Love Open Source? Good News and News
January 13, 2015
I read “Top 10 FOSS Legal Developments of 2014.” A legal eagle generated the listicle. Despite my skepticism for birds of this feather, the list has some good news and—well, to put it positively—news for the open source movement.
The good news is that folks from courts to government agencies are paying attention to free and open source software. The “news” news is that use of open source “by commercial companies expands.” The write up states:
We have discussed in the past how many large companies are using FOSS as an explicit strategy to build their software. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, has described this strategic use of FOSS as external “research and development.” His conclusions are supported by Gartner who noted that “the top tech companies are still spending tens of billions of dollars on software research and development, the smart ones are leveraging open source for 80 percent of the code and spending their money on the remaining 20 percent, which represents their program’s ‘special sauce.’” The scope of this trend was emphasized by Microsoft’s announcement that it was “open sourcing” the .NET software framework (this software is used by millions of developers to build and operate websites and other large online applications).
The other item of “news” news is that the dust up with regard to Google and Java for Android continues. Who wants to risk a similar patent action? The answer to that question will help inform your assessment of the “news”.
I interpreted the information to suggest that open source is increasingly commercial. Good news or just news?
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2015
Personalizing Search: A Good Thing?
January 13, 2015
Here’s a passage I noted from “Computers Know You Better Than Your Spouse or Siblings”:
“Big Data and machine-learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of thinking,” he said. Nevertheless, the authors concede that detection of some traits might be best left to human abilities, those without digital footprints or dependent on subtle cognition.
That pesky human characteristic of behavior shifts to match social context is just so annoying.
Search personalization is better than human-directed search. Right? Think about your answer before it is filtered.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2015
A Googley Tale and Maybe a Lesson?
January 13, 2015
Short honk: I don’t have a dog in this show. I did enjoy “Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development.” Google is about 15 or 16 years old. Some of the company’s original culture persists, and I find that encouraging. On the other hand, some may not. For me, the approach may suggest why search has not maintained its remarkable trajectory established between 1998 and 2002.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 13, 2015
AI: Outputs Become Inputs, No Humans Necessary in Some Situations
January 13, 2015
Here’s the thing. The time between an an actionable item and taking action is a big deal. For example, you hear about buying shares of X at the gym. Two days later you call your financial advisor and say, “Should we buy shares of X?”
He says, “Well, the stock has jumped 25 percent yesterday.”
The point: You heard about an actionable item—buying shares. When you cranked up to buy the stock, the big jump was history.
The train left the station, and you are standing on the platform watching the riders head to the bank.
How does one get less “wait” between the actionable item and taking action? The answer is automation. The slow down is usually human. Humans want to deliberate, think about stuff, and procrastinate.
A system that takes actionable outputs and does something about them reduces the “wait.” The idea is to assign a probability to reflect your confidence in the actionable item. The system computes that probability, looks at your number, and then either does or does not take an action.
This happens in milliseconds. Financial institutions pay hundreds of millions to shave milliseconds off their financial transactions. The objective is to use probability and automation to make sure these wizards do not miss the financial train.
Now read “Artificial Intelligence Experts Sign Open Letter to Protect Mankind from Machines.” The write up asserts:
AI experts around the globe are signing an open letter issued Sunday by the Future of Life Institute that pledges to safely and carefully coordinate progress in the field to ensure it does not grow beyond humanity’s control. Signees include co-founders of Deep Mind, the British AI company purchased by Google in January 2014; MIT professors; and experts at some of technology’s biggest corporations, including IBM’s Watson supercomputer team and Microsoft Research.
Sounds great. Won’t compute in the real world. The reason is that time means money to some, security to others, and opportunity for 20 somethings.
The reality is that outputs of smart systems will be piped directly into other smart systems. These systems will act based on probability and other considerations. Why burn out a human when you can disintermediate the human, save money, and give the person an opportunity to study Zen or pursue a hobby? Why wait to discover a security breach when a smart system can take proactive action?
Who resists accepting a recommendation from Amazon or Google “suggest”? I am not sure users of smart systems realize that automation and smart software—crude as it is—is not getting bogged down in the “humanity’s control” thing.
Need an example? Check out weapon systems. Need another? Read the CyberOSINT report available here.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2015
German Spies Eye Metadata
January 13, 2015
Germany’s foreign intelligence arm (BND) refuses to be outdone by our NSA. The World Socialist Web Site reports, “German Foreign Intelligence Service Plans Real-Time Surveillance of Social Networks.” The agency plans to invest €300 million by 2020 to catch up to the (Snowden-revealed) capabilities of U.S. and U.K. agencies. The stated goal is to thwart terrorism, of course, but reporter Sven Heymann is certain the initiative has more to do with tracking political dissidents who oppose the austerity policies of recent years.
Whatever the motivation, the BND has turned its attention to the wealth of information to be found in metadata. Smart spies. Heymann writes:
“While previously, there was mass surveillance of emails, telephone calls and faxes, now the intelligence agency intends to focus on the analysis of so-called metadata. This means the recording of details on the sender, receiver, subject line, and date and time of millions of messages, without reading their content.
“As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, BND representatives are apparently cynically attempting to present this to parliamentary deputies as the strengthening of citizens’ rights and freedoms in order to sell the proposal to the public.”
“In fact, the analysis of metadata makes it possible to identify details about a target person’s contacts. The BND is to be put in a position to know who is communicating with whom, when, and by what means. As is already known, the US sometimes conducts its lethal and illegal drone attacks purely on the basis of metadata.”
The article tells us the BND is also looking into the exploitation of newly revealed security weaknesses in common software, as well as tools to falsify biometric-security images (like fingerprints or iris scans). Though Germany’s intelligence agents are prohibited by law from spying on their own people, Heymann has little confidence that rule will be upheld. After all, so is the NSA.
Cynthia Murrell, January 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Continuing Evolution of SharePoint
January 13, 2015
It is the time of year when everyone is reflecting upon the year in review and much attention is given to goals, plans, and speculations for the future. Reviewing Microsoft SharePoint is no different. CMS Wire covers the latest speculations and year-end critics in their article, “A Look Back: The Continuing Evolution of SharePoint.”
The article begins:
“If we could really say what the future holds for SharePoint, we could probably sell the information back to Microsoft. All the signs point to major changes — but they also point to the fact that Microsoft is still dithering. While the company has committed to another on-premises version, after that all bets are off.”
Microsoft has always been largely secretive about SharePoint changes and updates. It is no surprise that no one knows for sure what to expect in 2015. We can, however, say that Stephen E. Arnold will continue to manage all the latest tips, tricks, and news related to SharePoint on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint feed provides precise and up to date information for users and managers alike. Stay tuned.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 13, 2015
Elsevier: On the Road to Mendeley
January 12, 2015
Academe once made hoots about pumping ads to young adults. Times have changed. Elsevier wants to pump ups its advertising to students. “Elsevier Acquires Newsflo To Add Media Monitoring To Its Academic Research Tool Mendeley” explains that Elsevier has
acquired Newsflo, a bespoke media monitoring service that enables academics to get ‘impact’ analytics for their published research, thus helping academic institutions keep track of media coverage and social media mentions, as an additional metric to more traditional citations.
According to TechCrunch:
Launched in 2012, Newsflo’s academic-specific media monitoring service tracks over 55,000 English-speaking media sources, based on feeds from 20 or so countries, and plans to add more sources and languages post-acquisition. Its pitch to the academic institutions who subscribe to the service is that it enables them to provide additional evidence of the ‘societal impact’ of their research, something that can also be touted when competing for funding and attracting students.
My thought is that Elseveir may find ways to use the technology in other products and services if—and this is the key to the deal—if the system pumps up revenue. Elsevier faces some challenges in its core products, and the company is obviously learning about tracking and advertising. Let’s see. GoTo.com got into this business a couple of decades ago.
Quick reaction from a sci-tech publishing which charges some authors to put their content in journals. The journals used to be marketed to libraries, which have had to make hard choices like retain staff or buy expensive sci-tech journals.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 13, 2015
Top Papers in Data Mining: Some Concern about Possibly Flawed Outputs
January 12, 2015
If you are a fan of “knowledge,” you probably follow the information provided by www.KDNuggets.com. I read “Research Leaders on Data Science and big Data Key Trends, Top Papers.” The information is quite interesting. I did note that the paper was kicked off with this statement:
As for the papers, we found that many researchers were so busy that they did not really have the time to read many papers by others. Of course, top researchers learn about works of others from personal interactions, including conferences and meetings, but we hope that professors have enough students who do read the papers and summarize the important ones for them!
Okay, everyone is really busy.
In the 13 experts cited, I noted that there were two papers that seemed to call attention to the issue of accuracy. These were:
“Preventing False Discovery in Interactive Data Analysis is Hard,” Moritz Hardt and Jonathan Ullman
“Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images,” Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune.
A related paper noted in the article is “Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks,” by Christian Szegdy, et al. The KDNuggets’ comment states:
It found that for every correctly classified image, one can generate an “adversarial”, visually indistinguishable image that will be misclassified. This suggests potential deep flaws in all neural networks, including possibly a human brain.
My take away is that automation is coming down the pike. Accuracy could get hit by a speeding output.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2015
Old School Natural Language Processing: Still Around, Of Course
January 12, 2015
I you are a fan of sentiment analysis and the other dark magic of content processing systems, you will find “What Happened to Old School NLP?” worth a moment.
The write up explains a couple of decades of innovation with a reference to the hand- crafting of word lists. The write up points out:
NLP research is now, essentially, just a branch of machine learning rather than a branch of linguistics.
The point that I noted was, “Money.”
The article then talks about sentiment analysis, primitive semantics, and prognostication.
The write up ends in a surprising way:
As AI and NLP become more and more prominent, and as comprehension and reasoning become important tasks, the kinds of structural information that is used for learning will become richer and richer. We’ll start to see the re-emergence of tools from old-school NLP, but now augmented with the powerful statistical tools and data-oriented automation of new-school NLP. IBM’s Watson already does this to some extent.
Ah, IBM Watson.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2015
The Continuing Issue of Data Integration for Financial Services Organizations
January 12, 2015
The article on Kapow Software titled Easy Integration of External Data? Don’t Bank On It shows that data integration and fusion still create issues. The article claims that any manual process for integrating external data cannot really be called timely. Financial services organizations need information from external sources like social media, and this often means the manual integration of structured and unstructured data. A survey through Computerworld.com brought to light some of the issues with data handling. The article explains,
“Integrating internal systems with external data sources can be challenging to say the least, especially when organizations are constantly adding new external sources of information to their operations, and these external websites and web portals either don’t provide APIs or the development efforts are too time consuming and costly… manual processes no longer fit into any financial organization business process. It’s clear these time consuming development projects used to integrate external data sources into an enterprise infrastructure are not a long-term viable strategy.”
Perhaps the top complaint companies have about data is that costliness of the time spent manually importing it and then validating it. 43% of companies surveyed said that they “struggle” with the integration between internal systems and external data sources. The article finishes with the suggestion that a platform for data integration that is both user-friendly and customizable is a necessity.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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