Visualization Woes: Smart Software Creates Human Problems
December 10, 2012
I am not dependent on visualization to figure out what data imply or “mean.” I have been a critic of systems which insulate the professional from the source information and data. I read “Visualization Problem”. The article focuses on the system user’s inability to come up with a mental picture or a concept. I learned:
I know I am supposed to get better with time, but it feels that the whole visualization part shouldn’t be this hard, especially since I can picture my wonderland so easily. I tried picturing my tulpa in my wonderland, in black/white voids, without any background, even what FAQ_man guide says about your surroundings, but none has worked. And I really have been working on her form for a long time.
A “tulpa” is a construct. But the key point is that the software cannot do the work of an inspired human.
The somewhat plaintive lament trigger three thoughts about the mad rush to “smart software” which converts data into high impact visuals.
First, a user may not be able to conceptualize what the visualization system is supposed to deliver in the first place. If a person becomes dependent on what the software provides, the user is flying blind. In the case of the “tulpa” problem, the result may be a lousy output. In the case of a smart business intelligence system such as Palantir’s or Centrifuge Systems’, the result may be data which are not understood.
Second, the weak link in this shift from “getting one’s hands dirty” by reviewing data, looking at exceptions, and making decisions about the processes to be used to generate a chart or graph puts the vendor in control. My view is that users of smart software have to do more than get the McDonald’s or KFC’s version of a good meal.
Third, with numerical literacy and a preference for “I’m feeling lucky” interfaces, the likelihood of content and data manipulation increases dramatically.
I am not able to judge a good “tulpa” from a bad “tulpa.” I do know that as smart software diffuses, the problem software will solve is the human factor. I think that is not such a good thing. From the author’s pain learning will result. For a vendor, from the author’s pain motivation to deliver predictive outputs and more training wheel functions will be what research and develop focuses upon.
I prefer a system with balance like Digital Reasoning’s: Advanced technology, appropriate user controls, and an interface which permits closer looks at data.
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2012
Interesting Software Companies in Indiana List Features Megaputer
December 8, 2012
Recently we stumbled across an interesting site with lists of software companies all over the world. All lists are created based on location and narrowing in on the alphabetical list in Indiana, we saw Megaputer Intelligence listed as 114. While there are hordes of technology vendors offering similar solutions, Megaputer provides a single, intuitive package with PolyAnalyst.
Megaputer has stuck out in the industry as a great way to simplify analytics with their data and text mining solutions. Both structured and unstructured data are churned through PolyAnalyst. Knowledge, insights and opportunities are turned out on the other side and in the hands of decision-makers.
We learned about the following benefits after exploring more about Megaputer:
“-Empowers data analysts to create multi-step data analysis scenarios and report templates for decision makers through a simple drag-and-drop interface
-Presents insights derived from data modeling to business users in the form of easy to understand reports, thus enabling them to make more informed decisions.”
Essentially, PolyAnalyst covers the complete data analysis process from ETL and integration to data modeling and reporting. A comprehensive selection of algorithms for automated analysis of text and structured data is also a hallmark feature of this technology.
Megan Feil, December 08, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Inbenta Semantic Search Brings Customer Satisfaction Solutions
December 7, 2012
An innovative small company in Spain that focuses on Natural Language Processing and Semantic Search is expanding business internationally and making some impressive changes. Inbenta, based in Barcelona and Sunnyvale, CA, is an organization developing new computational linguistics and web technologies. The company’s attention to innovation and action is evident in the company’s new deal with Grasshopper, a virtual phone system.
Grasshopper helps small businesses sound professional and stay connected from anywhere. Inbenta’s “Instant Email” functionality dynamically retrieves relevant articles and FAQs as users type emails.
Grasshopper was able to reduce the number of oncoming emails by implementing Inbenta Semantic Search on their Customer Support Portal. We learn about the advantages brought by the company in the article “Grasshopper Reduces the Number of Incoming E-mails by Using Inbenta on Their Customer Support Portal” on PRWeb.
Allison Canty, Social Media and Community Manager at Grasshopper, may have expressed it best:
We saw results almost immediately after implementing Inbenta on our Zendesk powered support site. In the first two months alone, the percentage of unanswered questions went down, from 21.83% to 8.29% and our click-through ratio increased by 34.4%.
“In the first week after implementing Inbenta’s dynamic FAQs on our ‘Submit a Request’ page, we measured a 22.91% deflection rate for Emails/Tickets […]
With strategies geared toward customer service solutions and not simply technology updates, it is easy to see why Inbenta is evolving and catching fire worldwide. We look forward to seeing what the company will continue to offer and hope the focus on customer satisfaction becomes a trend in the market.
Andrea Hayden, December 7, 2012
Exclusive Interview with the CTO of Cybertap
December 4, 2012
Cybertap is a company which pushes beyond key word search. The firm’s technology permits a different type of information retrieval.
In an exclusive interview with ArnoldIT, Cybertap revealed that hidden within the network traffic are malicious attacks, personal and medical information leaks, and insider theft of intellectual property and financial information. Cybertap’s clients use Recon to keep tabs on the good and the bad being done on their networks and who’s doing it, so that they can take the proper actions to mitigate any damage and bring the individuals to account.
Dr. Russ Couturier, Chief Technology Officer of Cybertap, recently granted an exclusive interview to the Arnold Information Technology Search Wizards Speak series to discuss Cybertap Recon, a product that applies big data analytics to captured network traffic to give organizations unparalleled visibility into what is transpiring both on and to their networks.
Until recently, the firm’s technology was available to niche markets. However, due to the growing demand to identify potentially improper actions, Cybertap has introduced its technology to organizations engaged in fraud detection and related disciplines. The Cybertap system facilitates information analysis in financial services, health care, and competitive intelligence.
Dr. Couturier said:
Recon is able to decrease risk and improve your situational awareness by decreasing the time to resolution of a cyber event and by improving your knowledge of what happened during a cyber event. We are incorporating big data analysis techniques to reduce the meaningless data and quantify the meaningful information using categorization, semantic, and sentiment tools,” Couturier said. “Recon presents the information as it was originally seen so analysts can follow conversations and threads in context.
The firm’s system processes content, embedded files, attachments, attributes, network protocol data, metadata, and entities. Developers incorporated semantic analysis tools to “roll-up” large volumes of data into what they call “themes” and “topics.” This aggregation enables researchers to more quickly decide whether information is relevant.
He added:
Mash ups and data fusion are crucial when dealing with big data. You can search, visualize, link, and reconstruct exactly what happened from the primary source and reduce investigation times by hours or days.
Cybertap is one of a handful of content processing firms taking findability to a new level of utility. The firm’s system combines next-generation methods with a search box and visualization to provide unique insights into information processed by the Cybertap system. The full text of the interview is available at www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/cybertap.html.
Cybertap LLC’s vision is to integrate the best-of-breed cyber forensics, analysis, and security technologies. Cybertap serves all markets requiring solutions next generation data analysis tools including: federal government markets, both civilian and Department of Defense agencies; commercial markets; and state and local governments. The privately held company has offices located in Vienna, Virginia; Englewood, Colorado and Palmer, Massachusetts.
The system is important because it underscores the opportunities for innovators in information retrieval and analysis. Cybertap combines search with a range of functions which allow a combination of alerting, discovering, and finding. In my experience, few products offer this type of pragmatic insight without the costs and complexities of traditional systems built by cobbling together different vendors’ products.
Search Wizards Speak is the largest collection of interviews with innovators and developers working in search and content processing. An index to the more than 60 interviews is available at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/.
Additional information about Cybertap LLC is available at http://www.cybertapllc.com.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2012
Possible SharePoint and Lync Server Price Increases
November 30, 2012
It is rumored that SharePoint and Lync Server prices will increase, but Caroline Donnelly says enterprise users may end up better off. She discusses the claim in the ITPro article, “Microsoft Users Warned of Upcoming SharePoint and Lync Server Price Hikes.” Richard Gibbons, software manager at Microsoft reseller Bechtle Direct says that SharePoint prices may go from £4,000 at the moment, so an extra £1,500 for 2013. This is added:
Gibbons was quick to point out that end users who stump up for the 2013 versions of Sharepoint and Lync from 1 December will be rewarded with extra functionality, which might make the price hikes a little easier for some end users to swallow.
For instance, Microsoft has introduced changes that mean end users will no longer need to purchase additional SharePoint for Internet licenses, which allow external users to access the software.
And while the added functionality comes at a cost for Standard users, enterprise users already having the features could end up paying less. The price hike doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, but the amount may be hard for many to justify. To save resources, consider evaluating your third party tools and streamlining your systems. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers Enterprise Search with SharePoint Connectors so to easily snap into your existing farm. In addition to all-inclusive search, Mindbreeze creates relevant knowledge by storing data according to type and relevance while processing data in a comprehensible form at a fair price.
Philip West, November 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Is the Series A Crunch Going to Starve Search Vendors?
November 29, 2012
Short honk. If you watch the venture capital league tables, you will want to read “The Series A Crunch Is Hitting Now. Have We Even Noticed?” The main idea is that starts up looking for the next round of dough may not get it. I have a difficult time keeping track of the new search, content processing, and predictive analytics vendors. I don’t have much trouble keeping track of the vendor “pivots” and the legal hassles arising from information retrieval litigation. I am already experiencing HP fatigue. It is an ink company, right? Assume the write up is correct when it says:
But wherever you stand on that, there’s one very real consequence of this explosion in seed funding: There has not been a corresponding explosion in investors willing to lead the next round, the so-called Series A. In fact, if anything, there are fewer. In the late 90s there was an explosion of capital at every level. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. But the Series A has remained the same. While Series A is what everyone is focusing on now, life doesn’t get much easier for those who survive. Finding a Series B will be even harder. That means we’re getting a very different “nuclear winter” as a result of industry excesses this time around. And by most accounts, it’s a far more benign one, considering that potentially thousands of companies are — and will be — going out of business in droves over the next year.
Assume this is okay. My thoughts:
- Some companies will find that their access to cash is gated. These outfits will be forced to slash staff and take extreme measures to survive.
- Some companies will shift from serving customers to preening themselves to the handful of companies which buy technology to take it off the table.
- Some companies will remain university type research outfits chasing every money making opportunity that each can find. Open source search vendors and some of the fragile, government centric analytics companies may become fans of hyper marketing.
I am glad I am old and living in a goose pond in rural Kentucky. Here information retrieval means shouting at someone down the hollow. Less financial risk with this findability method.
Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2012
Amazon CloudSearch Features and Pricing Explained
November 29, 2012
Amazon Web Services Blog aims to bring tools to the table that helps build powerful Web sites and applications with little time and cost. In “Amazon CloudSearch – Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month,” the author explains the importance of Web site search and Amazon CloudSearch capabilities. This is given about search challenges:
Search plays a major role in many web sites and other types of online applications. The basic model is seemingly simple…Needless to say, things can get very complex very quickly…We know that scaling a search system is non-trivial. There are lots of moving parts, all of which must be designed, implemented, instantiated, scaled, monitored, and maintained. As you scale, algorithmic complexity often comes in to play; you soon learn that algorithms and techniques which were practical at the beginning aren’t always practical at scale.
The author also highlights Amazon CloudSearch’s advanced searching and programming features. And while Amazon CloudSearch touts search scaling capabilities, it is hard to overlook the complex pricing model based on the number of running search instances, hourly costs, batch upload charges, and per Gigabyte prices. You might first want to take advantage of the Mindbreeze InSite free trial for a truly powerful search feature with no install required. In addition, their pricing model is straight-forward.
Philip West, November 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Top 25 Most Influential People in the Microsoft SharePoint Community
November 28, 2012
In “These are the Top 25 Microsoft SharePoint Influencers for 2012,” Mark Fidelman discusses the community around SharePoint and those influencers leading the way. The top 25 were chosen based on the social scoring system outlined in the book, Socialized!. Numbers one and two on the list are discussed:
Joel Oleson (number one on the list this year) created a public facing micro-community on Yammer called SPYam to discuss and support SharePoint and Yammer. The community rallied around the Microsoft acquisition and in an attempt to learn about it – then quickly started using it in a highly visible way. You can’t buy community members like him.
Mark Miller number #2 on the list, helped organize a world SharePoint promotional tour which helped to expand the community base.
The SharePoint community is a major benefit of the software platform. The article points out that the community has grown stronger and more influential given increase in numbers and strength from year to year. Along with using the SharePoint community, you may also want to use a third party tool to fill in any gaps in the software. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a proven enterprise search solution with the benefit of a SharePoint Connector. The Connector links systems for enterprise-wide information access with faceted search, a familiar user interface, search results that can easily be processed into actionable information, and more.
Philip West, November 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PolySpot Speaks More Than 50 Languages
November 27, 2012
Due to the ever increasingly globalized workforce, it is more important than ever that data analytics providers are able to appeal to a multitude of countries and languages and corner the polyglot market. Matthew Aslett of the Too Much Information blog recently reported on this topic in the article, “The Dawn of Polyglot Analytics.”
According to Aslett, the emergence of a polyglot analytics platform exemplifies a new approach to data analytics that is based on the user’s approach to analytics rather than the nature of the data.
The article states:
Polyglot analytics explains why we are seeing adoption of Hadoop and MapReduce as a complement to existing data warehousing deployments. It explains, for example, why a company like LinkedIn might adopt Hadoop for its People You May Know feature while retaining its investment in Aster Data for other analytic use cases. Polyglot analytics also explains why a company like eBay would retain its Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse for storing and analyzing traditional transactional and customer data, as well as adopting Hadoop for storing and analyzing clickstream, user behaviour and other un/semi-structured data, while also adopting an exploratory analytic platform based on Teradata’s Extreme Data Appliance for extreme analytics on a combination of transaction and user behaviour data pulled from both its EDW and Hadoop deployments.
One company that is currently excelling in polyglot analytics is Polyspot. In the recent blog post, “Polyspot is Polyglot” we learned that Polyspot offers its services in over 50 languages. Language is no longer a hindrance to data management success. PolySpot warrants a close look. The company offers high value technology within the reach of most organizations’ budgets.
Jasmine Ashton, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
High Performing Enterprise Search Needs Solid Solutions That Work
November 27, 2012
It seems that once a month someone is announcing the latest, greatest development in search optimization software and each new or revamped product gets faster, more accurate or easier to use. The increasing competition among developers has inspired designers to get more creative with their initial designs… or possibly just their marketing.
TechWeek Europe’s article “Start-up InboundWriter Scales Search Optimization For The Enterprise” spotlights a new ‘writer’ targeted search optimizer:
“One of the last miles is having an automated and scalable way to make sure your content is really, really good. That’s what we do, and we do it as simple as a spell-check. When using the service, a writer gets notifications and suggestions on better SEO words and phrases to use as he or she goes along in writing the document. There is an efficiency meter in the upper-left corner of the application to keep the writer apprised as the document is being written about how SEO-ready it is.”
The AI ability to second guess the user is nothing new, although in marketing things can be open to interpretation. High performing enterprise search needs functionality and usability, not more gadgets and gimmicks. That is why Intrafind has been a successful enterprise search provider for well over a decade. They use solid solutions that began in the university environment and scaled out to commercial solutions that work. Their user friendly interface enables customizable connectors which allow enterprise wide access to both structured and unstructured data in a secure environment.
Jennifer Shockley, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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