Thomson Reuters: Now the Answer Company
April 25, 2017
Earlier this year I saw a reference to “the answer company.” I ignored it. Yesterday I saw a link to a podcast with Casey Hall, who is the “head of social media for business communications” at Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is a publicly traded company with revenues in the $14 billion range. Here’s a Google chart showing how the company has performed over the last few years:
To my untrained eye, it looks as if revenues are down and profits are up. Yikes. How were those cost savings achieved? Perhaps the podcast explains how “the answer company” will boost revenues and continue to generate sustainable returns for stakeholders and, of course, senior management.
The podcast addresses a number of Thomson Reuters’ themes. One, for instance, is the fact that the company has 45,000 employees and a “giant footprint.” As the podcast ground forward, I realized that “the answer company” wants its employees to embrace employee advocacy.
It seems that “the answer company” is trying to communicate with its employees. According to the write up “How Thomson Reuters Earned the Brand as The Answer Company” accompanying the podcast told me:
Thomson Reuters encourages their employees to engage with their network of data scientists, finance, and accounting professionals by sharing the brand’s message. Leveraging their employees’ networks allows them to increase their reach and enhance the authenticity of the message since it’s coming from a real person, the employee. The employee advocacy program also helps with internal communications. Employees engage with each other and share what’s going on in their part of the organization.
Yeah, but, what about explaining “how” Thomson Reuters became “the answer company”? As it turns out, the podcast focused exclusively on “on boarding employees,” which I don’t really understand. Another topic was measuring the impact of the employee advocacy program. I think this means closing sales.
I suppose that Thomson Reuters just decided it needed a new tag line even thought its online services usually require a person to run a search, read a results list, and hunt for the needed information. That’s not answers. That’s work.
I believe that Thomson Reuters licensed the Palantir Technologies’ system in order to have tools which make sense of information. But if the podcast is any indication of how Thomson Reuters became “the answer company,” my thought is that the company is trying social media as a sales tool.
As for answers, one still has to hunt to find out what companies Thomson Reuters owns. One has to run queries on its online legal information systems and then hunt for answers.
Ah, PR. Love it. An article title which does not related to the content of the podcast OR the article.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2017
HonkinNews for April 18, 2017 Now Available
April 18, 2017
From the friendly skies of rural Kentucky, this week’s HonkinNews talks about the benefits of a visit to Louisville, Kentucky. Injuries are possible. HonkinNews report that a mid tier consulting firm has decided that people do not search. When you look for information online, you really “insight.” Yep, that sounds pretty crazy to Beyond Search as well. Even more startling are the companies the thrashing consulting firm identifies as leaders in “insight.” Spoiler: Recorded Future, Palantir Technologies, and other companies of this ilk are not included. Why? Insight means enterprise search. HonkinNews also take a quick look at what we call the “high school science club disorder” or HSSCD. Although not on the list of official medical conditions, we report on some striking parallels between Stephen E Arnold’s high school science club in 1958 and Google’s response to allegations from the US Department of Labor about Google’s compensation plan. From the Beyond Alexa service, HonkinNews recycles some information about must-use Amazon Alexa skills. Fancy some Eastern philosophy or words from fashionistas. You will learn what to have Alexa deliver for your auditory delight. A technological news flash about pizza adds flavor to this week’s show. You will want to use DRU to get your slice. No, DRU is not based on “drool”, although one of the Beyond Search team does droll when someone mentions pizza. DRU is a Domino Robotic Unit. Yummy. HonkinNews speculates about a rumored “new” functions for those who write using Microsoft Word. If you like Windows 10’s start menu ads, you will love LinkedIn information displayed next to that memo you are trying to finish so you can leave early. View the program to find out if Clippy will return. You can view the program here.
NB. One viewer of the program wanted to know why the program is in black and white and is pretty lousy. The reason is that we film on a Bell & Howell camera. We are in rural Kentucky, and we use what we have. Enough said. You can “insight” old fashioned eight mm film too.
Kenny Toth, April 18, 2017
You Do Not Search. You Insight.
April 12, 2017
I am delighted, thrilled. I read “Coveo, Microsoft, Sinequa Lead Insight Engine Market.” What a transformation is captured in what looks to me like a content marketing write up. Key word search morphs into “insight.” For folks who do not follow the history of enterprise search with the fanaticism of those involved in baseball statistics, the use of the word “insight” to describe locating a document is irrelevant. Do you search or insight?
For me, hunkered down in rural Kentucky, with my monitors flickering in the intellectual darkness of Kentucky, the use of the word “insight” is a linguistic singularity. Maybe not on the scale of an earthquake in Italy or a banker leaping from his apartment to the Manhattan asphalt, but a historical moment nevertheless.
Let me recap some of my perceptions of the three companies mentioned in the headline to this tsunami of jargon in the Datanami story:
- Coveo is a company which developed a search and retrieval system focused on Windows. With some marketing magic, the company explained keyword search as customer support, then Big data, and now this new thing, “insight”. For those who track vendor history, the roots of Coveo reach back to a consumer interface which was designed to make search easy. Remember Copernic. Yep, Coveo has been around a long while.
- Sinequa also was a search vendor. Like Exalead and Polyspot and other French search vendors, the company wanted manage data, provide federation, and enable workflows. After a president change and some executive shuffling, Sinequa emerged as a Big Data outfit with a core competency in analytics. Quite a change. How similar is Sinequa to enterprise search? Pretty similar.
- Microsoft. I enjoyed the “saved by the bell” deal in 2008 which delivered the “work in progress” Fast Search & Transfer enterprise search system to Redmond. Fast Search was one of the first search vendors to combine fast-flying jargon with a bit of sales magic. Despite the financial meltdown and an investigation of the Fast Search financials, Microsoft ponied up $1.2 billion and reinvented SharePoint search. Well, not exactly reinvented, but SharePoint is a giant hairball of content management, collaboration, business “intelligence” and, of course, search. Here’s a user friendly chart to help you grasp SharePoint search.
Flash forward to this Datanami article and what do I learn? Here’s a paragraph I noted with a smiley face and an exclamation point:
Among the areas where natural language processing is making inroads is so-called “insight engines” that are projected to account for half of analytic queries by 2019. Indeed, enterprise search is being supplanted by voice and automated voice commands, according to Gartner Inc. The market analyst released it latest “Magic Quadrant” rankings in late March that include a trio of “market leaders” along with a growing list of challengers that includes established vendors moving into the nascent market along with a batch of dedicated startups.
There you go. A trio like ZZTop with number one hits? Hardly. A consulting firm’s “magic” plucks these three companies from a chicken farm and gives each a blue ribbon. Even though we have chickens in our backyard, I cannot tell one from another. Subjectivity, not objectivity, applies to picking good chickens, and it seems to be what New York consulting firms do too.
Are the “scores” for the objective evaluations based on company revenue? No.
Return on investment? No.
Patents? No.
IRR? No. No. No.
Number of flagship customers like Amazon, Apple, and Google type companies? No.
The ranking is based on “vision.” And another key factor is “the ability to execute its “strategy.” There you go. A vision is what I want to help me make my way through Kabul. I need a strategy beyond stay alive.
What would I do if I have to index content in an enterprise? My answer may surprise you. I would take out my check book and license these systems.
- Palantir Technologies or Centrifuge Systems
- Bitext’s Deep Linguistic Analysis platform
- Recorded Future.
With these three systems I would have:
- The ability to locate an entity, concept, event, or document
- The capability to process content in more than 40 languages, perform subject verb object parsing and entity extraction in near real time
- Point-and-click predictive analytics
- Point-and-click visualization for financial, business, and military warfighting actions
- Numerous programming hooks for integrating other nifty things that I need to achieve an objective such as IBM’s Cybertap capability.
Why is there a logical and factual disconnect between what I would do to deliver real world, high value outputs to my employees and what the New York-Datanami folks recommend?
Well, “disconnect” may not be the right word. Have some search vendors and third party experts embraced the concept of “fake news” or embraced the know how explained in Propaganda, Father Ellul’s important book? Is the idea something along the lines of “we just say anything and people will believe our software will work this way”?
Many vendors stick reasonably close to the factual performance of their software and systems. Let me highlight three examples.
First, Darktrace, a company crafted by Dr. Michael Lynch, is a stickler for explaining what the smart software does. In a recent exchange with Darktrace, I learned that Darktrace’s senior staff bristle when a descriptive write up strays from the actual, verified technical functions of the software system. Anyone who has worked with Dr. Lynch and his senior managers knows that these people can be very persuasive. But when it comes to Darktrace, it is “facts R us”, thank you.
Second, Recorded Future takes a similar hard stand when explaining what the Recorded Future system can and cannot do. Anyone who suggests that Recorded Future predictive analytics can identify the winner of the Kentucky Derby a day before the race will be disabused of that notion by Recorded Future’s engineers. Accuracy is the name of the game at Recorded Future, but accuracy relates to the use of numerical recipes to identify likely events and assign a probability to some events. Even though the company deals with statistical probabilities, adding marketing spice to the predictive system’s capabilities is a no-go zone.
Third, Bitext, the company that offers a Deep Linguistics Analysis platform to improve the performance of a range of artificial intelligence functions, is anchored in facts. On a recent trip to Spain, we interviewed a number of the senior developers at this company and learned that Bitext software works. Furthermore, the professionals are enthusiastic about working for this linguistics-centric outfit because it avoid marketing hyperbole. “Our system works,” said one computational linguist. This person added, “We do magic with computational linguistics and deep linguistic analysis.” I like that—magic. Oh, Bitext does sales too with the likes of Porsche, Volkswagen, and the world’s leading vendor of mobile systems and services, among others. And from Madrid, Spain, no less. And without marketing hyperbole.
Why then are companies based on keyword indexing with a sprinkle of semantics and basic math repositioning themselves by chasing each new spun sugar-encrusted trend?
I have given a tiny bit of thought to this question.
In my monograph “The New Landscape of Search” I made the point that search had become devalued, a free download in open source repositories, and a utility like cat or dir. Most enterprise search systems have failed to deliver results painted in Technicolor in sales presentations and marketing collateral.
Today, if I want search and retrieval, I just use Lucene. In fact, Lucene is more than good enough; it is comparable to most proprietary enterprise search systems. If I need support, I can ring up Elastic or one of many vendors eager to gild the open source lily.
The extreme value and reliability of open source search and retrieval software has, in my opinion, gutted the market for proprietary search and retrieval software. The financial follies of Fast Search & Transfer reminded some investors of the costly failures of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, among others I documented on my Xenky.com site at this link.
Recently most of the news I see on my coal fired computer in Harrod’s Creek about enterprise search has been about repositioning, not innovation. What’s up?
The answer seems to be that the myth cherished by was that enterprise search was the one, true way make sense of digital information. What many organizations learned was that good enough search does the basic blocking and tackling of finding a document but precious little else without massive infusions of time, effort, and resources.
But do enterprise search systems–no matter how many sparkly buzzwords–work? Not too many, no matter what publicly traded consulting firms tell me to believe.
Snake oil? I don’t know. I just know my own experience, and after 45 years of trying to make digital information findable, I avoid fast talkers with covered wagons adorned with slogans.
What happens when an enterprise search system is fed videos, podcasts, telephone intercepts, flows of GPS data, and a couple of proprietary file formats?
Answer: Not much.
The search system has to be equipped with extra cost connectors, assorted oddments, and shimware to deal with a recorded webinar and a companion deck of PowerPoint slides used by the corporate speaker.
What happens when the content stream includes email and documents in six, 12, or 24 different languages?
Answer: Mad scrambling until the proud licensee of an enterprise search system can locate a vendor able to support multiple language inputs. The real life needs of an enterprise are often different from what the proprietary enterprise search system can deal with.
That’s why I find the repositioning of enterprise search technology a bit like a clown with a sad face. The clown is no longer funny. The unconvincing efforts to become something else clash with the sad face, the red nose, and worn shoes still popular in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
When it comes to enterprise search, my litmus test is simple: If a system is keyword centric, it isn’t going to work for some of the real world applications I have encountered.
Oh, and don’t believe me, please.
Find a US special operations professional who relies on Palantir Gotham or IBM Analyst’s Notebook to determine a route through a hostile area. Ask whether a keyword search system or Palantir is more useful. Listen carefully to the answer.
No matter what keyword enthusiasts and quasi-slick New York consultants assert, enterprise search systems are not well suited for a great many real world applications. Heck, enterprise search often has trouble displaying documents which match the user’s query.
And why? Sluggish index updating, lousy indexing, wonky metadata, flawed set up, updates that kill a system, or interfaces that baffle users.
Personally I love to browse results lists. I like old fashioned high school type research too. I like to open documents and Easter egg hunt my way to a document that answers my question. But I am in the minority. Most users expect their finding systems to work without the query-read-click-scan-read-scan-read-scan Sisyphus-emulating slog.
Ah, you are thinking I have offered no court admissible evidence to support my argument, right? Well, just license a proprietary enterprise search system and let me know how your career is progressing. Remember when you look for a new job. You won’t search; you will insight.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2017
HonkinNews for April 11, 2017, Now Available
April 11, 2017
This week’s HonkinNews video program leads with information about Bitext, a company providing breakthrough deep linguistic analysis solutions. In order to put the comments of Dr. Antonio Valderrabanos in perspective, HonkinNews takes a look at the “promo” article discussing IBM’s cognitive computing activities. There is one key difference highlighted in HonkinNews: IBM talks jargon in recycled marketing language and Bitext’s CEO talks about the company’s rapid growth and licensing deals with companies like Audi, Renault, and one of the largest players in the mobile device and mobile services market. The program also looks at the remarkable 9,000 word Fortune Magazine article about Palantir Technologies’ interaction with US government procurement agencies. The very long article does not describe Palantir’s technical innovations nor does the Fortune analysis explain why using commercial off-the-shelf software for intelligence work makes sense. News about the Dark Web Notebook teams three presentations at the prestigious TechnoSecurity & Digital Forensics Conference in June 2017 complements a special offer for the only handbook to Dark Web investigations available. For discount information, check out the links displayed in the video. The video also takes a look at the new Yahoo. Once the transformation of Yahoo into Oath with a punctuation mark no less takes place, the Yahoo yodel will become a faint auditory memory. Does the HonkinNews item trigger an auditory memory. Watch this week’s video to find out. You can watch the video at this link.
Kenny Toth, April 11, 2017
Quote to Note: Google and Its Red Herrings
March 9, 2017
I read “Google Makes Such a Big Deal Out of Everything But Its Search Business.” Wake up call. Google is going on 20 years of fun and excitement in online and content processing. It’s been running the same game plan for maybe 14, 15 years. It is good that CNBC is sort of thinking about the GOOG.
In the write up, there is a quote which I noted. The rest of the write up is pretty forgettable. Here’s the statement allegedly made by Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir Technologies and adviser to the new US administration. Here’s the comment:
If you have a monopoly, you will tell people you are in a super-competitive business. And if you are in a super-competitive business, you will tell people that you have a monopoly of sorts. So for example, if you have a search company in Silicon Valley that I will not name, if you were to go around to CEOs saying, ‘We have a bigger share of the market and higher profit margins than Microsoft ever had in the 1990s,’ you wouldn’t do that…You don’t even talk about search. You say, ‘We are a technology company with an enormous space called technology, and we’re competing with Apple on smartphones, and we’re competing on self-driving cars, and there’s competition in everything we’re doing except this one thing called search, and we never talk about that.'”
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2017
Companies As Countries: Facebook Plans for Its Social Nation State
February 26, 2017
I read some of the Facebook manifesto. About half way through the screed I thought I was back in a class I audited decades ago about alternative political structures. That class struck me as intellectual confection, a bit like science fiction in 1962. The Facebook manifesto shared some ingredients, but it is an altogether different recipe for a new type of political construct. Facebook, not Google, is the big dog of information control. Lots of folks will not be happy; for example, traditional “real” journalists who want to pull the info-yarn and knit their vision of the perfect muffler and other countries who want to manage their information flows.
I thought about my “here we go again” reaction when I read “Facebook Plans to Rewire Your Life. Be Afraid.” Sorry, I am not afraid. Maybe when I was a bit younger, but 74 years of “innovative” thinking have dulled my senses. The write up which is from the “real” journalism outfit Bloomberg is more sensitive than I am. If you are a Facebooker, you will be happy with the Zuck’s manifesto. If you are struggling to figure out what is going on with hundreds of millions of people checking their “friends” and their “likes,” you will want to read the “real news” about Facebook.
Spoiler: Facebook is a new type of country.
The write up “reports”:
Facebook — launched, in Zuckerberg’s own words five years ago, to “extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships” — is turning into something of an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering.
Yep, the same “we can do it better” thinking has infused many other high technology companies. Some see the attitude as arrogance. I see the approach as an extension of a high school math team. No one in the high school cares that much about the boys and girls who do not struggle to understand calculus. Those in the math club know that the other kids in the school just don’t “get it.”
The thinking has created some nifty technology. There’s the GOOG. There’s Palantir. There’s Uber. No doubt these companies have found traction in a world which seems to lack shared cultural norms and nation states which seem to be like a cookie jar from which elected officials take handfuls of cash.
The write up points out:
As for the “rewired” information infrastructure, it has helped to chase people into ideological silos and feed them content that reinforces confirmation biases. Facebook actively created the silos by fine-tuning the algorithm that lies at its center — the one that forms a user’s news feed. The algorithm prioritizes what it shows a user based, in large measure, on how many times the user has recently interacted with the poster and on the number of “likes” and comments the post has garnered. In other words, it stresses the most emotionally engaging posts from the people to whom you are drawn — during an election campaign, a recipe for a filter bubble and, what’s more, for amplifying emotional rather than rational arguments.
The traditional real journalists are supposed to do this job. Well, that’s real news. The New York Times wants to be like Netflix. Sounds great. In practice, well, the NYT is a newspaper with some baggage and maybe not enough cash to buy a ticket to zip zip land.
The real news story makes an interesting assertion:
It’s absurd to expect humility from Silicon Valley heroes. But Zuckerberg should realize that by trying to shape how people use Facebook, he may be creating a monster. His company’s other services — Messenger and WhatsApp — merely allow users to communicate without any interference, and that simple function is the source of the least controversial examples in Zuckerberg’s manifesto. “In Kenya, whole villages are in WhatsApp groups together, including their representatives,” the Facebook CEO writes. Well, so are my kids’ school mates, and that’s great.
But great translates to “virtual identify suicide.”
The fix? Get those billion people to cancel their accounts. Yep, that will work in the country of Facebook. I am, however, not afraid. Of course, I don’t use Facebook, worry about likes, or keep in touch with those folks from that audited class.
From my point of view, Facebook and Google to a lesser extent have been chugging along for years. Now the railroad want to lay new track. Your farm in the way? Well, there is a solution. Build the track anyway.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2017
HonkinNews for January 31, 2017 Now Available
January 31, 2017
This weeks’ seven minute HonkinNews includes some highlights from the Beyond Search coverage of Alphabet Google. If you have not followed, Sergey Brin’s participation at the World Economic Forum, you may have missed the opportunity that Google did not recognize. More surprising is that Alphabet Google owns a stake in a company which specializes in predicting the future. IBM Watson had a busy holiday season. The company which has compiled 19 consecutive quarters of declining revenue invented a new alcoholic “spirit”, sometimes referred to as booze, hooch, the bane of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. How did Watson, a software system, jump from reading text to inventing rum? We tell what Watson really did. How did Palantir Technologies respond to a protest in front of its Palo Alto headquarters, known by some as the Shire? Think free coffee, and we reveal what the Beyond Search goose wants when she attends a protest. Beyond Search has an interest in voice search, which seems to be more than an oddity. Learn about the battle between Amazon and Google. The stakes are high because Amazon is not a big player in search, but Alexa technology way be about to kick on of the legs from Google’s online hegemony. DuckDuckGo honked loudly that it experienced significant growth in online search traffic. How close is DuckDuckGo to Google? Find out. Mind that gap. Microsoft has “invented”, rediscovered, or simply copied Autonomy’s Kenjin service from the 1990s. The lucky Word users will experience automatic search and the display of third party information in an Outlook style paneled interface. HonkinNews believes that those writing term papers will be happy with the new “Research.” Yahoot or Yabba Dabba Hoot warrants a mention. The US Securities & Exchange Commission is allegedly poking into Yahoo’s ill timed public release of information about losing its users information. Yep, Yabba Dabba Hoot. Enjoy Beyond Search which is filmed on 8 mm film from the Beyond Search cabin in rural Kentucky.
If you are looking for previous HonkinNews videos, you can find them by navigating to www.googlevideo.com and running the query HonkinNews. Watch for Stephen E Arnold’s new information service, Beyond Alexa. Who wants to type a search query? That’s like real work and definitely not the future.
Kenny Toth, January 31, 2017
Indexing: The Big Wheel Keeps on Turning
January 23, 2017
Yep, indexing is back. The cacaphone “ontology” is the next big thing yet again. Folks, an ontology is a form of metadata. There are key words, categories, and classifications. Whipping these puppies into shape has been the thankless task of specialists for hundreds if not thousands of years. “What Is an Ontology and Why Do I Want One?” tries to make indexing more alluring. When an enterprise search system delivers results which are off the user’s information need or just plain wrong, it is time for indexing. The problem is that machine based indexing requires some well informed humans to keep the system on point. Consider Palantir Gotham. Content finds its way into the system when a human performs certain tasks. Some of these tasks are riding herd on the indexing of the content object. IBM Analyst’s Notebook and many other next generation information access systems work hand in glove with expensive humans. Why? Smart software is still only sort of smart.
The write up dances around the need for spending money on indexing. The write up prefers to confuse a person who just wants to locate the answer to a business related question without pointing, clicking, and doing high school research paper dog work. I noted this passage:
Think of an ontology as another way to classify content (like a taxonomy) that allows you to identify what the content is about and how it relates to other types of content.
Okay, but enterprise search generally falls short of the mark for 55 to 70 percent of a search system’s users. This is a downer. What makes enterprise search better? An ontology. But without the cost and time metrics, the yap about better indexing ends up with “smart content” companies looking confused when their licenses are not renewed.
What I found amusing about the write up is that use of an ontology improves search engine optimization. How about some hard data? Generalities are presented, not instead of some numbers one can examine and attempt to verify.
SEO means getting found when a user runs a query. That does not work too well for general purpose Web search systems like Google. SEO is struggling to deal with declining traffic to many Web sites and the problem mobile search presents.
But in an organization, SEO is not what the user wants. The user needs the purchase order for a client and easy access to related data. Will an ontology deliver an actionable output. To be fair, different types of metadata are needed. An ontology is one such type, but there are others. Some of these can be extracted without too high an error rate when the content is processed; for example, telephone numbers. Other types of data require different processes which can require knitting together different systems.
To build a bubble gum card, one needs to parse a range of data, including images and content from a range of sources. In most organizations, silos of data persist and will continue to persist. Money is tight. Few commercial enterprises can afford to do the computationally intensive content processing under the watchful eye and informed mind of an indexing professional.
Cacaphones like “ontology” exacerbate the confusion about indexing and delivering useful outputs to users who don’t know a Boolean operator from a SQL expression.
Indexing is a useful term. Why not use it?
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2017
HonkinNews for January 17, 2017 Now Available
January 17, 2017
This week’s HonkinNews takes a look at Yahoo’s post Verizon name. No, our suggestion of yabba dabba hoo or was it “hoot” was not ignored by Yahoo’s marketing wizards. We also highlight Alphabet Google’s erasure of two letters from its “alphabet.” Goners are “S” and “T”. Palantir is hiring a people centric person. The fancy title may have an interesting spin. Two enterprise search vendors kick off 2017 with a blizzard of buzzwords. The depth of the cacaphones is remarkable because search by any other name would return results with questionable precision and recall. The featured story is the Mitre’s Corporation Jason Report. If you have an interest in artificial intelligence and warfighting, the report provides some insight into what the US Department of Defense may be considering. But the highlight of the unclassified document is a helpful description of Google’s TPU. The seven minute program is at this link. For fans of XQuery, we have a bit of input for you too. Proprietary XQuery too. The program is produced in old fashioned black and white and enhanced with theme music from the days of the Stutz Bearcat. From the hotbed of search and content processing, HonkinNews is different. We’re presenting information other big time outfits ignore. Mitre is a variant of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research. There you go. Live from Harrod’s Creek.
Kenny Toth, January 17, 2017
BAE Lands US Air Force Info Fusion Job
January 6, 2017
I read “BAE Systems Awarded $49 Million Air Force Research Lab Contract to Enhance Intelligence Sharing.” The main point is that the US Air Force has a pressing need for integrating, analyzing, and sharing text, audio, images, and data. The write up states:
The U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) has awarded BAE Systems a five-year contract worth up to $49 million to develop, deploy, and maintain cross domain solutions for safeguarding the sharing of sensitive information between government networks.
The $49 million contract will enhance virtualization, boost data processing, and support the integration of machine learning solutions.
I recall reading that the Distributed Common Ground System performs some, if not most, of these “fusion” type functions. The $49 million seems a pittance when compared to the multi-billion dollar investments in DCGS.
My hunch is that Palantir Technologies may point to this new project as an example of the US government’s penchant for inventing, not using commercial off the shelf software.
Tough problem it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2016
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