Watson Weekly: Hotel Flips on an IBM Robot
March 15, 2016
I think customer service at the hotels in which I have stayed is just wonderful. I recall a false fire alarm in Manhattan on a winter’s night, lice in a hotel in Clear Lake, Texas, and no heat after 9 pm in the modern Russian built hotel in February. People really cared about their guests.
Well, humans are not enough if the information in this write up is accurate. Navigate to “IBM Watson Powers Hilton Robot Concierge.” I learned:
A Hilton hotel in McLean, Virginia, has deployed a Watson-powered robot named Connie to help answer basic travel questions.
Wait, wait. No smart fire monitoring system, no automated disinfecting of rooms and bedding, and no smart HVAC?
Well, those are trivial problems.
The Hilton group, which I assume Paris monitors via social media, is
now being tested as an automated concierge at Hilton McLean in Virginia, can call upon various Watson APIs — Dialog, Speech to Text, Text to Speech, and Natural Language Classifier — and WayBlazer’s travel-specific knowledge to answer questions from Hilton guests about nearby attractions, dining options, and hotel services.
I know that using my smart phone is a real hassle. I definitely want to talk with Connie instead of relying on the Apple, Google, and Microsoft services.
Well, it turns out that
The job of concierge was rated “not computerizable” by a 2013 Oxford study titled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” and given only a 21% chance of being automated in the next 20 years.
I think I was using my mobile devices to find restaurants, arrange for a car service, and looking up the local Apple store years ago. What do I know? Obviously my sense of history and how to use mobile devices is just what one expects from a person who lives in rural Kentucky.
Watson, when will Connie deal with bedbugs?
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2016
Is a Second Winter Inevitable for Search Vendors Who Need Cash?
March 15, 2016
I read “Valley VCs Sit on Cash, Forcing Startups to Dial Back Ambition.” I am not sure how one turns a knob on ambition. I think in terms of common sense. The write up suggests:
For most firms this is a pause, a reset, not a meltdown.
Very metaphorical. I think this passage in the write up chops the niblets off the cob so we can see the core of the matter:
Once driven by fear of missing out on the next Uber or Airbnb, formerly frenzied venture investors have turned circumspect, waiting to see how far the tech market will fall.
Forget the unicorns. Think in terms of the outfits which get funded at more modest levels. These outfits are similar to Attivio, BA Insight, and Coveo, among others. Generating revenues is expensive and difficult. Paying for bug fixes and enhanced technology are expensive and don’t follow a predictable schedule.
My hunch is that some of the search and content processing vendors will find that instead of spring arriving, another winter is coming.
What are the options? Selling out, closing the doors, and partnering. Let’s not overlook marketing using wild and crazy buzzwords. Anaphora, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2016
Google AI Wins at Go: The Board Game, Not the Driving Sport
March 15, 2016
I learned that Google, like IBM Watson, has embraced games as a way to demonstrate the power and potential of artificial intelligence. I learned that Google beat Lee S-dol in Go. You can read about the victory over a mere human in “Google AI Wins Second Go Game Against Top Player.” Unlike IBM, there appears to be no post production in the content. (Please, note that there are some Chinese Go masters who may want to challenge AlphaGo.)
Impressive, but I recall learning that a Google self driving car was not able to beat a bus in a modest, slow speed street racing challenge. Check the video.
The loser’s vehicle.
The winner’s vehicle.
Annoying humans are. I firmly believe there is no possibility of failure in Google’s smart software. I am looking forward to Google’s self directed system flying a Boeing 777 or Google’s system handling autonomous drone strikes.
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2016
Tech Unicorns May Soon Disappear as Fast as They Appeared
March 15, 2016
Silicon Valley “unicorns”, private companies valued at one billion or more, may not see the magic last. The article Palantir co-founder Lonsdale calls LinkedIn plunge a bad sign for unicorns from Airline Industry Today questions the future for companies like LinkedIn whose true value has yet to result in ever-increasing profits. After disappointing Wall Street with lower earnings and revenue, investors devalued LinkedIn by about $10 billion. Joe Lonsdale, the Formation 8 venture investor who co-founded Palantir Technologies is quoted stating,
“A lot of LinkedIn’s value, according to how many of us think about it, is tied to what it will achieve in the next five to 10 years,” Lonsdale said in an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Friday. “It is very similar to a unicorn in that way. Yes, it is making a few billion in revenue and it’s a public company but it has these really big long-term plans as well and is very similar to how you see these other companies.” He added a lot of people who have been willing to suspend disbelief aren’t doing that anymore. “At this point, people are asking, ‘Are you actually going to be able to keep growing?’ And they’re punishing the unicorns and punishing the public companies the same way.”
Lonsdale understands why many private companies postpone an IPO for as long as possible, given these circumstances. Regardless of the pros and cons of when a company should go public, the LinkedIn devaluation seems as if it will send a message. Whether that message is one that fearmongers similar companies into staying private for longer or one that changes profitability norms for younger tech companies remains to be seen.
Megan Feil, March 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
How Sony Was Hacked
March 15, 2016
Remember when Sony was gearing up to release the controversial flick The Interview starring James Franco and Seth Rogen and how the CIA recruited them to kill Kim Jong-un, when suddenly their system was hacked? The people who hacked Sony called themselves “God’sApstls” and demanded the production company pay them an undisclosed amount of money or else they would “be bombarded as a whole.” Sony Pictures ignored the threat and the studio was taken offline for weeks, resulting in $35 million IT damages.
Motherboard investigated the current status of the Sony attack, it took place in 2014, which the company is still reeling from, “These Are The Cyberweapons Used To Hack Sony.” The FBI officially stated that the hackers were on the North Korean pay roll and still going about their business. A security researcher coalition thinks they can expose the hackers’ extensive malware arsenal.
“Andre Ludwig, the senior technical director at Novetta Research and Interdiction Group, said that the investigation started from four hashes (values that uniquely identify a file) that the Department of Homeland security published after the attack. With those few identifying strings, and after months of sleuthing, the researchers found 2,000 malware samples, both from online malware portal VirusTotal, as well as from antivirus companies. Of those, they manually reviewed and catalogued 1,000, and were able to identify 45 unique malware strains, revealing that the Sony hackers had an arsenal more sophisticated and varied than previously thought.”
The goal is to disrupt the hacker group often enough that they have to use their time, resources, and energy to rebuild their defenses and even lose some of their capabilities. They also might lose access to their past victims. There is good suspicion, however, to believe the hackers were not North Koreans:
“As it turns out, the hackers’ arsenal contains not only malware capable of wiping and destroying files on a hard disk like the Sony hack, but also Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tools, tools that allow for remotely eavesdropping on a victim’s computer, and more, according to the report. The researchers tracked some of this tools in cyberattacks and espionage operations that go as far as back as 2009, perhaps even 2007, showing the hackers that hit Sony have a long history.”
What the data reveals is that the hackers have been around for a long, long time (perhaps the North Korean government simply hired them?) and have had years to build up their arsenal. The counteroffensive, however, has built up its own and learned from the Sony hack job, pitting the hackers’ tools against them in hopes they will not be as effective in the future.
Warriors…er…coders, hackers, developers, etc. learn from each other to build stronger and better tools. The old adage, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so who is the hackers’ enemy-other than the obvious USA?
Whitney Grace, March 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Xerox and Paper: A Lasting Love Affair
March 14, 2016
I can envision a person with a document in one language and no way to create a digital version so it can be pumped into an online translation service. Granted I have to think hard for scenarios outside of scriptwriters for the Jason Bourne films or some other low probability activity like a hard working person working in a government office in Bulgaria. But paper? Really?
I read “Xerox Adds Instant Translator Feature to Some of Its Printers.” The idea is that one puts in a page, the system digitizes the page, does the optical character recognition thing, and generates a version in the user’s language. Well, that’s the theory.
The write up says:
Just scan the original document, and the machine will instantly print it out in the language you choose among the 40 available.
Yeah, but what if the source language is one that is not supported? Well, there’s dear, old Google Translate with a 100 or so languages.
Xerox. A pacesetter. How quickly will this function become available in Canon and Epson printers?
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2016
Yahoo, a Xoogler, and Wisdom from the Capitalist Tool
March 14, 2016
I recall the good old days at Forbes. The outfit has a stellar information professional. The company decided it did not need a stellar information professional. At that point, I realized that the “real” journalists knew how to formulate questions, obtain information from online resources, winnow the results, and deliver on point summaries germane to the topics the “real” journalists were writing about. That’s when I dismissed Forbes as a source of high value, accurate information. Now when I flip through a copy at the still open Barnes & Noble I have a tough time figuring out what’s fact, what’s opinion, and what’s content marketing or what I am now considering content spam.
Is this Yahoo’s new headquarters?
I did read “The Seven Lessons of Marissa Mayer.” I suppose the information created by a person who describes himself as “the unwritten contract at work” is a “real” journalist, a person with opinions, or a creator of content spam. Let’s look at the analysis of the wild and crazy place which houses the remaining Yahooligans.
The write up makes this point via a quote from Vanity Fair, another “real” journalism publication:
“Most people in (Silicon) Valley want to see Yahoo succeed, if only out of respect for its legacy,” the magazine reported. “And they generally believe that, if anyone can fix Yahoo, it is Mayer. She is an engineer, and engineers are revered in the Valley. She is also a ‘product person,’ which means that she has a track record of designing Internet-based products that people want to use.”
The worm hath turned. I learned a factoid from the New York Times, which is reproduced in the capitalist tool:
“Yahoo is likely to sell for less than all of the money Ms. Mayer spent,” wrote Berkeley Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon in his recent New York Times column. “If she had sought to liquidate Yahoo as soon as she took over and distributed the proceeds, Yahoo shareholders would have fared much better than they will now.”
Let me cut to the cob. Mayer is a loser. But, according to the article, there are lessons to be learned from the Mayer “voyage” to the heart of darkness. Poetry doesn’t make it into the “real” journalism stuff. May I highlight three of the lessons which are, I presume, worth the shareholder value which the current management team has tossed on the bonfire of vanities. (Yikes, there I go again. Poetry.)
Lesson 2 of the seven: Just because there’s a new captain doesn’t mean the ship’s not going to sing. I understand. A flawed design for the Titanic is likely to present some challenges to any captain who sails into iceberg infested seas. (Does this suggest that Ms. Mayer failed to evaluate her engineered RMS Titanic? Quite an error in judgment from the git go, right?)
Lesson 5 of the seven: Rank and yank makes a company tear itself up from the inside. I don’t understand. What’s a rank and yank? Perhaps this is a “real” journalist’s way of explaining that employee reviews resulted in firing people? I understand the jargon “stack ranking,” but the “rank and yank” phraseology is a trigger for some other associations. IBM tries to hide its firing people with the phrase “resource allocation.” Although unseemly, it lacks the connotations of the “yank and rank” lesson. (Does this mean that Ms. Mayer lacks management expertise?)
Lesson 7 of the seven: Employees will support a CEO who has their best interests at heart and turn on one who doesn’t. Yikes, Ms. Mayer, if I understand the lesson, managed to alienate some of the folks who worked for her. So much for the leadership capability of Ms. Mayer. (Does this tell me more about Ms. Mayer than about Yahoo? It sure does.)
I love the capitalist tool and “real” journalism. Ms. Mintz, Ms. Mintz, how badly does Forbes need you?
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2016
PageRank to Blame for the Lousy Web? Nope
March 14, 2016
I read “RIP Google PageRank Score: A Retrospective on How It Ruined the Web.” You can work through the romp yourself. I want to highlight one very, small, almost insignificant point. The death of the relevant Web was a direct consequence of several factors. PageRank was little more than a more usable version of what AltaVista and Jon Kleinberg developed. Here are these very small issues:
- Those responsible for Web sites wanted traffic. The shortest route was finding ways to fool Mother Google.
- Conference organizers and other whiz kid marketers crafted search engine optimization as a business.
Put one and two together and we have the findability problem. Google is not the cause. Google provided a escalator. Humans seeking traffic rode it until the escalator stopped working.
So walk up to the nifty new systems and see if you can get precise, on point, objective results. Those pesky humans have invented content spam.
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2016
FireEye Builds Toward a Bigger, Smarter Future
March 14, 2016
Demand for cybersecurity may exist, but one security firm’s first quarter results do not have much to show for it. People are not spending on security published by MyInforms reports this sharing the story of FireEye. Several explanations are offered for the lack of profitability this quarter and next, including their recent purchase of subscription-based iSight Partners and Invotas. The article contextualizes FireEye’s results,
“Security outfit FireEye released some disappointing results and claim it is because firms are skimping on their security budgets. FireEye forecast a bigger than expected loss for the first quarter and said it expected growth in cyber security spending to slow this year. FireEye Chief Executive Dave DeWalt said sales across the industry were boosted by “emergency spending” last year as major hacking attacks prompted some companies to place massive orders.”
Profitability can be looked at in several ways, but that’s another story. What is important to note here is the security concern many businesses have — and notably acted on last year, according to the article. What kind of player with FireEye be in this market with their newly acquired cyber intelligence offerings? We will keep our sights set on them.
Megan Feil, March 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Social Media Still a Crime Hub
March 14, 2016
It seems that most crime is concentrated on the hidden Dark Web, especially with news of identity thief and potential threats to national security making the news over the latest social media hotspot. Social media is still a hot bed for Internet crime and Motherboard has a little tale tell about, “SocioSpyder: The Tool Bought By The FBI To Monitor Social Media.” Social media remains a popular crime hub, because of the amount of the general public that use it making them susceptible to everything from terroristic propaganda to the latest scam to steal credit card numbers.
Law enforcement officials are well aware of how criminals use social media, but the biggest problem is having to sift through the large data stockpile from the various social media platforms. While some law enforcement officials might enjoy watching the latest cute kitten video, it is not a conducive use of their time. The FBI purchased SocioSpyder as their big data tool.
“ ‘SocioSpyder,’ as the product is called, ‘can be configured to collect posts, tweets, videos and chats on-demand or autonomously into a relational, searchable and graphable database,” according to the product’s website. SocioSpyder is made by Allied Associates International, a US-based contractor for government and military clients as well as other private companies, and which sells, amongst other things, software.
This particular piece of kit, which is only sold to law enforcement or intelligence agencies, allows an analyst to not only keep tabs on many different targets across various social networks at once, but also easily download all of the data and store it. In short, it’s pretty much a pre-configured web scraper for social media.”
SocioSpyder maps relationships within the data and understand how the user-generated content adds up to the bigger picture. Reportedly, the FBI spent $78,000 on the SocioSpyder software and the US Marshals bought a lesser version worth $22,500. SocioSpyder is being used to gather incriminating evidence against criminals and avoid potential crimes.
My biggest question: where can we get a version of SocioSpyder to generate reports for personal use?
Whitney Grace, March 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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