used a “recurrent neural network trained using the Tesla K40 and GEForce GTX 980 Ti GPUs.” Interestingly, the app was initially created at least partly to prevent cheating. Students have been known to alter their answers after the fact and argue a failure of grading, so a digital record of the paper is extremely useful. This might sound like the end of teachers, but in reality it is the beginning of a giant, global teacher party!
Chelsea Kerwin, February 8, 2017
The Game-Changing Power of Visualization
February 8, 2017
Data visualization may be hitting at just the right time. Data Floq shared an article highlighting the latest, Data Visualisation Can Change How We Think About The World. As the article mentions, we are primed for it biologically: the human eye and brain processes 10 to 12 separate images per second, comfortably. Considering the output, visualization provides the ability to rapidly incorporate new data sets, remove metadata and increase performance. Data visualization is not without challenge. The article explains,
Perhaps the biggest challenge for data visualisation is understanding how to abstract and represent abstraction without compromising one of the two in the process. This challenge is deep rooted in the inherent simplicity of descriptive visual tools, which significantly clashes with the inherent complexity that defines predictive analytics. For the moment, this is a major issue in communicating data; The Chartered Management Institute found that 86% of 2,000 financiers surveyed late 2013, were still struggling to turn volumes of data into valuable insights. There is a need, for people to understand what led to the visualisation, each stage of the process that led to its design. But, as we increasingly adopt more and more data this is becoming increasingly difficult.
Is data visualization changing how we think about the world, or is the existence of big data the culprit? We would argue data visualization is simply a tool to present data; it is a product rather than an impetus for a paradigm shift. This piece is right, however in bringing attention to the conflict between detail and accessibility of information. We can’t help but think the meaning is likely in the balancing of both.
Megan Feil, February 8, 2017
Oracle Pays Big Premium for NetSuite and Larry Ellison Benefits
February 6, 2017
The article on Reuters titled Oracle-NetSuite Deal May Be Sweetest for Ellison emphasizes the perks of being an executive chairman like Larry Ellison, of Oracle. Ellison ranks as the third richest person in America and fifth in the world. The article suggests that his fortune of over $50B is often considered as mingling with Oracle’s $160B in a way that makes, if no one else, at least Reuters, very uncomfortable. The article does offer some context to the most recent acquisition of NetSuite, for which Oracle paid a 44% premium on a company of which Ellison owns a 45% stake.
NetSuite was founded by an ex-Oracle employee, bankrolled by Ellison. While Oracle concentrated on selling enterprise software to giant corporations, the upstart focused on servicing small and medium-sized companies using the cloud. The two companies’ businesses have increasingly overlapped as larger customers have become comfortable using web-based software.
As a result, it makes strategic sense to combine the two firms. And the process seems to have been handled right, with a committee of independent Oracle directors calling the shots.
The article also points out that such high surcharges aren’t all that unusual. Salesforce.com recently paid a 56% premium for Demandware. But in this case, things are complicated by Ellison’s potential conflict of interest. If Oracle had done more to invest in cloud business or NetSuite earlier, say four or five years ago, they would not find themselves forking over just under $10B now.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 6, 2017
Give a Problem, Take a Problem
February 3, 2017
An article at the Telegraph, “Employees Are Faster and More Creative When Solving Other People’s Problems,” suggests innovative ways to coax creative solutions from workers. Writer Daniel H. Pink describes three experiments, performed by New York University’s Evan Polman and Cornell’s Kyle Emich. The researchers found that, when posed with hypothetical scenarios, participants devised more creative solutions when problems were framed as being someone else’s. But why? Pink writes:
Polman and Emich build upon existing psychological research showing that when we think of situations or individuals that are distant – in space, time, or social connection – we think of them in the abstract. But when those things are close – near us physically, about to happen, or standing beside us – we think about them concretely. Over the years, social scientists have found that abstract thinking leads to greater creativity. That means that if we care about innovation we need to be more abstract and therefore more distant. But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. We draw closer rather than step back. That’s a mistake, Polman and Emich suggest. ‘That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self… should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers and advertisers, among many others,’ they write.
The article goes on to supply five practical suggestions this research has for business. For one, organizations can recruit independent directors to bring in more objective points of view. Pink also suggests keeping firms loosely structured, and bringing together peers from different fields to exchange ideas. On the individual level, he advises finding a “problem-swapping partner” with whom you can trade perspectives. Finally, workers can create psychological distance between themselves and their projects by imagining they’re helping out someone else.
Pink acknowledges a couple of caveats to this approach. For one, many tasks actually do require concrete thinking and laser focus; it is important to recognize them. Also, the business world is not currently structured to take advantage of this quirk of the human psyche. The article points to the growth of crowd-sourcing techniques as evidence that factor may change. Perhaps… but group think brings its own issues, like the potential for discounting experience and specialized skill sets, for example. To whom shall we turn for a fresh perspective on that problem?
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2017
Bradley Metrock and the Alexa Conference: Alexa As a Game Changer for Search and Publishing
February 2, 2017
Bradley Metrock, Score Publishing, organized The Alexa Conference held in January 2017. More than 60 attendees shared technical and business insights about Amazon’s voice-search enabled device. The conference recognized the opportunity Amazon’s innovative product represents. Keyword search traditionally has been dependent on a keyboard. Alexa changes the nature of information access. An Alexa owner can talk to a device which is about the size of a can of vegetables. Alexa is poised to nudge the world of information access and applications in new directions.
Bradley Metrock, Score Publishing, organized The Alexa Conference in January 2017. An expanded event is in the works.
After hearing a positive review of the conference, its speakers, and the programming event, I spoke with Mr. Metrock. The full text of the interview appears below:
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.
Delighted to do it.
What path did you follow to arrive at The Alexa Conference?
A somewhat surprising one. My background is in business, but I’ve always been keenly interested in publishing. It’s fascinating how the world of publishing has been ripped open by technology, allowing us as a society to shed gatekeepers and hear more stories from more people than we ever would have otherwise. In 2013, when I was in the process of selling a business, I discovered Apple’s iBooks Author software. I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t talking about it. It was such a gift: the ability to create next-generation, interactive and multimedia digital books that could be sold on Apple hardware (iPads at first, then later iPhones) all for no cost. The software was completely free. I formed Score Publishing, published books using iBooks Author, and organized the annual iBooks Author Conference which all sorts of people attend from all over the world. It’s been fun.
Where does Alexa fit into your interest in publishing books?
I approached Alexa at first from the standpoint of digital content creators: What do they need to get out of this tool? And out of the Internet of Things, in general?
Do you have an answer to this question about using Alexa as an authoring tool?
No, not yet. My long-term ambition with Alexa is to produce authoring tools for it that allow content creators to leverage their content effectively in an audio-only environment. Not just audio books, but the creation of voice-enabled applications around published works, from books to white papers and so forth.
What is needed to make it easy for an author or developer to leverage Amazon’s remarkable device and ecosystem?
That’s a good question. The first step toward doing that is learning Alexa myself and incorporating it into what Score Publishing already does. To that end, we decided to put on the first-ever Alexa Conference. We experienced directly the incredible value in bringing communities of people together on the iBooks Author side of things. We saw the same exact things with the just-completed Alexa Conference and can’t wait to do it again next January. In fact, we’re already planning it.
What were some of the takeaways for you from The Alexa Conference?
I think Amazon has opened an entirely new world with Alexa that perhaps even they didn’t fully appreciate at first. Alexa puts voice search in the home. But far from just new ways to buy products or services, Alexa allows every computing interface that exists today to be re-imagined with greater efficiency, while also creating greater accessibility to content than ever before. My eyes were opened in a big way.
Can you give me an example?
I can try, but it’s hard for me to even begin to explain, being relatively new to the technology and the ideas that Alexa (and IoT in general) bring to the table, but a good place to start is the summary from the first Alexa Conference. This report gives a taste of the topics and ideas covered.
One of the most interesting events at The Alexa Conference was the programming of an Alexa skill. You called it the Alexathon, right?
Yes, and it was fascinating to watch the participants at work and then experience what they created in less than 24 hours. Developers are red-hot for this technology and are eager to explore its full potential. They understand these are the early days, just like it was a decade ago with iOS apps for the iPad and iPhone. They see, in my opinion, a combination of opportunity and necessity in being part of it all.
What was the winning Alexa skill?
The winner was Xander Morrison, the Digital Community Coordinator at Sony Music’s Provident Label Group. It took Morrison just 24 hours to create his Nashville Tour Guide as an Alexa skill.
How does Alexa intersect with publishing?
I think the publishing industry doesn’t really understand the implications of the internet of things on its business. Companies like HarperCollins, whom I invited to be part of The Alexa Conference, sent Jolene Barto to the conference. She described how her company built an Alexa skill for one of the company’s most important markets. Her remarks sparked a lively question-and-answer session. HarperColllins seems to be one of the more proactive publishers in the Alexa space at this time.
Is it game over for Google and the other companies offering Alexa-type products and services?
No. I think it is the dawn of the voice enabled application era. Right now, it looks as if Alexa has a clear lead. But the Internet of Things is a very dynamic technology trend. The winner will probably be the company which creates tools.
What do you mean tools?
Software and system that make it easy for digital content to flow into it and be re-purposed in new and exciting ways.
Is this an opportunity for you and Score Publishing?
Yes. As I mentioned earlier, this is an area I want Score Publishing involved in. We may create some of the tools to help bridge the gap for content creators. Many authors and publishers have no interest in learning how to code. Alexa and the competing products do not make it easy for authors and publishers to get their content into the ecosystem all the same.
Google has a competing product and recently updated it. What’s your view of Google with regard to Alexa?
Google is definitely in the fray with Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana. Also, there are several other less well known competitors. Amazon’s primary advantage is how early Amazon opened up Alexa to third-party development. Alexa’s other advantages include the sheer marketing reach of Amazon. I learned at the conference that Amazon has done a great job in promoting promoting its hardware, from the Echo, Tap, and Dot. Now the the Amazon Kindle has Alexa baked into the device. Amazon has, in contrast to Apple and Google, demonstrated its willingness to spend significant dollars to advertise both Alexa and Alexa-enabled hardware.
However, Google has something Amazon doesn’t–search data. And Apple has the dominant mobile device. So there are advantages these other companies can bring to bear in competing in this space. I want to point out that Amazon has its shopping data, and its Alexa team will find ways to to leverage its consumer behavior data as Alexa evolves over time.
What are your ideas for The Alexa Conference 2018?
Yes. We will be having another The Alexa Conference in January 2018. The event will be held in Nashville, Tennessee. We want to expand the program. We hope to feature topic and industry-specific sub-tracks as well. If your readers want to sign up, we have Super Early Bird passes available now. There is a limited supply of these. We expect to announce more information in the next month or so.
How can a person inte4reserted in The Alexa Conference and Score Publishing contact you?
We have a number of de-centralized websites such as the iBooks Author Conference, the iBooks Author Universe (a free online learning resource for iBooks Author digital publishing) and now, the Alexa Conference. Following us on Twitter at @iBAConference and @AlexaConf is a great idea to stay in the know on either technology, and to reach me, people can email me directly at Bradley@AlexaConference.com.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
Stephen E. Arnold, February 2, 2017
Penn State Research Team Uses Big Data to Explore Crime Rates
February 2, 2017
The article on E&T titled Social Media and Taxi Data Improve Crime Pattern Picture delves into a fascinating study that uses big data involving taxi routes and social media location labels from sites like Foursquare to discover a correlation between taxis, locations of interest, and crime. The study was executed by Penn State researchers who are looking for a more useful way to estimate crime rates rather than the traditional approach targeting demographics and geographic data only. The article explains,
The researchers say that the analysis of crime statistics that encompass population, poverty, disadvantage index and ethnic diversity can provide more accurate estimates of crime rates … the team’s approach likens taxi routes to internet hyperlinks, connecting different communities with each other… One surprising discovery is that the data suggests areas with nightclubs tend to experience lower crime rates – at least in Chicago. The explanation may be that it reflects people’s choices to be there.
This research will be especially useful to city planners interested in how certain spaces are being used, and whether people want to go to those spaces. But the researcher Jessie Li, an assistant professor of information sciences, explained that while the correlation is clear, the underlying cause is not yet known.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 2, 2017
Fight Fake News with Science
February 1, 2017
With all the recent chatter around “fake news,” one researcher has decided to approach the problem scientifically. An article at Fortune reveals “What a Map of the Fake-News Ecosystem Says About the Problem.” Writer Mathew Ingram introduces us to data-journalism expert and professor Jonathan Albright, of Elon University, who has mapped the fake-news ecosystem. Facebook and Google are just unwitting distributors of faux facts; Albright wanted to examine the network of sites putting this stuff out there in the first place. See the article for a description of his methodology; Ingram summarizes the results:
More than anything, the impression one gets from looking at Albright’s network map is that there are some extremely powerful ‘nodes’ or hubs, that propel a lot of the traffic involving fake news. And it also shows an entire universe of sites that many people have probably never heard of. Two of the largest hubs Albright found were a site called Conservapedia—a kind of Wikipedia for the right wing—and another called Rense, both of which got huge amounts of incoming traffic. Other prominent destinations were sites like Breitbart News, DailyCaller and YouTube (the latter possibly as an attempt to monetize their traffic).
Albright said he specifically stayed away from trying to determine what or who is behind the rise of fake news. … He just wanted to try and get a handle on the scope of the problem, as well as a sense of how the various fake-news distribution or creation sites are inter-connected. Albright also wanted to do so with publicly-available data and open-source tools so others could build on it.
Albright also pointed out the folly of speculating on sources of fake news; such guesswork only “adds to the existing noise,” he noted. (Let’s hear it for common sense!) Ingram points out that, armed with Albright’s research, Google, Facebook, and other outlets may be better able to combat the problem.
Cynthia Murrell, February 1, 2017
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Releases Q4 Earnings of First Year After Split from HP
January 30, 2017
The article on Business Insider titled Hewlett Packard Enterprise Misses Its Q4 Revenue Expectations But Beats on Profit discusses the first year of HPE following its separation from HP. The article reports fiscal fourth quarter revenue of $12.5B, just short of the expected $12.85B. The article provides all of the nitty gritty details of the fourth quarter segment results, including,
Software revenue was $903 million, down 6% year over year, flat when adjusted for divestitures and currency, with a 32.1% operating margin. License revenue was down 5%, down 1% when adjusted for divestitures and currency, support revenue was down 7%, up 1% when adjusted for divestitures and currency, professional services revenue was down 7%, down 4% adjusted for divestitures and currency, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue was down 1%, up 11% adjusted for divestitures and currency.
Additionally, Enterprise Services revenue was reported as $4.7B, down 6% year over year, and Enterprise Group revenue was down 9% at $6.7B. Financial Services revenue was up 2% at $814M. According to HPE President and CEO Meg Whitman, all of this amounts to a major win for the standalone company. She emphasized the innovation and financial performance and called FY16 a “historic” year for the company.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 30, 2017
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