Gannett Wants Better Content Management
December 31, 2012
Gannett is a media and marketing company that represents USA Today, Shop Local, and Deal Chicken. One can imagine that such a prolific company has a lot of data that needs to be organized and made workable. Marketing and media companies are on the forefront of the public eye and if they do not get their client’s name out in the open, then it means less dollars in the bank for them. One way this could happen is if they do not centralize a plan for information governance. The good news is “Gannett Chooses ITM for Centralized Management of Reference Vocabularies,”as reported via the Mondeca news Web site. Mondeca is a company that specializes in knowledge management with a variety of products that structure knowledge in many possible ways. Its ITM system was built to handle knowledge structures from conception to usage and the maintenance process afterward. ITM helps organize knowledge, accessing data across multiple platforms, improved search and navigation, and aligning/merging taxonomies and ontologies.
Gannet selected Mondeca for these very purposes:
“Gannett needed software to centrally manage, synchronize, and distribute its reference vocabularies across a variety of systems, such as text analytics, search engines, and CMS. They also wanted to create vocabularies and enrich them using external sources, with the help of MEI. Gannett selected ITM as the best match for the job. At the end of the project, Gannett intends to achieve stronger semantic integration across its content delivery workflow.”
Gannett is sure to discover that Mondeca’s ITM software will provide them with better control over its data, not to mention new insights into its knowledge base. Data organization and proper search techniques are the master key to any organization’s success.
Whitney Grace, December 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Offering from Attensity Poised to Blow Up ROI
December 21, 2012
Analytics tools from social-minded vendors are now using text analytics technology to report on market perception and consumer preferences before the product launch. BtoB reported on this new offering in the article, “Attensity Releases Analytics Tools for Product Introductions.”
Now, businesses will be able to monitor product introductions with this new tool from Attensity. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing specific technology solutions to evaluate and analyze every specific phase of the product development cycle.
Both new insights for further developments and opportunities to avoid risk will be possible with New Product Introduction.
The article states:
“The tool uses text analytics technology to report on market perception and preferences before roll out, uncovering areas of risk and opportunity, according to the company. It then tracks customer reception upon and after the launch to determine the impact of initial marketing efforts. Attensity said the New Product Introduction tool is one in a series of planned social text-analytics applications devoted to customer care, branding, and campaign and competitive analytics.”
Many organizations will be chomping at the bit to utilize this technology since it offers an easy way to improve ROI.
Megan Feil, December 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Predictive Coding: Who Is on First? What Is the Betting Game?
December 20, 2012
I am confused, but what’s new? The whole “predictive analytics” rah rah causes me to reach for my NRR 33 dB bell shaped foam ear plugs.
Look. If predictive methods worked, there would be headlines in the Daily Racing Form, in the Wall Street Journal, and in the Las Vegas sports books. The cheerleaders for predictive wizardry are pitching breakthrough technology in places where accountability is a little fuzzier than a horse race, stock picking, and betting on football games.
The godfather of cost cutting for legal document analysis. Revenend Thomas Bayes, 1701 to 1761. I heard he said, “Praise be, the math doth work when I flip the numbers and perform the old inverse probability trick. Perhaps I shall apply this to legal disputes when lawyers believe technology will transform their profession.” Yep, partial belief. Just the ticket for attorneys. See http://goo.gl/S5VSR.
I understand that there is PREDICTION which generates tons of money to the person who has an algorithm which divines which nag wins the Derby, which stock is going to soar, and which football team will win a particular game. Skip the fuzzifiers like 51 percent chance of rain. It either rains or it does not rain. In the harsh world of Harrod’s Creek, capital letter PREDICTION is not too reliable.
The lower case prediction is far safer. The assumptions, the unexamined data, the thresholds hardwired into the off-the-shelf algorithms, or the fiddling with Bayesian relaxation factors is aimed at those looking to cut corners, trim costs, or figure out which way to point the hit-and-miss medical research team.
Which is it? PREDICTION or prediction.
I submit that it is lower case prediction with an upper case MARKETING wordsmithing.
Here’s why:
I read “The Amazing Forensic Tech behind the Next Apple, Samsun Legal Dust Up (and How to Hack It).” Now that is a headline. Skip the “amazing”, “Apple”, “Samsung,” and “Hack.” I think the message is that Fast Company has discovered predictive text analysis. I could be wrong here, but I think Fast Company might have been helped along by some friendly public relations type.
Let’s look at the write up.
First, the high profile Apple Samsung trial become the hook for “amazing” technology. the idea is that smart software can grind through the text spit out from a discovery process. In the era of a ballooning digital data, it is really expensive to pay humans (even those working at a discount in India or the Philippines) to read the emails, reports, and transcripts.
Let a smart machine do the work. It is cheaper, faster, and better. (Shouldn’t one have to pick two of these attributes?)
Fast Company asserts:
“A couple good things are happening now,” Looby says. “Courts are beginning to endorse predictive coding, and training a machine to do the information retrieval is a lot quicker than doing it manually.” The process of “Information retrieval” (or IR) is the first part of the “discovery” phase of a lawsuit, dubbed “e-discovery” when computers are involved. Normally, a small team of lawyers would have to comb through documents and manually search for pertinent patterns. With predictive coding, they can manually review a small portion, and use the sample to teach the computer to analyze the rest. (A variety of machine learning technologies were used in the Madoff investigation, says Looby, but he can’t specify which.)
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
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
IntelTrax Summary November 16 to November 22
November 26, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published some excellent pieces regarding the state of big data and analytics technologies.
“Diversity is the New Key for Analytic Success” looks at how Burberry is using analytics technology to analyze customer buying behavior.
The article states:
“SAP is pushing further in this vein and has this week announced its SAP Customer 360 transactional system which the firm says is being used by fashion retailer Burberry to analyse customer buying behaviour and provide on the floor sales staff with access to big data analytics on mobile devices. This “immediate information” is then (in theory) available to help these same staff personalise fashion advice to customers.
Do we really want this amount of technology in our lives?
SAP’s other Co-CEO Bill McDermott has predicted that by 2030 there will be an additional two billion consumers on the planet by 2030 and … “They want to purchase in the digital world,” he said.”
Another interesting story, “Big Data Moves Continue” announced some impressive news in the big data community.
The article states:
“Cray announced it was awarded a contract to deliver a uRiKA graph-analytics appliance to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Analysts at ORNL will use the uRiKA system as they conduct research in healthcare fraud and analytics for a leading healthcare payer. The uRiKA system is a Big Data appliance for graph analytics that enables discovery of unknown relationships in Big Data. It is a highly scalable, real-time platform for ad hoc queries, pattern-based searches, inferencing and deduction.
“Identifying healthcare fraud and abuse is challenging due to the volume of data, the various types of data, as well as the velocity at which new data is created. YarcData’s uRiKA appliance is uniquely suited to take on these challenges, and we are excited to see the results that will come from the strategic analysis of some very large and complex data sets,” said Jeff Nichols, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”
“Big Data Expert Overlooks the Obvious” shares some interesting thoughts on the future of big data. However, it leaves out some pretty important things.
The article states:
“The goal of all the discussion around big data and data analysis is, as I’ve argued, not to make the wrong decision faster, but to develop the best decision at the right time and deliver the information to the people that most need the information. In an Information Week column Wednesday, Tony Byrne argued small data beat big data in the presidential election.
Call it business intelligence, data analysis or predictive analytics, IT’s role here is to provide a foundation for your company to make the right decisions. Those decisions might be what to charge passengers for seats on a flight, how much to charge to for a season ticket or how many widgets to create to strike the right balance among manufacturing costs, inventory and availability. These decisions are fundamental to business success.”
When it comes to finding big data intelligence solutions that work for your organization, it is important that businesses find a trusted provider. Digital Reasoning’s Synthesys helps streamline expenses for intelligence, healthcare and finance clients.
Jasmine Ashton, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Summary: November 9 to November 15
November 19, 2012
This week, the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published some important information regarding the state of big data and its impact on some of the world’s most up and coming industries.
“The Ethics of Big Data” examines the possible ethical quandries that develop from big data analysis. However, despite the potential ethical challenges that face the industry in the end the pros, outweigh the cons.
The article states:
“Yet it cuts both ways: Consumers also can take advantage of the democratizing effects of big data. In fact, there’s an app for that: RateDriverenables users to quickly determine the appropriate rate they should expect to pay for attorney’s fees in 51 U.S. markets.
Big data holds promise to improve the legal profession and the quality of service that we deliver to clients, says Carolyn Elefant, a Washington, D.C., attorney and technology evangelist. “Significantly, big data would inject a strong dose of transparency into lawyer marketing and assist consumers in hiring lawyers. How so? Because big data can be used to show the likelihood of winning a case and the true cost.”
An article that shows the way that big data is transforming the healthcare industry is, “Big Data is the New Anti-Virus.” However, it looks at it from the angle of computer health and how to better detect viruses.
The article states:
“With Seculert Sense, customers can now upload log files using a Secure FTPS tunnel, or upstream logs through Syslog directly from a secure web gateway or web proxy devices, or log aggregation solution for real-time detection and forensics investigation. Built on Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Seculert Sense launches a “big data analysis cloud” that rapidly analyzes an organization’s vast amount of log data, going back months or even years and comparing it against the thousands of unique malware samples collected by Seculert. Over time, Seculert Sense continues to digest huge amounts of data in order to identify persistent attacks that are going undetected by next generation IPs, Anti-Bot and Secure Web Gateways.”
Big data analytics is not only taking off in America, it is becoming a world-wide phenomenon. “Asian Analytics on the Verge of a Boom” describes the potential for big data analytics success in Asia.
According to the article,
“Two different consumer analytics platforms from Singapore Management University (SMU) and StarHub respectively aim to provide insights into consumer behavior, so companies can develop and tailor initiatives that will be more relevant to and better received by customers.
Rajesh Balan, director of LiveLabs Urban Lifestyle Innovation Platform at SMU, said the platform will enable organizations to utilize real-time insights, helping their campaigns go to market and assess the outcome faster. On the consumer end, it will turn what most users perceive as intrusive spam messages on their phones into something useful.”
It does not matter what country you live in or what industry you work in. Big Data analytics technology is becoming too important to overlook. Digital Reasoning has been using automated understanding of big data for nearly a decade.
Jasmine Ashton, November 19, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google and Its Preserving the Lumber Room Contents
November 14, 2012
I don’t know if this write up is accurate. Navigate to “Privacy Issue: Google Docs Seems to Not Delete but Only Hide Documents When the Trash Is Emptied.” The main point of the write up is that content which a user may have wanted to make go away has not gone away. In database deletions, a similar issue exists until the database is spiffed up to make the space hogging deletions go the way of the dodo. Even then, it is possible to roll back a database or just restore it to a previous state. So what’s gone may not be gone.
Here’s a passage I noted:
The good thing is that Google Docs is still in Beta and things can change until it goes into release mode. But chances are higher that something will happen when we bring our privacy concerns to the attention of Google and also to the attention of all others that are offering to us either free or paid services on the Web. It is our responsibility. Let us choose wisely what and what not we are using as the the core of our personal information infrastructure.
I admire optimism. What surprises me is that someone finds this non deletion anything other than standard operating procedure. The original Norton’s Utilities removed those pesky “?”s so that deleted files were suddenly not deleted. Magic.
If I had the energy, I would ask questions about the deployment of link analysis and intercept tools across deleted data. But, I am 68 and it is late in the afternoon. I assume that nothing untoward will be done with deleted user data. The world is just getting better with each passing day. Oh, I have to limp to the TV. More information about the email buzz and consequences concerning a certain former government official, a writer who can do more pushups than I can, and a wild and crazy family in Florida. Now that’s a state I admire with or without email shenanigans.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2012
Exclusive Interview: Chris Westphal, Visual Analytics
November 12, 2012
With the hype surrounding analytics, I have difficulty separating the wheat from the Wheaties when it comes to companies offering next-generation . Since the election, some individuals have been positioned as superstars of analytics. (The full text of my interview with Mr. Westphal appears in the ArnoldIT Search Wizards Speak series at this link.)
I am not comfortable with political predictions nor the notion of superstars. I did some checking and got solid referrals to Chris Westphal, one of the founders of Visual Analytics. The company has a solid client base in the world where analytics are essential to security and risk mitigation.
Mr. Westphal was gracious with his time, and I was able to speak with him in Washington, DC and then continue our discussion via email. In the course of my conversations with Mr. Westphal, he provided a different perspective on the fast-growing analytics sector.
His company, Visual Analytics or VAI is a privately-held company based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area providing proactive analytical, decision support, and information sharing solutions in commercial and government marketplaces throughout the world for investigating money laundering, financial crimes, narcotics, terrorism, border security, embezzlement, and fraud.
He told me that his firm’s approach and its success are a result of focusing on client problems, not imposing a textbook solution on a situation. He said:
We are problem driven. One of the most important areas we have found that separates us from much of our competition is the ability to deliver actual “analytics” to our end-user clients. It is not simply running a query looking for a specific value or graphically showing the contents of a spreadsheet. Our approach is to exploit the patterns and behaviors that are hidden with in the structures and volumes of the data we are processing. Our system effectively taps multiple, disparate sources to deliver one of the industry’s only federated data access platforms. We continue to focus on how to create algorithms (in a generic fashion), that can detect temporal sequences repeating activities, commonality, high-velocity connections, pathways, and complex aggregations.
One of the keys to Visual Analytics success is the company’s distinction between analytics and monitoring. Mr. Westphal pointed out:
The world is full of very good data management systems. There are databases, crawlers, indexers, etc. Our approach is to provide a layer on top of these existing sources and provide “interface-compliant-queries” to pull out relevant content. In about 90 percent of our engagements, we take advantage of the existing infrastructure with little to no impact on the client’s information technology processes, networks, or hardware footprint. If special processing is required, we tune the data management application to best meet the structure of the data so it can be processed/queried to maximize the analytical results. One other discussion is to differentiate “analytics” from “monitoring.” Much of our capability is to expose new patterns and trends, define the parameters, and verify data structures, content, and other key factors. Once we’ve locked in on a valuable pattern, we can continue to look for the pattern or it can be recoded into another system/approach (e.g., like is typically done with inline transactional systems) for real-time detection. The hard-issue is detecting the pattern in the first place.
The technical approach of Visual Analytics relies on open source and proprietary systems and methods. Mr. Westphal noted:
We have a very robust data connection framework consisting of different methods for different purposes. The core “connectors” are for relational databases and are based on standard database connector protocols. Our system also has drivers to other platforms such as information retrieval systems, various enterprise systems, plus the ability to create custom web services to expand, where necessary, to handle new sources or systems (including proprietary formats – assuming there is a Web-service interface available. We also have Apache Lucene built into our application at the data-layer so it can crawl and index content as needed. We try to make options available along with guidance about each approach. We offer a collection of methods to deliver the right-content for meeting a wide range of client needs. We always reference “contextual analytics” which basically means providing the actual content or pointers to content for any data entity – regardless of where it resides.
The full text of the interview is available at http://goo.gl/2y6T8. After my discussions with Mr. Westphal I remain convinced that the notion of next generation analytics is more rich and mature than some applications of next generation analytics.
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2012
IntelTrax Summary: November 2 to November 8
November 12, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published some excellent article summaries regarding big data’s growing impact on the globalized workplace.
“Big Data Talent Pool Grows” explains how job seekers are embracing the big data analytics profession due to the fact that it welcomes new talent.
The article states:
“The just-released InformationWeek 2012 State of IT Staffing Survey reveals that 40% of those who cite big data and analytics as a top hiring priority say they’ll increase staffing in these areas by 11% or more during the next two years. At the same time, 53% of these companies say it will be hard to find big-data-savvy analytics experts. Respondents expect to try a mix of retraining of existing people, hiring of new employees and contracting of consultants and temporary employees to fill the gap.
Practitioners, vendors, and educators we spoke to for our Big Data IT Staffing report offer seven tips for finding the right talent.”
The article, “The Healthcare Analytics Trickle Down” shows how the pairing of healthcare and data analytics is starting to pay off for many companies and its starting to trickle down.
The article states:
“If you’re old enough to remember the Reagan administration, you remember the politically charged expression “trickle-down economics,” which referred to the theory that if you provide benefits and incentives to businesses and the wealthy, those benefits would trickle down to wage earners at lower socioeconomic levels.
In some ways, big data analytics is like trickle-down economics. Only the biggest healthcare providers with the deepest pockets can afford the kind of analytics platforms required to get useful intelligence from tens of thousands of patient records. But in theory, those benefits will trickle down to smaller providers that either don’t have the financial support or the large patient populations to do this type of data crunching on their own.”
We all knew that big data was something worth investing in, but save the world? that seems to be a little bit much. “50 Ways Big Data Can Save the World” showcases the new startup Bidgely, which aims to turn every appliance in your home into a data scientist, providing you with real time results on your energy usage.
The article states:
“Utilities worldwide are installing smart meters on homes and businesses, which means there could be as much as 50 terabytes of energy data that can emerge from a million or so homes in a year. The problem has been that there haven’t been very many ways to make good use of all this data to benefit the average consumer. But a startup called Bidgely, which raised a series A round from Khosla Ventures, says it has created algorithms that can dig into real-time smart meter energy-consumption data, can reduce consumers’ home energy use by between 4 percent to 12 percent, and can also deliver other beneficial home services to consumers.”
Whether you are looking to utilize big data to protect the environment, save lives, or boost business for your company, there are solutions available that can be very beneficial. Thanks to companies like Digital Reasoning, this technology is more affordable, accessible and customizable than ever.
Jasmine Ashton, November 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
