Palantir: More Legal Excitement
September 6, 2016
One of the Beyond Search goslings directed my attention to a legal document “Palantir Technologies Inc. (”Palantir”) Sues Defendants Marc L. Abramowitz…” The 20 page complaint asserts that a Palantir investor sucked in proprietary information and then used that information outside the boundaries of Sillycon Valley norms of behavior. These norms apply to the one percent of the one percent in my opinion.
The legal “complaint” points to several patent documents which embodied Palantir’s proprietary information. The documents require that one use the Justia system to locate; specifically, Provisional Application No. 62/072,36 Provisional Application No. 62/066,716, and Provisional Application No. 62/094,888. These provisional applications, I concluded, reveal that Palantir seeks to enter insurance and health care type markets. This information appears to put Palantir Technologies at a competitive disadvantage.
Who is the individual named in the complaint?
Marc Abramowitz, who is associated with an outfit named KT4. KT4 does not have much of an online presence. The sparse information available to me about Abramowitz is that he is a Harvard trained lawyer and connected to Stanford’s Hoover econo-think unit. Abramowitz’s link to Palantir is that he invested in the company and made visits to the Hobbits’ Palo Alto “shire” part of his work routine.
Despite the legalese, the annoyance of Palantir with Abramowitz seeps through the sentences.
For me what is interesting is that IBM i2 asserted several years ago that Palantir Technologies improperly tapped into proprietary methods used in the Analyst’s Notebook software product and system. See “i2 and Palantir: Resolved Quietly.”
One new twist is that the Palantir complaint against Abramowitz includes a reference to Abramowitz’s appropriating of the word “Shire.” If you are not in the know in Sillycon Valley, Palantir has referenced its offices as the shire; that is, the firm’s office in Palo Alto.
When I read the document, I did not spot a reference to Hobbits or seeing stones.
When I checked this morning (September 6, 2016), the document was still publicly accessible at the link above. However, Palantir’s complaint about the US Army’s procurement system was sealed shortly after it was filed. This Abramowitz complaint may go away for some folks as well. If you can’t locate the Abramowitz document, you will have to up your legal research game. My hunch is that neither Palantir or Mr. Abramowitz will respond to your request for a copy.
There are several hypothetical, Tolkienesque cyclones from this dust up between and investor and the Palantir outfit, which is alleged to be a mythical unicorn:
- Trust seems to need a more precise definition when dealing with either Palantir and Abramowitz
- Some folks use Tolkein’s jargon and don’t want anyone else to “horn” in on this appropriation
- Filing patents on relatively narrow “new” concepts when one does not have a software engineering track record goes against the accepted norms of innovation
- IBM i2’s team may await the trajectory of this Abramowitz manner more attentively than the next IBM Watson marketing innovation.
Worth monitoring just for the irony molecules in this Palantir complaint. WWTK or What would Tolkien think? Perhaps a quick check of the seeing stone is appropriate.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2016
Google and Social Media: A Trail of Tears
September 6, 2016
I read “Why Alphabet Inc Is Killing Google Plus.” The write up was a surprise here in Harrod’s Creek. Our operating assumption was that Facebook kicked Google Plus to the curb years ago. Nevertheless, an intrepid analyst flipped open a paper road map and retraced the journey of the + or Plus service. By the way, how do those searches for Google + work?
The write up reports:
Google has a rather long list of social media also-rans, including Orkut, Reader, Wave, and more recently, Buzz, the ill-fated Gmail-based social network that imploded following a catastrophic user policy violation and a class action lawsuit.
We thought that YouTube is Google’s new social play. It’s Facebook killer perhaps?
We learned:
Alphabet Inc did little to differentiate Google Plus from existing social media sites, and the result was that the platform ended up looking little more than a Facebook clone. The company did outthink Facebook on some aspects, notably Circles, a feature that allows users to better customize the privacy of what they share. But FB was no slouch in the “me-too” game either, and soon introduced a similar feature. In the end, there was little reason for people to switch from FB to Google Plus. Additionally, Google’s playbook of tying Gmail, Google Drive and a host of apps to Google Plus did not go down well with most users. People still remembered the Buzz fallout, and many were jittery about letting Google use their personal data to tailor its ads.
Yep, but ancient history at least in mobile Internet time.
My view is that Google Plus or + was a “me too” play. These, if they work, often yield up to 60 percent of the market number one’s revenue. If they flop, users go elsewhere.
But which is the bigger failure:
- Google big bets like solving death and Loon balloons
- Google Fiber
- Google’s social media efforts?
Looking at Google’s revenue it appears that Google remains a one trick pony. Even more troubling is that the DNA of that particular steed comes from the Yahooligans’ GoTo.com/Overture.com inspiration.
Net net: Google is struggling with innovation just as it has for more than a decade. Social me toos, solving death, becoming the new Bell Telephone—great ideas, just expensive ones which have not performed.
We love the Alphabet Google thing. We love the notion of objective search results. We love personalized ads. We love the internal systems.
We love everything except the company’s inability to diversify its revenue. Now the GOOG is in cost saving mode, and it may be too little too late.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2016
More on Biased Algorithms: Humans in the Mix
September 6, 2016
I read “When Computers Learn Human Languages, They Also Learn Human Prejudices.” The write up makes a point which seems obvious to me and the goslings. Numbers may be neutral in the ivory tower of a mathematician in Minsk or Midland. But in the world of smart software, the human influence may be inescapable like death. Oh, Google will solve death, and I suppose at some point Google will eliminate the human element in its fancy math.
For all others, I learned:
Implicit biases are a well-documented and pernicious feature of human languages.
Okay.
In the write up full of revelations, I highlighted this passage:
New research from computer scientists at Princeton suggests that computers learning human languages will also inevitably learn those human biases.
What’s the fix? The write up and the wizards have an answer:
The solution to these problems is probably not to train algorithms to be speakers of a more ideal English language (or believers in a more ideal world), but rather in ensuring “algorithmic accountability” (pdf), which calls for layers of accountability for any decisions in which an algorithm is involved….It may be necessary to override the results to compensate—a sort of “fake it until you make it” strategy for erasing the biases that creep into our algorithms.
I love the “fake it until you make it” idea.
Who will analyze the often not-so-accessible numerical recipes in use at the centralized online services? Will it be “real” journalists? Will it be legal eagles? Will it be self regulation just like the banking sector enforces with such assiduousness?
My hunch is that this algorithm bias thing will be a problem a bit like death; that is, no solution for now.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2016
Watson Ads for Branded Answers to the Little Questions of Life
September 6, 2016
Here is a potent new way for brands to worm their way into every aspect of consumers’ lives. “IBM Watson Is Now Offering AI-Powered Digital Ads That Answer Consumers’ Questions,” we learn from AdWeek. Watson Ads will hook users up with answers to their everyday questions—answers supplied by advertisers. Apparently, IBM’s Weather-Company acquisition supplied the tools behind this product. Writer Christopher Heine explains:
IBM’s relatively new ownership of The Weather Company’s digital properties is coming into play in a serious fashion: Watson Ads will first appear on Weather.com, the Weather mobile app and the company’s data-driven WeatherFX platform. Later, IBM plans to allow them to appear on third-party properties.
Campbell Soup Company, Unilever and GSK Consumer Healthcare are some of the brands that will run the ads in the coming days. Watson Ads’ pricing details were not disclosed.
Jeremy Steinberg, global head of sales, The Weather Company, described how they work, stating that ‘machine learning and natural-language capabilities will allow it to provide accurate responses. What we’re doing is moving away from keyword searches and towards more natural language and well-reasoned answers.
Heine outlines Campbell’s plan as an example—their Watson Ads will present “Chef Watson,” the helpful AI which suggests recipes based on criteria like available ingredients, the time of day, and what the weather is like. Those recipes will be pulled from Campbell’s existing site Campbell’s Kitchen. Not surprisingly, their ingredient lists rely heavily on Campbell’s product line (which goes well beyond soup these days).
Another Watson Ads client is GSK Consumer Healthcare, which plans to use the tech to help users make better real-time health decisions—a worthy project, I’ll admit. I am curious to see how Unilever, and other companies down the line, will leverage their digital voices of authority. See the article for more details on the project.
Cynthia Murrell, September 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Government Seeks Sentiment Analysis on Its PR Efforts
September 6, 2016
Sentiment analysis is taking off — government agencies are using it for PR purposes. Next Gov released a story, Spy Agency Wants Tech that Shows How Well Its PR Team Is Doing, which covers the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s request for information about sentiment analysis. The NGA hopes to use this technology to assess their PR efforts to increase public awareness of their agency and communicate its mission, especially to groups such as college students, recruits and those in the private sector. Commenting on the bigger picture, the author writes,
The request for information appears to be part of a broader effort within the intelligence community to improve public opinion about its operations, especially among younger, tech-savvy citizens. The CIA has been using Twitter since 2014 to inform the public about the agency’s past missions and to demonstrate that it has a sense of humor, according to an Nextgov interview last year with its social media team. The CIA’s social media director said at the time there weren’t plans to use sentiment analysis technology to analyze the public’s tweets about the CIA because it was unclear how accurate those systems are.
The technologies used in sentiment analysis such as natural language processing and computational linguistics are attractive in many sectors for PR and other purposes, the government is no exception. Especially now that CIA and other organizations are using social media, the space is certainly ripe for government sentiment analysis. Though, we must echo the question posed by the CIA’s social media director in regards to accuracy.
Megan Feil, September 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/DarkWeb meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Alphabet Google Innovation: Doing the Uber Me Too Thing
September 5, 2016
I noted a flurry of articles about one of Alphabet Google’s most recent technical breakthroughs. If I understand the information in “Google Is Going Head-to-Head with Uber on Ride-Hailing,” the online ad supporter search giant will compete with Uber. Uber is, I believe, a taxi service without the sticky seats and interesting dashboard decorations.
According to the write up:
Waze Carpool is unlike Uber and Lyft in that it is not designed as a money-making enterprise for drivers, but rather as an ultra-cheap platform that helps people coordinate their rides to-and-from the office.
I noted that Alphabet Google experienced a Yogi Berra déjà vu moment. Navigate to “Alphabet Executive Steps Down From Uber Board Amid Growing Competition.” The Alphabet Google outfit employs a lawyer. That lawyer served on the Uber board of directors. Uber seems to be a company in the taxi business. The situation reminded me of another Googler who served on the board of Apple. When Google had the brilliant idea to create a mobile phone business, the Googler resigned from the Apple board. Yogi Berra. Déjà vu.
I learned about Mr. Drummond’s departure from the Uber board:
Drummond joined the board after Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV in 2013 invested about $250 million…in Uber, among the firm’s largest investments and a deal in which Drummond was involved. “I recently stepped down from Uber’s board given the overlap between the two companies,” Drummond said in a written statement sent to Reuters. “Uber is a phenomenal company and it’s been a privilege working with the team over the last two-plus years. GV remains an enthusiastic investor and Google will continue to partner with Uber.”
Is it possible that the Alphabet Google thing invests in companies and learns about a specific approach to business. Then the Alphabet Google thing processes that information and does an bit of reinvention? Probably not.
The fact that Alphabet Google is inventing a new approach to the gig economy is just one of those epiphanies which keep the Sillycon Valley world spinning.
I find that the usefulness of Google search results in my research is softening. Perhaps “softening” is not sufficiently firm. I have to work to locate on point information using the Google search system. I hope that the profits from the new venture are pumped into the firm’s search and retrieval system. I see many tiny green notices flagging results which are ads. I have to click through pages of results to locate information germane to my query. I have to work around the flabby syntax which Google makes available for those who want precision and recall. I have to use many different search strategies to locate a document I have in front of me because Google’s index seems to be on an ultra slim fast type diet.
I love innovation. The me too approach to innovation is an inspiration to original thinkers everywhere. Does Stanford teach a class in legal me too innovation? If not, perhaps the course should be offered. Guest lecturers can explore the Google Yahoo ad methods, the Google Apple mobile phone breakthroughs, the Google Uber insights. To add substance the the course, there might be a talk about Amazon Netflix synergies.
Yandex, the Russian search outfit, seems to have a dearth of fresh ideas too. I noted “Russian Search Giant Yandex Announces Self-Driving Car Partnership.” One thought I have is that search may be a dead end. Therefore, search vendors are chasing other folks’ ideas in order to find a less expensive, less challenging way to generate revenue? Me tooism may be a global trend.
Sillycon Valley innovation may not stand on the shoulders of giants. Innovation may be integrating another outfit’s business models. But only the best bits. Who wants to support drivers when smart software created by smart people can make life into an absolute doddle. The me too approach to innovation may create as many flavors of ride sharing taxis as there are types of dry breakfast cereal. What’s not to like?
Stephen E Arnold, September 5, 2016
Eliminate Bias from Human Curated Training Sets with Training Sets Created by Humans
September 5, 2016
I love the quest for objectivity in training smart software. I recall a professor in my undergraduate days named Dr. Stephen Pence I believe. He was an interesting fellow who enjoyed pointing out logical fallacies. Pence introduced me to the work of Stephen Toulmin, an author who is a fun read.
I thought about argument by sign when I read “Language Necessarily Contains Human Biases, and So Will Machines Trained on Language Corpora.” The write up points out that smart software processing human utterances for “information” will end up with biases. The notion matches my experience.
I highlighted:
for 50 occupation words (doctor, engineer, …), we can accurately predict the percentage of U.S. workers in that occupation who are women using nothing but the semantic closeness of the occupation word to feminine words!… These results simultaneously show that the biases in question are embedded in human language, and that word embeddings are picking up the biases.
Algorithms, the write up points out, “Algorithms don’t have a way to identify biases.”
When we read about smart software taking a query like “beautiful girls” and returning a skewed data set, we wonder how vendors can ignore the distortions in their artificially intelligent routines.
Objectivity, gentle reader, is not easy to come by. Vendors of smart software who ignore the biases created by training sets and by the engineers’ decisions about threshold settings in numerical recipes may benefit from some critical thinking. Reading the work of Toulmin may be helpful as well.
Stephen E Arnold, September 5, 2016
Verizon Strategizes to Get Paid for Installing Big Brand Apps That You Will Probably Never Open
September 5, 2016
The article titled Verizon Offered to Install Marketers’ Apps Directly on Subscribers’ Phones on AdAge discusses the next phase in Verizon’s marketing strategy, a seeming inheritance of product placement: automatic installations for big brands onto your phone. Next time you notice an app that you didn’t download on your phone, look no further. Verizon has been in talks with both retail and finance brands about charging between $1 and $2 per device, which sounds small until you multiply it by 75 million Verizon smartphone subscribers. The article discusses some of the potential drawbacks.
Verizon has stoked some user frustration in the past with “bloatware,” as have many carriers and phone manufacturers. Bloatware comprises the often irrelevant apps that arrive pre-installed on phones, though they’re less often major brands’ apps and more often small, proprietary services from the carriers and manufacturers…There is no guarantee, however, that Verizon subscribers open the apps they find pre-installed on their phones. “If a user is not interested, they just delete it without activating.
Sara Choi, COO of AirFox, is quoted in the article making a great point about the importance to carriers to innovate new strategies for profit growth. Ultimately, the best use for this marketing technique is a huge number of immediate downloads. How to engage users once you have gotten into their phones is the next question. If this goes through, there will be no need to search to get an ad, which could mean bad news for online ad search.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
The Zen of More Tabs from Yandex
September 5, 2016
Serendipitous information discovery has been attempted through many apps, browsers and more. Attempting a solution, Russia’s giant in online search, Yandex, launched a new feature to their browser. A news release from PR Newswire appeared on 4 Traders entitled Yandex Adds AI-based Personal Recommendations to Browser tells us more. Fueling this feature is Yandex’s personalized content recommendation technology called Zen, which selects articles, videos, images and more for its infinite content stream. This is the first time personally targeted content will appear in new tabs for the user. The press release offers a description of the new feature,
The intelligent content discovery feed in Yandex Browser delivers personal recommendations based on the user’s location, browsing history, their viewing history and preferences in Zen, among hundreds of other factors. Zen uses natural language processing and computer vision to understand the verbal and visual content on the pages the user has viewed, liked or disliked, to offer them the content they are likely to like. To start exploring this new internet experience, all one needs to do is download Yandex Browser and give Zen some browsing history to work with. Alternatively, liking or disliking a few websites on Zen’s start up page will help it understand your preferences on the outset.
The world of online search and information discovery is ever-evolving. For a preview of the new Yandex feature, go to their demo. This service works on all platforms in 24 different countries and in 15 different languages. The design of this feature implies people want to actually read all of their recommended content. Whether that’s the case or not, whether Zen is accurate enough for the design to be effective, time will tell.
Megan Feil, September 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/DarkWeb meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
A Blurred In-Q-Tel X-Ray: Real Journalists Uncover Old News
September 4, 2016
I noted this write up by the Rupert Murdoch outfit, the Wall Street Journal: “The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows.” You may have to buy a dead tree version of the Wall Street Journal, go to your public library, or subscribe to read the source itself. (Don’t hassle me if the link begs for dollars. Buzz Mr. Murdoch and express your views.)
The point of the article is that the US government’s intelligence outfit operates a venture capital firm. That investment entity does business as In-Q-Tel. The goal, in my opinion, is to identify promising technologies which may have application at the Central Intelligence Agency. Please, note that much of the work at the CIA is not public. That’s because it mostly operates in secrecy. The fact that a government has secret activities is not exactly news.
Furthermore, whom do you think advises the Central Intelligence Agency and its various units? Choose from the following list:
- Immigrants without US entry authorizations
- Felons recently released from prison to a half way house
- Individuals working for governments antithetical to the posture of the United States
- Investigative journalists looking for a gig
- Individuals with clearances or a track record of serving the US.
Okay, you picked one to three. You may qualify for work at a large, “real news” outfit. If you selected item four, you now understand why the news about the individuals and the companies exposed to In-Q-Tel is stale.
Obviously those in the spy game want folks who are in the same fox hole.
The write up reveals this stunning factoid: In-Q-Tel provides only limited information about its investments, and some of its trustees have ties to funded companies.
No kidding.
With considerable assiduity, the write up lists the companies in which In-Q-Tel has invested and notes:
Of about 325 investments In-Q-Tel says it has made since its founding, more than 100 weren’t announced, although the identities of some of those companies have leaked out. The absence of disclosure can be due to national-security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized, people familiar with the arrangements said. While moneymaking isn’t In-Q-Tel’s goal, when that happens, such as when a startup it funded goes public, In-Q-Tel can keep the profit and roll it into new projects. It doesn’t obtain rights to technology or inventions.
There you go. Why not let another nation’s intelligence services invest in high potential but little known innovators? The US government is trying to bring more business discipline to some of its activities. Therefore, is it not logical that an intelligence agency seeking high value products and services can use the proceeds from its investments to further the work of the intelligence agency?
I guess that’s a thought foreign to some real journalists.
What does one expect the CIA and In-Q-Tel to do? Publish a daily newspaper detailing the companies, people, and technologies the CIA is interested in? What about going on Fox News and explaining what’s hot and what’s not in advanced technology? Oh, right. Technology is not as much fun as pundits who over talk one another.
I know that an outfit owned by Rupert Murdoch is in the news business. I know that gathering information from the In-Q-Tel Web site is really difficult. For me, information about In-Q-Tel is a bit of a yawner.
I would much rather read about some of the management methods used in some major media entities. Government efforts to identify cutting edge technologies is just not that interesting to me. Where’s the beef? Why not consider why certain categories of investments have not yielded products and services which can be used across missions? Why not explore why Purple Yogi was a dead end and why Palantir is not? Oh, right. That’s harder than realizing that in certain types of work one wants to deal with individuals from that fox hole.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2016
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