Story Telling and Search: Smartlogic Fiction
June 25, 2015
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to an article appearing in the Smartlogic Web log. I found the write up unusual. You may want to check it out: Surviving without Content Intelligence? There’s an Elephant in the Room. The first chapter is here.
The approach is to tell a story which explains the value of Smartlogic’s content intelligence approach. I circled this passage in pale blue:
The OLAP cube and MDM solution he’s spent the first half of the year implementing [you can read about it here] is not going to help him with the emails, call records and file system data that he is being asked to include. He’d always known that 80% of an organization’s data was unstructured – he had hoped that they could get away with the 20% that was structured and easily managed. Now he’s got four times more data to work with, and he can’t just shovel it into the CRM system and hope they can deal with it.
The “read about it here” does not link to anything.
If the story resonates with you, Smartlogic may be exactly what you require.
The subhead “Next Week” includes this passage:
The Smartlogic Semaphore Search Application Framework is a tool for rapidly developing search applications that uniquely combine a Semantic Model with commodity tools such as SOLR and the Google Search Appliance, so users are not restricted to keywords, but can search by meaning as well which dramatically improves the user experience. Last, but not least, the Semaphore Classification Server would have allowed Archie to reliably link structured data and unstructured content without being dependent on existing structures and metadata; but that’s a story for next week.
I found one word fascinating, “commodity.” I think of the Google Search Appliance as an expensive way to process large volumes of content. The GSA no longer takes a one size fits all approach, but it is expensive to set up with fail over and customized functions. Solr is an open source solution perched on top of Lucene. A number of companies offer implementations of these open source products. The current stallion winning races is Elastic, but that is not a commodity like diapers.
The “story” is not complete. Part three will become available soon. Stay tuned.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2015
The US Government and Software: Some of It Works Maybe
June 25, 2015
I read “Report: Government Software Flawed, Rarely Fixed.” Over the years I have tallied some anecdotes about US government software. Examples range from outputs that come from a pool of demonstration data instead of the actual data from the system to content management systems which cannot manage content.
The write up states:
According to Veracode’s annual software security report just 24 percent of government sector software was found to be compliant — the lowest rate among seven sectors Veracode studied. The report suggests that one reason could be government’s frequent use of scripting and older languages such as ColdFusion, which can lead to more vulnerabilities. When it comes to fixing those vulnerabilities, government again had the lowest rate at just 27 percent. Veracode looked 34 industries in all, grouped into seven sectors: government, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and hospitality, technology and “other.”
In the wake of the recent security issues at a certain US government agency, the challenge is now national news.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25,2015
Why Are Ads Hiding Themselves
June 25, 2015
The main point of an advertisement is to get your attention and persuade you to buy a good or service. So why would ads be hiding themselves in a public venue? Gizmodo reports that in Russia certain ads are hiding from law enforcement in the article: “This Ad For Banned Food In Russia Itself From The Cops.” Russian authorities have banned imported food from the United States and European Union. Don Giulio Salumeria is a Russian food store that makes its income by selling imported Italian food, but in light of the recent ban the store has had to come up with some creative advertising:
“Websites are already able to serve up ads customized for whoever happens to be viewing a page. Now an ad agency in Russia is taking that idea one step further with an outdoor billboard that’s able to automatically hide when it spots the police coming.”
Using a camera equipped with facial recognition software programmed to recognized symbols and logos on officers’ uniforms, the billboard switches ads from Don Giulio Salumeria to another ad advertising a doll store. While the ad does change when it “sees “ the police coming, they still have enough time to see it. The article argues that the billboard’s idea is more interesting than anything. It then points out how advertising will become more personally targeted in the future, such as a billboard recognizing a sports logo and advertising an event related to your favorite team or being able to recognize your car on a weekly commute, then recommending a vacation. While Web sites are already able to do this by tracking cookies on your browser, it is another thing to being tracked in the real world by targeted ads.
Whitney Grace, June 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
How the Cloud Might Limit SharePoint Functionality
June 25, 2015
In the highly anticipated SharePoint Server 2016, on-premises, cloud, and hybrid functionality are all emphasized. However, some are beginning to wonder if functionality can suffer based on the variety of deployment chosen. Read all the details in the Search Content Management article, “How Does the Cloud Limit SharePoint Search and Integration?”
The article begins:
“All searches are not created equal, and tradeoffs remain for companies mulling deployment of the cloud, on-premises and hybrid versions of Microsoft’s collaboration platform, SharePoint. SharePoint on-premises has evolved over the years with a focus on customization and integration with other internal systems. That is not yet the case in the cloud with SharePoint Online, and there are still unique challenges for those who look to combine the two products with a hybrid approach.”
The article goes on to say that there are certain restrictions, especially with search customization, for the SharePoint Online deployment. Furthermore, a good amount of configuration is required to maximize search for the hybrid version. To keep up to date on how this might affect your organization, and the required workarounds, stay tuned to ArnoldIT.com. Stephen E. Arnold is longtime search professional, and his work on SharePoint is conveniently collocated in a dedicated feed to maximize efficiency.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Twitter Gets a Search Facelift
June 25, 2015
Twitter has been experimenting with improving its search results and according to TechCrunch the upgrade comes via a new search results interface: “Twitter’s New Search Results Interface Expands To All Users.” The new search results interface is the one of the largest updates Twitter has made in 2015. It is supposed to increase the ease with a cleaner look and better filtering options. Users will now be able to filter search results by live tweets, photos, videos, news, accounts, and more.
Twitter made the update to help people better understand how to use the message service and to take a more active approach to using it, rather than passively reading other peoples tweets. The update is specifically targeted at new Twitter users.
The tweaked search interface will return tweets related to the search phrase or keyword, but that does not mean that the most popular tweets are returned:
“In some cases, the top search result isn’t necessarily the one with the higher metrics associated with it – but one that better matches what Twitter believes to be the searcher’s “intent.” For example, a search for “Steve Jobs” first displays a heavily-retweeted article about the movie’s trailer, but a search for “Mad Men” instead first displays a more relevant tweet ahead of the heavily-favorited “Mad Men” mention by singer Lorde.”
The new interface proves to be simpler and better list trends, related users, and news. It does take a little while to finesse Twitter, which is a daunting task to new users. Twitter is not the most popular social network these day and it’s using these updates to increase its appeal.
Whitney Grace, June 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Security: If True, Check the Web Loo
June 24, 2015
I read “Login Creds for US agencies Found Scrawled on the Web’s Toilet Walls.” I have no idea if this story is information, disinformation, or misinformation. It could even be reformation, a practice which blends items from different sources to deliver a calorie free dessert to those hungry for security related fare.
The write up asserts:
A threat intelligence report into the availability of login credentials for US government agencies has identified 47 agencies across 89 unique domains may be compromised. The findings resulted from an analysis of open source intelligence (OSint) from 17 paste sites, carried out between 4 November 2013 and 4 November 2014.
If you are not familiar with paste sites, you can get the full scoop in my forthcoming Dark Web monograph. If you are, you are one of the folks checking out the Web’s toilet walls.
There is an interesting chart in the article. It appears that the Department of Energy is an outfit with some security challenges. The source of the report is a pretty reliable outfit called Recorded Future, a company warranting a full chapter in my CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access report. Worth checking out if you can locate a copy of the Recorded Future report.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2015
Old Wine: Semantic Search from the Enlightenment
June 24, 2015
I read a weird disclaimer. Here it is:
This is an archived version of Pandia’s original article “Top 5 Semantic Search Engines”, we made it available to the users mainly because it is still among the most sought articles from old site. You can also check kids, radio search, news, people finder and q-cards sections.
An article from the defunct search newsletter Pandia surfaced in a news aggregation list. Pandia published one of my books, but at the moment I cannot remember which of my studies.
The write up identifies “semantic search engines.” Here’s the list with my status update in bold face:
- Hakia. Out of business
- SenseBot. Out of business.
- Powerset. Bought by Microsoft. Fate unknown in the new Delve/Bing world.
- DeepDyve. Talk about semantics but the system is a variation of the Dialog/BRS for fee search model from the late 1970s.
- Cognition (Cognition Technologies). May be a unit of Nuance?
What’s the score?
Two failures. Two sales to another company. One survivor which has an old school business model. My take? Zero significant impact on information retrieval.
Feel free to disagree, but the promise of semantic search seems to pivot on finding a buyer and surviving by selling online research. Why so much semantic cheerleading? Beats me. Semantic methods are useful in the plumbing as a component of a richer, more robust system. Most cyberOSINT systems follow this path. Users don’t care too much about plumbing in my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2015
Palantir: A Unicorn on Steroids
June 24, 2015
Whoa. I read “Palantir Valued At $20 Billion In New Funding Round.” Palantir is not exactly pumping out the marketing collateral. The company is making sales to those who want to squeeze “nuggets” from the hydraulic flow of digital information. What’s remarkable is that the company is selling into a sector which wants to buy, yet Palantir continues to collect money from funding sources.
Is the company in the business of processing data or in the business of making presentations to venture types with open checkbooks?
According to the write up:
Palantir is raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion, people briefed on the matter told BuzzFeed News, insisting on anonymity to discuss the confidential deal. The 11-year-old company previously raised money late last year at a $15 billion valuation. The new round of funding, which has not been previously disclosed, reflects investors’ eagerness to gain access to a startup seen as one of the most successful in the world. Little is known about the details of Palantir’s business, beyond reports about its data-processing software being used to fight terror and catch financial criminals.
A couple of observations:
First, the amount of money is impressive, even by Sillycon Valley standards. The investment makes outfits like Digital Reasoning look like paupers.
Second, compared to search centric outfits like Attivio, Coveo, and others working to deliver traditional Fast Search type services, Palantir is in a different league. Attivio and Coveo combined has attracted less than $70 million or so. This amount probably is equivalent to the fees assessed on Palantir’s inflows of cash.
Third, Palantir is a bit like Google with a twist of paranoia. There are unreturned phone calls and unanswered emails. There are legal dust ups sealed away, presumably forever. There are secrets, lots of secrets.
In short, Palantir makes other content processing outfits green with envy. Green. The color of money. With a unicorn on steroids the question becomes, “Will the joints hold up?”
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2015
Deep Learning System Surprises Researchers
June 24, 2015
Researchers were surprised when their scene-classification AI performed some independent study, we learn from Kurzweil’s article, “MIT Deep-Learning System Autonomously Learns to Identify Objects.”
At last December’s International Conference on Learning Representations, a research team from MIT demonstrated that their scene-recognition software was 25-33 percent more accurate than its leading predecessor. They also presented a paper describing the object-identification tactic their software chose to adopt; perhaps this is what gave it the edge. The paper’s lead author, and MIT computer science/ engineering associate professor, Antonio Torralba ponders the development:
“Deep learning works very well, but it’s very hard to understand why it works — what is the internal representation that the network is building. It could be that the representations for scenes are parts of scenes that don’t make any sense, like corners or pieces of objects. But it could be that it’s objects: To know that something is a bedroom, you need to see the bed; to know that something is a conference room, you need to see a table and chairs. That’s what we found, that the network is really finding these objects.”
Researchers being researchers, the team is investigating their own software’s initiative. The article tells us:
“In ongoing work, the researchers are starting from scratch and retraining their network on the same data sets, to see if it consistently converges on the same objects, or whether it can randomly evolve in different directions that still produce good predictions. They’re also exploring whether object detection and scene detection can feed back into each other, to improve the performance of both. ‘But we want to do that in a way that doesn’t force the network to do something that it doesn’t want to do,’ Torralba says.”
Very respectful. See the article for a few more details on this ambitious AI, or check out the researchers’ open-access paper here.
Cynthia Murrell, June 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
HP Sales Are Slow, But CEO Says Progress
June 24, 2015
According to Computer Weekly, “HP CEO Hails Business Split Progress Amid Downbeat Q2 Revenue Slumps.” HP’s Enterprise Service has the worst revenue reports for the quarter along with several more of its business units with a seven percent net loss. The Enterprise Service saw a sixteen percent loss.
Ironically, the company’s stock rose 1 percent, mostly due to HP expanding into China due to a new partnership with Tsinghua University. The joint venture will focus on developing HP’s H3C’s technology and its China-based server business, supposedly it will have huge implications on the Chinese technology market.
Another piece of news is that HP will split up:
“[CEO Meg ] Whitman also spoke in favour of the progress the company is making with its plans to separate into two publicly traded business entities: one comprised of its consumer PC and printing operations, and the other focused on enterprise hardware, software and services.
The past six months have reinforced Whitman’s conviction that this is the right path for the company to take, and the split is still on course to occur before the end of the firm’s financial year.”
The company wants to increase its revenue, but it needs to cut gross costs across the board. HP is confidant that it will work. Sales will continue to be slow for 2015, but they can still do investment banking things at HP.
Whitney Grace, June 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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