Minority Report and Reality: The Google and In-Q-Tel Play

August 9, 2010

Unlike the film “Minority Report”, predictive analytics are here and now. More surprising to me is that most people don’t realize that the methods are in the cateogry of “been there, done that.”

I don’t want to provide too much detail about predictive methods applied to military and law enforcement. Let me remind you, gentle reader, that using numerical recipes to figure out what is likely to happen is an old, old discipline. Keep in mind that the links in this post may go dead at any time, particularly the link to the Chinese write up.

There are companies who have been grinding away in this field for a long time. I worked at an outfit that had a “pretzel factory”. We did not make snacks; we made predictions along with some other goodies.

In this blog I have mentioned over time companies who operate in this sector; for example, Kroll, recently acquired by Altegrity and Fetch Technologies. Now that’s a household name in Sioux City and Seattle. I have even mentioned a project on which I worked which you can ping at www.tosig.com. Other hints and clues are scattered like wacky Johnny Appleseed trees. I don’t plan on pulling these threads together in a free blog post.

I can direct your attention to the public announcement that RecordedFuture has received some financial Tiger Milk from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of one of the US government entities. Good old Google via its ventures arm has added some cinnamon to the predictive analytics smoothie. You can get an acceptable run down in Wired’s “Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring.” I think you want to have your “real journalist” baloney detector on because In-Q-Tel invested in RecordedFuture in January 2010, a fact disclosed on the In-Q-Tel Web site many moons ago. RecordedFuture also has a Web site at www.recordedfuture.com, rich with marketing mumbo jumbo, a video, and some semi-useful examples of what the company does. I will leave the public Web site to readers with some time to burn. If you want to get an attention deficit disorder injection, here you go:

The Web contains a vast amount of unstructured information. Web users access specific content of interest with a variety of Websites supporting unstructured search. The unstructured search approaches clearly provide tremendous value but are unable to address a variety of classes of search. RecordedFuture is aggregating a variety of Web-based news and information sources and developing semantic context enabling more structured classes of search. In this presentation, we present initial methods for accessing and analyzing this structured content. The RJSONIO package is used to form queries and manage response data. Analytic approaches for the extracted content include normalization and regression approaches. R-based visualization approaches are complemented with data presentation capabilities of Spotfire.

The abstract come from a tough to find document called “Structured Text Access and Analysis.” If you are not familiar with Spotfire, click here. Exploring the Stanford connections is particularly helpful when thinking about RecordedFuture.

I would direct your attention to a Chinese language write up here that offers some useful points to evaluate. My Japanese language skills are non existent, so I rely on public accessible translation systems. I recommend that you get the original document translated and not rely on what I present below:

Total invested by In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures is estimated to be not more than $10 million
Sources will include Web sites, blogs, and Twitter tweets among others including those that are “Beyond Search”. [Cute reference I thought]
The relationship among RecordedFuture, In-Q-Tel, and Google is “ambiguous”

For me the most interesting passage in the Chinese write up was:

RecordedFuture company can strip out the pages involved in the people, places and events. The company will also look at the time of these events and place (in time and space analysis), and the tone of the document (semantic analysis) to be checked. After using some artificial intelligence algorithms to extract the relevant links between the characters. RecordedFuture company has more than 100 million incidents of indexes, and stores it in Amazon’s servers, but the analysis is in real time. RecordedFuture really have the ability to identify the events and the early trends.

If you want to work at RecordedFuture, navigate to this page. You can read about RecordedFuture in its consumer-y blog here, or you can get more substantive information in its Analysis Intelligence blog here. There are some other open source sources about open source sources from RecordedFuture, but you need to demonstrate your intelligence expertise to locate them. (Sorry about the “open source sources” phrase, but that’s the best I could produce today.)

Keep in mind that there are different types of investments. I think this point is germane to Google’s interest.

Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010

Stephen E

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business intelligence, Feature, Google, Government, Real time search, Technology, Text analytics, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.