Attensity: Downplaying Automated Collection and Analysis
November 7, 2014
I read “Do What I Mean, Not What I Say: The Text Analytics Paradox.” The write up made a comment which I found interesting; to wit:
Now, before you start worrying about robots replacing humans (relax—that’s at least a couple of years away), understand this: context and disambiguation within these billions of daily social posts, tweets, comments, and online surveys is they key to viable, business-relevant data. The way human use language is replete with nuance, idiomatic expressions, slang, typos, and of course, context. This underscores the magnitude of surfacing actionable intelligence in data for any industry.
Based on information my research team has collected, the notion of threat detection via automated collection and analysis of Internet-accessible information is quite advanced. In fact, some of the technology has been undergoing continuous refinement since the late 1990s. Rutgers University has been one of the academic outfits in the forefront of this approach to the paradox puzzling Attensity.
The more recent entrants in this important branch (perhaps an new redwood in the search forest) of information access are keeping a low profile. There is a promising venture funded company in Baltimore as well as a China-based firm operating from offices in Hong Kong. Neither of these companies has captured the imagination of traditional content processing vendors for three reasons:
First, the approach is not from traditional information retrieval methodologies.
Second, the companies generate most of their revenue from organizations demanding “quiet service.” (This means that when there is no marketing hoo hah, the most interesting companies are simply not visible to the casual, MBA inspired analyst.
Third, the outputs are of stunning utility. Information about quite particular subjects are presented without recourse to traditional human intermediated fiddling.
I want to float an idea: The next generation firms delivering state of the art solutions and have yet to hit the wall that requires the type of marketing that now characterizes some content processing efforts.
I am trying to figure out how to present these important but little known players. I will write about one in my next Info Today article. The challenge is that there are two dozen firms pushing “search” in a new and productive direction.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2014
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