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While this is the season of miracles and magic, usually those are reserved for Hallmark movies and people in need, but one could argue that HP was in desperate need after the Autonomy fiasco. Maybe their Christmas wish will come true if the Information Week article “HP Cloud Adds Big Data Options” makes correct prediction.
HP will release its Haven big data analytics platform through the HP Helion cloud as Haven OnDemand. The writer believes this is HP’s next logical step given Autonomy Idol was released in January as SaaS. The popular Vertica DBMS will also be launches as a cloud service.
“Cloud-based database services have proven to be popular, with Amazon’s fast-growing Redshift service being an obvious point of comparison. Both HP Vertica and Redshift are distributed, columnar databases that are ideally suited to high-scale data-mart and data-warehouse use cases.”
HP wants to make a mark in the big data market and help their clients harness the valuable insights hiding in structured and unstructured data. While HP is on its way to becoming a key component in big data software, but it still needs improvement to compete. It doesn’t offer Hadoop OnDemand and it also lacks ETL, analytics software, and BI solutions that run alongside HP Haven OnDemand.
The company is finally moving forward and developing products that will start making up for the money lost in the Autonomy deal. How long will it take, however, to get every penny back?
Whitney Grace, December 15, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
I noted a blog post in the Wall Street Journal called “Artificial Intelligence Company Sentient Emerges from Stealth.” The company then had an enthusiastic PR person named Peter Lo contact me. I asked for a list of the company’s patents. These are public documents and the law librarian and paralegal who work with me on my research for Cyber OSINT are ever at the ready to provide a list of patent information to me.
Not Sentient, the “just emerging from stealth company.” Here’s what I received in response to a polite, legitimate request for patent numbers:
Hi Stephen,
We’re checking on the patent numbers to see if we can share these publicly and will disclose if we can do so.
Best,
Peter [on behalf of Sentient Technologies, Zenogroup]
I pointed out that patents were in the US as far as I knew information available at USPTO, via Google, and free services that seem to be as plentiful as Microsoft Surface ads on televised basketball games.
Mr. Lo from Zenogroup replied:
Hey Stephen,
Completely understood that patents are public. We’re checking if we can give the exact numbers to share those details specifically. While these patents can be found publicly, the company overall has been careful about revealing the precise patents so as not to tip off other competitors.
Will let you know what we have!
Best,
Peter
Well, Peter replied a couple of days later with this information:
About two days later I received this information from Mr. Lo, who at this point, had become a center of interest for my research team:
Hi Stephen,
I certainly didn’t mean to come off as trying to withhold any information. I’m sorry if I gave that impression. Here’s the patents numbers for the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) patents that we’ve been granted thus far. You’re also welcome to Google other patents by Babak Hodjat, Sentient Founder and Chief Scientist, to see where we’re building our expertise. Please feel free to also Google the patents by our other founders for more of the team’s collective background.
· 8825560 – Distributed evolutionary algorithm for asset management and trading
· 8527433 – Distributed evolutionary algorithm for asset management and trading
· 8768811 – Class-based distributed evolutionary algorithm for asset management and trading
Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions, and I’m sorry regarding the impression I gave you earlier. Happy to help if you need anything else.
Best,
Peter
So, case closed, right? No.
I asked one of the ArnoldIT goslings to check the the company a bit more closely, particularly the claim made about patents in the PR spam email I received on December 9, 2014:
Sentient now has 15 U.S. patents – 6 issued and 9 pending.
My researcher pointed out that the email from Mr. Lo contained references to three patent documents. The clever ArnoldIT professional told me that we should have received 12 patent application and patent numbers.
Math is a strong suit of this particular researcher.
In poking around, we found that the folks involved with Sentient have or had some connection with Sentient Technologies Holdings Ltd, which in turn, is hooked with Genetic Finance (Barbados) Limited. A fair number of the inventions are related to finance; for example:
Distributed evolutionary algorithm for asset management and trading United States Patent 8825560 B2 · Filed: 05/15/2013 · Published: 09/02/2014
Abstract: The cost of performing sophisticated software-based financial trend and pattern analysis is significantly reduced by distributing the processing power required to carry out the analysis and computational task across a large number of networked individual or cluster of computing nodes. To achieve this, the computational task is divided into a number of sub tasks. Each sub task is then executed on one of a number of processing devices to generate a multitude of solutions. The solutions are subsequently combined to generate a result for the computational task. The individuals controlling the processing devices are compensated for use of their associated processing devices. The algorithms are optionally enabled to evolve over time. Thereafter, one or more of the evolved algorithms is selected in accordance with a predefined condition.
Assignee:
Genetic Finance (Barbados) Limited (Belleville, BB)
Inventors:
Hodjat, Babak (Dublin, CA, US)
Shahrzad, Hormoz (Dublin, CA, US)
Blondeau, Antoine (Hong Kong, CN)
Cheyer, Adam (Oakland, CA, US)
Harrigan, Peter (San Francisco, CA, US)
Others relate to executing algorithms via a network; for example:
DISTRIBUTED NETWORK FOR PERFORMING COMPLEX ALGORITHMS United States Patent Application 20140006316 A1 · Filed: 08/29/2013 · Published: 01/02/2014
Abstract: A server computer and a multitude of client computers form a network computing system that is scalable and adapted to continue to evaluate the performance characteristics of a number of genes generated using a software application running on the client computers. Each client computer continues to periodically receive data associated with the genes stored in its memory. Using this data, the client computers evaluate the performance characteristic of their genes by comparing a solution provided by the gene with the periodically received data associated with that gene. Accordingly, the performance characteristic of each gene may be updated and varied with each periodically received data. The performance characteristic of a gene defines its fitness. The genes may be virtual asset traders that recommend trading options, and the data associated with the genes may be historical trading data.
Assignee:
GENETIC FINANCE (BARBADOS) LIMITED (Belleville, BB)
Inventors:
Hodjat, Babak (Dublin, CA, US)
Shahrzad, Hormoz (Dublin, CA, US)
Blondeau, Antoine (Hong Kong, CN)
Cheyer, Adam (Oakland, CA, US)
Harrigan, Peter (San Francisco, CA, US)
The company has a Web site, it seems, for its financial applications. It looks like this:
The company also has an artificial intelligence centric Web site. It looks like this:
The company, according to Crunchbase here, has raised more than $140 million. Founded in 2007, Crunchbase describes the company this way:
Using advanced Artificial Intelligence technology, massively distributed computing, and a scientific approach to the verification of newly discovered strategies, Genetic Finance delivers novel solutions to complex problems in a wide variety of fields.
Sentient is described this way in an IDC article (without the ministrations of Dave Schubmehl it seems):
Sentient works on scaling artificial intelligence to help companies solve problems: “We take machine learning AI and algorithms – and scale them dramatically so by that we tailor and distribute them around thousands of sites and millions of processors.” Sentient has been around for about six years and has managed to raise a total of $143 million in funding. The founding team actually worked on the technology that became Siri, Apple’s famous voice-controlled virtual assistant. I ask Blondeau if his work on Siri influenced what Sentient are working on now.
Fresh from the research for my forthcoming monograph CyberOSINT, several thoughts wafted through my mind as my researchers bored me with this information:
First, it seems that the “play” for sentient is to repurpose “smart” trading methods for more general purpose applications; hence, the stealth and the second Web site.
Second, the company does not equip Zenogroup to email a person receiving PR spam a list of public documents. Instead the company operates as if it were one of the firms providing specialized services to the law enforcement and intelligence communities. I did a quick check on the vendors known to me to be involved in law enforcement and intelligence, and Sentient rated a hit on the WSJ blog I mentioned but nothing else. Perhaps my files are incomplete? My thought is that pretending to be secret and being secret are two different things. Maybe not?
Third, the Barbados connection fascinates me. Years ago I encountered a financial professional working on a business matter with me. In our conversations, he identified what he called flashing yellow lights. Among those were senior managers who operated away from the primary place of business. Another was having legal incorporation at some interesting places.
Net net: Once again PR backfires for companies trying to cash in with their artificial intelligence technology. I think this company will be interesting to monitor. At the February 2015 CyberOSINT Conference in Washington, DC, I will ask around about Sentient’s technology.
There is a great deal of talk about artificial intelligence. However, human intelligence may be needed when trying to whip up buzz. I suppose the approach works in Barbados, but it does not work in rural Kentucky.
We have added this company to our forthcoming and very public Overflight for CyberOSINT. News about this free service will be available in early 2015 and no PR professional will flog you with stealth baloney.
Stephen E Arnold, December 14, 2014
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Marketing, News | Comments Off on Sentient Technologies: AI via Barbados and Hong Kong
I have been following the “AI will kill us”, the landscape of machine intelligence craziness, and “Artificial Intelligence Isn’t a Threat—Yet.”
The most recent big thinking on this subject appears in the Wall Street Journal, an organization in need of any type of intelligence: Machine, managerial, fiscal, online, and sci-fi.
Harsh? Hmm. The Wall Street Journal has been running full page ads for Factiva. If you are not familiar with this for fee service, think 1981. The system gathers “high value” content and makes it available to humans clever enough to guess the keywords that unlock, not answers, but a list of documents presumably germane to the keyword query. There are wrappers that make Factiva more fetching. But NGIA systems (what I call next generation information access systems) use the Factiva methods perfected 40 years ago as a utility.
These are Cheetos. nutritious, right? Will your smart kitchen let you eat these when it knows you are 30 pounds overweight, have consumed a quart of alcohol infused beverages, and ate a Snickers for lunch? Duh? What?
NGIA systems are sort of intelligent. The most interesting systems recurse through the previous indexes as the content processing system ingests data from users happily clicking, real time content streaming to the collection service, and threshold adjustments made either by savvy 18 year olds or some numerical recipes documented by Google’s Dr. Norvig in his standard text Artificial Intelligence.
So should be looking forward to the outputs of a predictive system pumping directly into an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle? Will a nifty laser weapon find and do whatever the nifty gizmo does to a target? Will the money machine figure out why I need $300 for concrete repairs and decline to give it to me because the ATM “knows” the King of Concrete could not lay down in a feather bed. Forget real concrete.
The Wall Street Journal write up offers up this titbit:
Read more
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Feature, NGIA | Comments Off on Artificial Intelligence: Duh? What?
I am not too keen on Facebook. I get odd ball friend requests to our automated Beyond Search account which baffles me. Who wants to be friends with a script.
Nevertheless, I read “Facebook Dumps Microsoft Web Search Results.” The Facebookers have to get control of information access to their content. Note I said “their”, not your content, gentle reader.
The write up, which is a foundation, asserts:
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has flagged search as one of the company’s key growth initiatives, noting in July that there were more than 1 billion search queries occurring on Facebook every day and hinting that the vast amount of information that users share within Facebook could eventually replace the need to search the Web for answers to certain questions.
Yep, the Googlers at Facebook know there is money in them thar search results.
Debing, bada, gone.
Stephen E Arnold, December 13, 2014
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Facebook, News, Search | Comments Off on Debing, Bada Gone: Facebook Search
I need this in my office. I will dump my early 1940s French posters and go for logos.
Navigate to this link: http://bit.ly/1sdmBL0. You will be able to download a copy of an infographic (poster) that summarizes “The Current State of Machine Intelligence.” There are some interesting editorial decisions; for example, the cheery Google logo turns up in deep learning, predictive APIs, automotive, and personal assistant. I quite liked the inclusion of IBM Watson in artificial intelligence—recipes with tamarind and post-video editing game show champion. I found the listing of Palantir as one of the “intelligence tools” outfits. Three observations:
- I am not sure if the landscape captures what machine intelligence is
- The categories, while brightly colored, do not make clear how a core technology can be speech recognition but not part of the “rethinking industries” category
- Shouldn’t Google be in every category?
I am confident that mid tier consultants and reputation surfers like Dave Schubmehl will find the chart a source of inspiration. Does Digital Reasoning actually have a product? The company did not make the cut for the top 60 companies in NGIA systems. Hmmm. Live and learn.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2014
The Economist, the British magazine that calls itself a newspaper, published “The Dozy Watchdogs.” Well, okay. The write up does contain an interesting nugget along the lines of “when you are out you are in and when you are in you are out.” Take that cricket fans.
The snippet in the article that I noted was this bit:
In 2012 Hewlett-Packard wrote off 80% of its $10.3 billion purchase of Autonomy, a software company, after accusing the firm of counting forecast subscriptions as current sales (Autonomy pleads innocence).
What’s 80 percent of $11 billion? In Harrod’s Creek, that’s a big management mistake. HP wrote a check and drove the vehicle off the lot. Yep, let’s blame the auditors, the dozy ones.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2014
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Management, News | Comments Off on Did Hewlett Packard Overpay for Autonomy?
Analytics outfit Lexalytics is going all-in on their European expansion. The write-up, “Lexalytics Expands International Presence: Launches Pain-Free Text Mining Customization” at Virtual-Strategy Magazine tells us that the company has boosted the language capacity of their recently acquired Semantria platform. The text-analytics and sentiment-analysis platform now includes Japanese, Arabic, Malay, and Russian in its supported-language list, which already included English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean.
Lexalytics is also setting up servers in Europe. Because of upcoming changes to EU privacy law, we’re told companies will soon be prohibited from passing data into the U.S. Thanks to these new servers, European clients will be able to use Semantria’s cloud services without running afoul of the law.
Last summer, the company courted Europeans’ attention by becoming a sponsor of the 2014 Enterprise Hackathon in Prague. The press release tells us:
“All participants of the Hackathon were granted unlimited access and support to the Semantria API during the event. Nearly every team tried Semantria during the 36 hours they had to build a program that could crunch enough data to be used at the enterprise level. Redmore says, “We love innovative, quick development events, and are always looking for good events to support. Please contact us if you have a hackathon where you can use the power of our text mining solutions, and we’ll talk about hooking you up!”
Lexalytics is proud to have been the first to offer sentiment analysis, auto theme detection, and Wikipedia integration. Designed to integrate with third-party applications, their text analysis software is chugs along in the background at many data-related organizations. Founded in 2003, Lexalytics is headquartered in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Cynthia Murrell, December 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
After Dassault Systèms bought Exalead in 2010, we were eager to learn what they would do with one of our favorite search systems. We waited. And waited. Now, as Dassault pursues bigger and better deals around the world, search may have fallen by the wayside. In fact, the company seems to be focused on its 3D technology at the moment. Business Wire reveals, “Dassault Systèms Signs Research Agreement with the Food and Drug Administration for Its ‘Living Heart Project’.” If they must shove search aside, at least they’re working on something that should be good for medicine. The press release states that Dassault:
“… has reached a significant milestone in its project aimed at driving the creation and use of simulated 3D personalized hearts in the treatment and diagnosis of heart diseases and medical device development. Powered by Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s realistic simulation applications, The ‘Living Heart Project’ announced in May of this year, has rapidly moved its first realistic 3D heart simulator into beta test, validated the efficacy of a device and has surpassed 30 contributing member organizations.
“As a key step of this initiative, Dassault Systèmes has signed a five-year collaborative research agreement with the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which will initially target the development of testing paradigms for the insertion, placement and performance of pacemaker leads and other cardiovascular devices used to treat heart disease.”
Dassault’s deal with the FDA is a five-year collaborative research agreement. The team is working closely with a long list of cardiologists, medical device companies, and academic researchers. We applaud programs that promise better medical outcomes, especially for a condition as widespread as heart disease.
Still, we can’t help being a bit disappointed that search seems to be an afterthought, if that, for Dassault. Exalead’s CloudView is a search platform we felt was on the right track. Exalead was launched in 2000 and is based in Paris. Dassault Systèms is located in Vélizy-Villacoublay, France. The company has a history of snapping up other businesses, having acquired 11 companies since its founding in 1981.
Cynthia Murrell, December 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Search | Comments Off on Big Deal for Dassault but Where Is Search?
I have zero idea if this is a tire change on Google’s run to the trophy at el Gran Premio de España or a spin out. (By the way, I don’t care.)
Here’s the write up from my favorite pro physical punishment news outlet: “Google’s rough time in Europe continues with closure of Google News Spain.”
If accurate, some publishers in Spain are throwing roses because the GOOG has turned off its Spanish Google News service. Olé. If I understand the situation, the Google would have to pay a “tax” to use story links. Olé.
I noted this passage:
The move is likely to mean a huge drop in traffic for many of the Spanish media outlets that regularly appear on Google’s news site in the country, a situation that could ultimately lead to a climb-down by the Spanish government.
“Likely” strikes me a limp word. Anyone recall how quickly a certain German news and information company did an about face when its traffic cratered? Well, I do. Axel Springer, which owns it own Google goblin in the somewhat fascinating logic of Google’s senior managers, now understands what traffic means. Stated simply, if one’s Web page or Web whatever is not in the Google index, that Web whatever does not exist for most of the Internet world. Is this a monopoly position? What about that one click away from another search system? Is that baloney? Is Mr. Vanderbilt proud of Google from his perch in capitalist heaven? Will Spain get the message?
Yep, eventually. Anyway the news outlets can work hard to get big time traffic from Exalead Search or Yahoo. (Remember the yodel?)
I wonder if Google questions why pesky countries cannot understand the Google way. Nah.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2014
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, Government, News | Comments Off on Google: Not Yet the Conquistador of Spanish News
Short honk: The news about HP creating a new operating system must have thrilled the folks at MIT Technology Review. I read “HP Will Release a “Revolutionary” New Operating System in 2015.”
Okay.
I also read “HP sees HP-UX Sticking around for 10 Years.”
How long will it take to port Autonomy IDOL and DRE to the new operating system? And the big question, “Which of the two HPs will have the honor of supporting the beastie?
Nothing beats a prediction about something so revolutionary as a bunch of “news.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2014
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Technology | Comments Off on HP: New Memory, New Operating System, New, New, New
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