IBM and Apple Wake Up an App
March 8, 2016
Are we approaching peak app? Not likely if one works at Apple and IBM. I read “SleepHealth Debuts as First ResearchKit App & Study to Support IBM Watson Health Cloud.”
According to the write up, Apple and IBM along with Johnson & Johnson (a fine outfit) and Medtronic (sounds very technical, doesn’t it?) are now on Watson’s band wagon.
The write up states:
Official titled the SleepHealth Mobile Study, IBM’s latest initiative seeks to leverage the advanced sensor suite provided by Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch, in conjunction with the open source ResearchKit framework, to determine how sleep quality impacts daytime activities, alertness, productivity, general health and medical conditions. The study is being rolled out in partnership with the American Sleep Apnea Association.
It is working. I got tired reading about Watson and the connection between slep and health. Heck, who needs an app. El Chapo wants to be extradited to the US because Mexican jailers won’t let him sleep. No Watson needed if El Chapo is representative of a tired person and clear thinking.
Time for a nap. When I wake up, will Watson have revenues? Will IBM complete its downsizing?
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2016
Alphabet Google to Advise the US Department of Defense
March 8, 2016
There is a delicious irony in “Former Google CEO Schmidt to Head New Pentagon Innovation Board.” Alphabet Google’s core business is based on the experiences of some search predecessors. I understand the shoulders of giants thing. But in Google’s case, there are some specific folks to thank for the efficacy of the pre-2006 Google search system. Say what, Ghemawat? How mean, Mr. Dean? And for the revenue model, there is always the outfit one can “GoTo.” But no more Clever.
I recall that Mr. Schmidt had a seat on the Apple board. I wonder how some of the members of the Apple board liked their Android powered Samsung phones?
The point is that Google does some innovative things, but these are often built on top of other ideas, concepts, and implementations. Did you forget the pre IPO settlement of Yahoo’s issue with the Google ad system? Harvard did and lots of others folks ignore that hiccup as well.
The write up reports:
Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military… Modeled on the Defense Business Board, which provides advice on best business practices from the private sector, the new panel is intended to help the Pentagon become more innovative and adaptive in developing technology and doing business.
One imagines that Palantir’s executives will be eager to join the new group.
As both Alphabet Google and Palantir turn to buying companies to acquire innovative people and technology, the Department of Defense may rekindle its love for In-Q-Tel-type deals. Make no mistake. Any outfit with a seat on the board has some Tesla-like spark.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2016
A Hefty Guide to Setting up SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Search Center
March 8, 2016
The how-to guide titled Customizing SharePoint 2013 Search Center on Code Project provides a lengthy, detailed explanation (with pictures) of the new features of SharePoint 2013, an integration of the 2010 version and Microsoft FAST search. The article offers insights into certain concepts of the program such as crawled properties and managed properties before introducing step-by-step navigation for customizing the result page and Display template, as well as other areas of Sharepoint. The article includes such tips as this,
“Query rules allow you to modify the users keyword search based on a condition. Let’s say when the user types Developer, we want to retrieve only the books which have BookCategory as Developer and if they type ‘IT Pro’, we only want to retrieve the Administrator related books.”
Nine steps later, you have a neat little result block with the matching items. The article outlines similar processes for Customizing the Search Center, Modifying the Search Center, Adding the Results Page to the Navigation, and Creating the Result Source. This leads us to ask, Shouldn’t this be easier by now? Customizing a program so that it looks and acts the way we expect seems like pretty basic setup, so why does it take 100+ steps to tailor SharePoint 2013?
Chelsea Kerwin, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Dually Conceals and Retrieves for an Audience
March 8, 2016
There are many ways to trace a digital footprint, but Google is expanding European users’ ability to cover their tracks. An article entitled, In Europe, Google will now remove ‘right to be forgotten’ search results from all its sites, from The Verge tells us the story. Basically, European users who request links to be removed protect those links from being crawled by Google.fr in addition to all their other homepages. The write-up explains,
“So, for instance, if someone in France had previously requested that a link be hidden from search results, Google would just remove it from its European homepages, including google.fr. But a savvy searcher could have just used google.com to dig up all those hidden results. Now, however, the company will scrub its US homepage results, too, but only for European users. The company didn’t provide specifics on how it’ll detect that a user is in Europe, but it’s likely going off IP addresses, so in theory, someone could use a VPN to subvert those results.”
As the article mentions, European privacy regulators are happy about this but would still prefer contested links not appear, even if the searcher is in the U.S. or elsewhere. Between the existence of the Dark Web and the “right to be forgotten” protections, more and more links are hidden making search increasingly difficult.
Megan Feil, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Italian Firm Adds to the Buzzword Blizzard in an Expert Way
March 7, 2016
I don’t pay too much attention to lists of functions an information intelligence system must have. The needs are many because federation, normalization of disparate data, and real time content processing are not ready for prime time. Don’t believe me? Ask the US Army which is struggling with the challenges of DCGS-A, Palantir, and other vendors’ next generation systems in actual use in a battle zone. (See this presentation for one example.)
I read “No Time to Waste! 5 Essential Features for Your Information Intelligence Solution.” I like the idea of a company (Expert System) which was founded a quarter century ago, urging speedy action.
You can work through the well worn checklist of entity extraction, links and relationships, classification, and sticking info in a “knowledge base.” I want to focus on one point which introduces a nifty bit of jargon which I had not seen in use since I was in college decades ago.
The word is anaphora.
There you go. An anaphora, as I recall, is repetition or word substitution. Not clear? Here are a couple of examples:
Rhetorical:
For want of revenue the investors were lost.
For want of a product credibility was lost.
For want of an application the market was lost.
Grammatical:
The marketing cacophony increased and that drove off the potential customers.
Now you can work these points into your presentation when the users want actionable information which fuses available information into a meaningful output.
Because modern systems are essentially works in progress, buzzwords like anaphora take the place of dealing with real world information problems.
But marketing by thought leaders is so much more fun. That may trouble some. Parse that, gentle reader. What can one make in the midst of a blizzard of buzzwords? One hopes revenue which keeps the stock out of penny territory.
Expert System SpA, if Google Finance is accurate, about $2 a share. Roger, anaphora that.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2016
Facebook: In the Spotlight
March 7, 2016
A Facebook executive found that the party-loving Brazilians were not full of fun recently. A Facebook executive was detained without samba music. (See “Facebook Executive Jailed in Brazil.”)
Also interesting was “Facebook Hit With German Antitrust Investigation Over User Terms.” The write up reported:
The German federal competition authority has opened an investigation into Facebook over what it suspects is “an abusive imposition of unfair conditions on users.”
The friction between governments and widely used American software systems and services appears to be increasing.
The only challenge will be figuring how to put the horse back in the barn. The barn burned and apartments and a Chuck E Cheese have been built on the once fallow land.
Facebook was set up in 2004. That works out to more than a decade of development. How often are complexes torn down in a modern digital city? Municipal bureaucracies often react slowly and in often confusing ways.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2016
Alphabet Spells Artistic
March 7, 2016
I read “Painting from a New Perspective.” Too bad for Adobe. The Alphabet Google thing is dabbling in Photoshop’s wading pond.
You can watch a video about Tilt Brush, the most recent me-too from the friendly folks in Mountain View.
What makes Tilt Brush different? Here’s the explanation:
Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D space with virtual reality. Your room is your canvas. Your palette is your imagination. The possibilities are endless.
I like the endless. Will virtual reality apps generate revenue? Worth watching.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2016
Attivio: Dines on Data Dexterity
March 7, 2016
Attivio was founded by some former Fast Search & Transfer executives. Attivio also had a brush with a board member who found himself in a sticky wicket. Quite a pedigree.
I read “Enterprise Search Takes Its Place at the Big Data Table.” The write up is built upon an interview with the chief executive officer of Attivio. Nice looking fellow who had a degree in music and marketing and an MBA from Wharton, the institution which helped educate Donald Trump.
What caught my attention were these points in the write up. My observations are in italics:
- Enterprise search has been around for two decades. [Nah, enterprise search is closing in on 50 years of fun and delight.]
- Enterprise search “finds unstructured content housed in file shares like SharePoint and other content management systems, in email archives, and in the content repositories of applications like customer relationship management. [Yep, and that is part of the problem with enterprise search. The bulk of the systems I have examined do not handle video, audio, binaries, and odd ball file types like those in ANB format very well or not at all. Plus users expect comprehensive results updated in near real time presented in a form which allows instant use.]
- Enterprise search does analytics and accelerated data discovery. [Yep, if the customer licenses a system like BAE NetReveal, the Palantir platform, or another industrial-strength fusion vendor.]
What I found interesting was the phrase “reducing the time to insight.” There is a suggestion from Attivio and from other vendors that their systems process digital content in a super fast mode.
In our testing, we have found that throughput for new content can require considerable investment in engineering and processing capability. Furthermore, dealing with flows from intercepts or other high volume content sources, most enterprise search systems cannot handle:
- Processing large flows of content in a matter of minutes. Hours or days is a more suitable time unit
- Updating the index or indexes
- Integrating real time data into search results, reports, and visualizations in a dynamic manner.
That’s why outfits who are emulating Palantir-style information access use open source search and then invest hundreds of millions in specialized engineering, interfaces, and fusion technologies.
Enterprise search vendors chasing Palantir-type systems are delivering what marketers find quite easy to describe. Here’s an example:
Not only that, but many enterprises can only “see” 10 percent of their data. The other ninety percent remains hidden—dark data. Data is often locked in silos, and it’s just too time-consuming to get it out. And making connections across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information to serve to a BI tool is a completely manual, slow process – although highly valuable for developing strategic insights. Organizations that can cross this chasm will be poised to transform productivity, mitigate risks, and seize market opportunities.
The only hitch in the git along is that systems which handle “dark data” are available now. There are outfits able to handle “dark” data today. True, these are not based on enterprise search concepts because the core of a utility function is not a solid foundation for next generation information access. There are platforms which deliver actionable outputs. Even more interesting is that the US government is funding research to develop next generation systems designed to leap frog Palantir, i2, DCGS-A, and many other solutions.
Why?
Marketing is one thing. Delivering a system which works reliably, exhibits consistency, and integrates with work flows is a work in progress.
The notion that a Fast-type system can deliver what a Palantir-type system does is something I believe is wordsmithing. Watson does wordsmithing; others deliver next generation information access. Has Attivio hit a home run with its new positioning? Is the Attivio solution a starter for the Hickory Crawdads? My hunch the folks investing $70 million in Attivio want to start for the Boston Red Sox this year. Play ball.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2016
The Progress and Obstacles for Microsoft Delve When It Comes to On-Premise Search
March 7, 2016
The article titled Microsoft Delve Faces Challenges in Enterprise Search Role on Search Content Management posits that Microsoft Delve could use some serious enhancements to ensure that it functions as well with on-premises data as it does with data from the cloud. Delve is an exciting step forward, an enterprise-wide search engine that relies on machine learning to deliver relevant results. The article even goes so far as to call it a “digital assistant” that can make decisions based on an analysis of previous requests and preferences. But there is a downside, and the article explains it,
“Microsoft Delve isn’t being used to its full potential. Deployed within the cloud-based Office 365 (O365) environment, it can monitor activity and retrieve information from SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook in a single pass — and that’s pretty impressive. But few organizations have migrated their entire enterprise to O365, and a majority never will: Hybrid deployments and blending cloud systems with on-premises platforms are the norm… if an organization has mostly on-premises data, its search results will always be incomplete.”
With a new version of Delve in the works at Microsoft, the message has already been received. According to the article, the hybrid Delve will be the first on-premise product based on SharePoint Online. You can almost hear the content management specialists holding their breaths for an integrated cloud and on-premise architecture for search.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Place to Express Yourself on the Dark Web
March 7, 2016
For evidence that the dark web is not all about drugs and cybercrime, check out this article at Motherboard: “The Dark Web Now Has a Literary Journal.” As it turns out, anonymity is also good for people who wish to freely explore their creativity and private thoughts.
The new journal, the Torist, was just launched by a professor at the University of Utah, Robert W. Ghel, and a person known simply as GMH. Inspired by the free discussions on their dark-web-based social network, Galaxy, they have seized their chance to create something unexpected. The journal’s preface asks:
“If a magazine publishes itself via a Tor hidden service, what does the creative output look like? How might it contrast itself with its clearweb counterparts? Who indeed will gravitate towards a dark web literary magazine?”
So, why is one of the Torist’s creators anonymous while the other is putting himself out there? Writer Joseph Cox tells us:
Gehl, after being pitched the idea of The Torist by GMH, decided to strip away his pseudonym, and work on the project under his own name. “I thought about that for a while,” Gehl said. “I thought that because GMH is anonymous/pseudonymous, and he’s running the servers, I could be a sort of ‘clear’ liason.”
So while Gehl used his name, and added legitimacy to the project in that way, GMH could continue to work with the freedom the anonymity awards. “I guess it’s easier to explore ideas and not worry as much how it turns out,” said GMH, who described himself as someone with a past studying the humanities, and playing with technology in his spare time.
Gehl and GMH say part of their reasoning behind the journal is to show people that anonymity and encryption can be forces for good. Privacy furthers discussion of controversial, personal, and difficult topics and, according to GMH, should be the default setting for all communications, especially online.
Submissions are currently being accepted, so go ahead and submit that poem or essay if you have something to get off your chest, anonymously. If you dare to venture into the dark web, that is.
Cynthia Murrell, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
