Kroll in the UK and Its Content Technology
September 14, 2011
The recent disturbances in London have lead UK Prime Minister David Cameron to reach across the pond to consult Kroll Chairman and former American police chief, William Bratton on preventing gang related violence and building safer communities. There’s nothing like an outside US expert to come to the aid of our British cousins.
Altergrity, a specialized law enforcement training company and owner of Kroll, quoted Mr. Bratton in an Aug 12, Media Release:
I would certainly be in a position to discuss the contemporary American experience and my work in these areas – in particular the successes that created real reductions in gang-related crime in Boston, New York and most recently in Los Angeles, where we also saw significant improvements in the relations between the police and the city’s diverse communities. There are many lessons from these experiences that I believe are relevant to the current situation in England.
Based on this release, Mr. Bratton appears confident in his abilities to solve the world’s security concerns. We hope that UK police and civilians are equally secure in the role that his company takes in dispelling the violence affecting their country. If you want some basic information about the types of search and content processing tools that Mr. Bratton brings to his engagements, navigate to the interview with former Kroll wizard David Chaplin here. This is quite impressive technology.
Jasmine Ashton, September 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM, Natural Language PR, and Television
September 13, 2011
I read “IBM and Jeopardy! Relive History with Encore Presentation of Jeopardy!: The IBM Challenge.” Frankly with TV in the summer slump, a reprise of the competition between IBM and humans is not likely to kick off the fall TV season with a bang. Reruns are, in fact, recycled information.
The idea is that on September 12, 13, and 14, 2011, I can watch humans match wits with IBM’s natural language search system, Watson.
Now Watson, based on what I have heard, is quite a lot of Lucene (an open source search system which IBM uses in its OmniFind 9.x product), and an extremely large database of analytics and content. To some degree it is not too different from having Wikipedia on your hard drive with IBM’s highly customized proprietary software.
To make Watson work, IBM needed three key ingredients: (a) very large systems – ninety IBM Power 750 servers with four 8-core processors each (2880 cores total!), (b) numerous engineers from the IBM R&D Labs, and (c) an army of technicians to baby sit the machine and database. Watson does not understand spoken speech, but like the computer on my desk, Watson can accept typed inputs. Watson also does not work from my iPad or my mobile phone.
While it is a solid achievement and nice step forward for Natural Language, the reality is that Watson is pretty much a raw demo from the R&D labs, and the Jeopardy! angle is an expensive and somewhat amusing marketing play. Not many Jeopardy! watchers are going to license IBM’s natural language processing technology. A better question is, “How many Jeopardy! watchers know what natural language processing is anyway?”
The problem for me is that television is not the real world. Reality shows are loosely scripted. When I see a commercial television production, the operative word is postproduction. The video wizards snip and segue to make the talent and the floor personnel, the writers, the sound team, the videographers, and the teleprompter operator fuse as a seamless whole.
But let’s look at Watson’s impact in the commercial software world. Jeopardy! is a show and the Watson system and content is highly customized to the show. In applying Watson to the real world, I personally have some doubts about how “smart” Watson is. Watson has potential but clearly needs much more work to prove it can be applied to everyday business problems due to the immaturity of the technology and the tremendously high cost of the systems and the databases involved.
Linguamatics Scores Big with Text Mining
September 6, 2011
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to sift through all the chatter on Twitter and other social media sites to get to the real meat and potatoes? What if companies could find the proverbial needle in the Twitter-haystack? All this is being done by Cambridge-based Linguamatics as reported in the article, Tweet Smell of Success, on Business Weekly.
The small company (only 50 employees after expanding) caught the world’s attention due to their text-mining skills. Last year, using their search expertise, they were able to very accurately predict the outcome of an election based on the Tweets which occurred during a live, televised debate.
There core technology was developed by the four original founding members. Three remain at the company. They have expanded, rapidly, in their ten years of business, and rely solely on income. They believe their success is due to their unique search approach.
David Milward, CTO and co-founder said: ‘We knew that language processing could get people relevant information much faster than traditional search methods. However, previous systems needed reprogramming for different questions: we wanted to give users the flexibility to extract any information they wanted.’
Linguamatics is just one of many emerging search management companies, each with its own niche. With business and technology constantly shifting to newer and faster methods of getting information, it is no surprise that businesses demand better search methods. More and more information is popping up within the internet, intranets, file-sharing and other data storage entities. Traditional brute force search looks less and less useful to the professionals in some of these hot new market sectors.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Inteltrax: Top Stories, Aug 29 to Sept 2, 2011
September 5, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, pulling these stories from across a wide spectrum of analytic topics.
Our feature this week, “Definition of Big Data Evolving” took an inside look at how customers, not designers, are sculpting what we will come to call “big data” in the future.
Another story, “JP Morgan Shows No Sign of Analytic Slowdown” explains how JP Morgan cut its costs by investing in faster analytic tools.
Another interesting story, “Digital Reasoning Beefs up its Front Office,” showed how one of the business intelligence/data analytics world’s fastest risers is strengthening its leadership with an expert in healthcare. (Beyond Search will be running an interview with Dr. Ric Upton in a future issue of Beyond Search.)
These stories and more made up our week as we follow the ever-evolving landscape of big data. Whether it’s executives changing titles or the changing terminology of the field, we’ve got our eyes on it all and will bring the latest scoop to readers.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax, September 5, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Acquires i2 Ltd.
September 1, 2011
IBM purchased i2 Group. Founded in 1990 by Mike Hunter, i2 is a widely used content processing and case management system for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. The company received the EuroIntel Golden Candle Award, for its contribution to the global intelligence community. On several occasions, the ArnoldIT team worked on some i2 products several years. The company has moved outside the somewhat narrow market for sophisticated intelligence analysis systems.
“IBM Acquiring I2 for Criminal Mastermind Software” reported:
IBM plans to fuse i2’s products with its own data collection, analysis and warehousing software. It will then offer packages based on this combinations to organizations looking to spot suspicious behavior within vast collections of data.
Not surprisingly, there has been considerable confusion about the company. Part of the reason is that the name “i2” was used by a back office and supply chain company. The firm benefited from its acquisition from the low profile Silver Lake Sununu. Silver Lake purchased i2 from Choicepoint in 2008 for about $185 million. “IBM Bolsters Big Data Security Credentials with i2 Buy” opines that the deal was worth more than $500 million, a fraction of what UK vendor Autonomy commanded from Hewlett Packard in August 2011.
i2’s technology is not well understood by those without direct experience using the firm’s pace setting products. One example in the Analyst’s Notebook, a system which allows multiple case details to be processed, analyzed, and displayed in a manner immediately familiar to law enforcement and intelligence professionals. i2 acquired Coplink, developed at an academic institution in Arizona.
The core technology continues to be enhanced. i2 now provides its system to organizations with an interest in analyzing data across time, via relationships, and with specialized numerical recipes.
My position is that I am not going to dive into the specific features and functions of the i2 system. If you want to know more about i2’s technology, you can visit the firm’s Web site at http://www.i2group.com/us. The Wikipedia page and many of the news and trade write ups about i2 are either incorrect or off by 20 degrees or more.
What will IBM “do” with the i2 technology? My hunch is that IBM will maintain the present market trajectory of i2 and expose the firm’s technology to IBM clients and prospects with specific security needs. Please, appreciate that the nature of the i2 technology is essentially the opposite of software available for more general purpose applications. My view is that IBM will probably continue to support the integration of i2 Clairty component with the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Like the descriptions of Autonomy’s technology, some of the write ups about i2 may require further verfication.
We have reported on the legal dust up about the i2 ANB file format and some friction between Palantir and i2 in Inteltrax. Most of the legal hassles appear to be worked out, but contention is certainly possible going forward.
I have been a fan of i2’s technology for many years. However, some firms have moved into different analytical approaches. In most cases, these new developments enhance the functionality of an i2 system. Today we are featuring an editorial by Tim Estes, founder of Digital Reasoning, a company that has moved “beyond i2.” You can read his views about the Autonomy deal in “Summer of Big Deals”. More information about Digital Reasoning is available at www.digitalreasoning.com. Digital Reasoning is a client of ArnoldIT, the publisher of this information service.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Hlava on Indexing, Metadata, and Findability
September 1, 2011
On August 31, 2011, I spoke with Margie Hlava, president and co-founder of Access Innovations. The idea for a podcast grew out of our lunch chatter. I then brought her back to the ArnoldIT office and we recorded a conversation about the challenges of “after the fact” indexing. One of the key points surfacing in the interview is the importance of a specific work process required for developing an indexing approach. “Fire, ready, aim!” is a method which can undermine an otherwise effective search solution. In the podcast, Ms. Hlava makes three points:
- Today’s search systems are often making it difficult for users to locate exactly the information needed. Access Innovations’ software and services can change “search to found.”
- Support for standards is important. Once a controlled term list or other value adding indexing process has been implemented, Access Innovations makes it easy for clients to repurpose and move their metadata. Ms. Hlava said, “We are standards wonks.”
- Indexing and metadata are challenging tasks. On the surface, creating a word list looks easy. Errors in logic make locating information more difficult. Informed support and the right taxonomy management system is important. The Access Innovations’ solutions are available as cloud services or as on premises installations.
The challenge is that automated content processing without controlled term lists creates a wide range of problems for users.
You can listen to the podcast by navigating to http://arnoldit.com/podcasts/. For more information about Access Innovations, point your browser to www.accessinn.com. Be sure to take a look at Access Innovations’ Web log, Taxodiary. Updated each day, the blog is at www.taxodiary.com
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Summer of Big Deals
September 1, 2011
Will These Blockbusters Affect Business Intelligence?
The summer has been a hot one, not in terms of temperature, but when measured on the acquisition thermometer. First, Oracle the sprawling database and enterprise applications company bought InQuira. Then, Google took one third of its cash and the equivalent of two years’ profit and bought Motorola Mobility. And Hewlett Packard, one of the icon’s of the Silicon Valley way, spent $10 billion on its surprise purchase of Autonomy plc.
Business intelligence, intellectual property, and information management turned up the heat for investors and those tracking active market sectors. The market interest is high and many think these deals are likely to sustain their energy. But I don’t see it that way. I think the deals are more like dumping charcoal starter on charcoal briquettes: Very dramatic at ignition but certain to cool and fade into the fabric of day-to-day activity.
Starting a charcoal fire can produce some initial pyrotechnics. These fade quickly.
As the founder of Digital Reasoning, a company focused on delivering the next-generation solution-based on entity oriented analytics, I see these deals from the perspective of working with customers to solve big data analytics challenges. First, let me give you my view of information management and traditional business analytics and then outline where I think the technology and the market are going.
Business intelligence in general and analytics particular are now verbal noise. I know that most of the professionals with whom I speak interpret the phrase “business intelligence” in terms of their own experiences in getting information to make a decision. For some, business intelligence is a report and follow up telephone conversation with a human expert. Don’t get me wrong, consultants and advisors often do great work, but my point is that the phrase “business intelligence” is anchored in a method of information analysis rooted in human behavior unchanged since our ancestors sat around the camp fire roasting meat on sticks.,
The word analytics is equally difficult to explain. For many of our clients, analytics means SAS or SPSS (both the bread and butter of traditional statistics courses and business analysts from banking to warehouse management).
Microsoft and Its NLP Info Page
August 30, 2011
Microsoft is making a concerted effort to tackle natural language processing with its Redmond-based Natural Language Processing Group. The Microsoft page devoted to the group highlights current and older projects, downloads, and researchers involved.
The goal of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group is to design and build software that will analyze, understand, and generate languages that humans use naturally, so that eventually you will be able to address your computer as though you were addressing another person. This goal is not easy to reach. “Understanding” language means, among other things, knowing what concepts a word or phrase stands for and knowing how to link those concepts together in a meaningful way.
Of particular interest are the recent publications authored by those in the group. Work includes everything from social media implementation, to multi-lingual Wikipedia content, to syntactic language modeling. The papers are well worth a read for anyone interested in the pressing field of natural language processing. Microsoft is definitely putting time and energy into the project, but it remains to be seen who of the tech giants will emerge the victor in the battle for natural language processing supremacy.
If you track NLP, including the newly minted azure chip consultants, you will want to monitor this aspect of Microsoft’s many, many search and text processing activities.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Calculated Field Formulas for SharePoint Made Easy
August 30, 2011
Text Processing for Gender Info
August 27, 2011
Apparently researchers are proving what we have known all along, men and women communicate differently. In all seriousness, language patterns of tweets are being studied by the Mitre Corporation to determine if gender can be accurately assigned. Read more from, “Study shows how some tweeters can identify their gender without even trying.”
As the Mitre team shows in their report, there are certain “buzzwords” that can often be found by analyzing the output of female tweeters. Phrases such as “chocolate” and “shopping” are among the most repeated for women tweeters. The most popular phrases for men, you ask? “Http” and “Google”…hey we never said either gender was more interesting than the other.
The team determined that the female/male ratio on Twitter is 55/45, so a guess of “female” would prove correct 55% of the time. However, the team found success 75% of the time through analyze of certain phrases, like those mentioned above. Perhaps such research could lead to targeted gender-specific advertising. It is interesting regardless, and the full report could be worth a look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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