Google: Travel Planning
April 22, 2019
Google wants to become the one stop shop for most information needs which generate advertising revenue. Google can already track flight information, has an incredibly accurate map system, and can track down hotel and tourist sight locations. Google now wants to help people book their travel plans and earn profit from the travel industry. PYMNTS shares the news about Google’s new travel endeavors in the article, “Google Debuts Travel Bookings Feature.” Google’s new endeavor is a travel insight tool.
Google’s new travel insight tool helps people decide where to visit for vacation, including information on trending vacation destinations. Other new features include a Google Flights that allows users to search for travel destinations based on budget. At first glance, Google Flights appears to be another flight search engine like Priceline, Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz. Google Flights is more intuitive than a regular travel tool and offers more interaction along with price comparisons:
“Google enables users to explore the world map on Google Flights to see where you can fly on the cheap. If you live in, say, San Francisco and want to spend under $150 on flight, you search by setting a price limit and seeing only the destinations that will be in your price range to fly. For users who have decided on where they want to travel and are starting to search for flights, Google will provide price insight for most trips, which was previously only available for holiday dates. It shows whether the price of the flight is high, typical or cheap compared to what the airline typically charges. Google will also alert you if the price won’t decline more or if it will increase soon.”
And hotels? Why not? Using the new “Deals” feature, users can search and find hotels that offer cheaper rates for a specific hotel or area. Hotel review pages have also expanded with machine learning to include more photos and reviews.
Google Flights is an interesting intuitive tool, especially for the budget traveler. Other travel Web sites offer the same service, but you have to scour to find the deals and conduct numerous searches at once. Google makes it easy for advertisers? For users? Not an issue.
Whitney Grace, April 23, 2019
IBM: Drugs, Web Pages, and Watson
April 22, 2019
I read “Watson For Drug Discovery”. I don’t pay much attention to IBM’s assertions about its IBM Watson technology. The Jeopardy thing, the HRBlock thing, and the froth whipped up about smart software bored me.
This story was a bit different because, if it is accurate, it reveals a lack of coordination within a company which once was reasonably well organized. I worked on indexing the content of the IBM technical libraries and oversaw the leasing of certain data sets to Big Blue for a number of years. That IBM — despite the J1, J2, and J3 charging mechanism — was a good customer and probably could have made New York commuter trains run on time. (Well, maybe not.)
The Science Magazine story focuses on IBM pulling out of selling Watson to invent drugs. I mean if anyone took a look at the recipes Watson cooked up and memorialized in the IBM cook book, drugs seemed to be a stretch. Would you like tamarind for your cancer treatment? No, possibly another spice?
The factoid I noted in the article is that even though the drug thing is history, IBM keeps or kept its Web pages touting the Watson thing. I snapped this screen shot at 641 am US Eastern time on April 22, 2019. Here it is:
The Science Magazine write up (which I assume is not channeling its inner Saturday Night Live) states:
The idea was that it [Watson} would go ripping through the medical literature, genomics databases, and your in-house data collection, finding correlations and clues that humans had missed. There’s nothing wrong with that as an aspirational goal. In fact, that’s what people eventually expect out of machine learning approaches, but a key word in that sentence is “eventually”. IBM, though, specifically sold the system as being ready to use for target identification, pathway elucidation, prediction of gene and protein function and regulation, drug repurposing, and so on. And it just wasn’t ready for those challenges, especially as early as they were announcing that they were.
Failure I understand. The inability to manage the Web site is a bit like screwing up Job Control Language instructions. When I worked in the university computer lab, that was a minimum wage student job, dead easy, and only required basic organizational and coordination skills.
IBM seems to have lost something just as it did when it allegedly fired old timers to become the “new” IBM. Maybe the old IBM has something today’s IBM lacks?
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2019
JEDI: A Down to Earth Battle Between Digital Super Powers
April 20, 2019
This may be good news for China and Russia. Nextgov predicts, “Without JEDI, Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Efforts May Be Hindered.” The Pentagon requires an enterprise cloud computing solution for its ambitious AI plans—once it gets past one little snag, that is. They had a plan, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, but it is now on hold pending litigation. Reporter Frank Konkel writes:
“Through the JEDI contract, the Pentagon aims to put a commercial company in charge of hosting and distributing mission-critical workloads and classified data to warfighters around the globe in a single cloud computing environment. That environment would also process large swaths of military and defense data and serve as the computing and analytics workhorse for artificial intelligence applications.
Motley Fool reports in “An Unexpected Scandal Threatens To Cripple Amazon”:
the Department of Defense (DoD) cleared itself of wrongdoing following an internal investigation into the forthcoming award of the $10 billion cloud computing Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) program. Yet the Pentagon’s self-exoneration was not comprehensive, as Bloomberg noted that: “The investigation uncovered evidence of unethical conduct that will be referred to the DoD inspector general for a separate review.”
Nations like China will not oblige us by putting their AI plans on hold while we catch up. The DoD could try using a hardware stack instead, but that would severely constrict their plans, according to Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, head of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
Is DarkCyber surprised? A better question, “What was the business ethos of DH Shaw when Mr. Bezos honed his financial and business skills at that Wall Street firm?”
DarkCyber does not know.
Cynthia Murrell, April 20, 2019
Algorithms: Thresholds and Recycling Partially Explained
April 19, 2019
Five or six years ago I prepared a lecture about the weaknesses in widely used algorithms. In that talk, which I delivered to intelligence operatives in Western Europe and the US, I pointed out two points which were significant to me and my small research team.
- There are about nine or 10 algorithms which are used again and again. One example is k means. The reason is that the procedure is a fixture in many university courses, and the method is good enough.
- Quite a bit of the work on smart software relies on cutting and pasting. In 1962, I discovered the value of this approach when I worked on a small project at my undergraduate university. Find a code snippet that does the needed task, modify it if necessary, and bingo! Today this approach remains popular.
I thought about my lectures and these two points when I read another part of the mathy series “Untold History of AI: Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s.” IEEE Spectrum does a reasonable job of explaining one case of algorithmic bias. The story is similar to the experience Amazon had with one of its smart modules. The math produced wonky results. The word “bias” is okay with me, but the outputs from systems which happily chug away and deliver “outputs” to clueless MBAs, lawyers, and marketers may be incorrect.
Several observations:
- The bias in methods goes back before I showed up at the university computer center to use the keypunch machines. Way back in fact.
- Developers today rely on copy and paste, open source, and the basic methods taught by professors who may be thinking about their side jobs as consultants.
- Training data may be skewed, and no one wants to spend the money or take the time to create training data. Why bother? Just use whatever is free, cheap, or already on a storage device. Close enough for horseshoes.
- Users do not know [a] what’s going on behind the point and click interfaces, nor do most users care. As a result, a good graphic is “correct.”
The chatter about the one percent focuses on money. There is another, more important one percent in my opinion. The one percent who take the time to look at a sophisticated system will find the same nine or 10 algorithms, the same open source components, and some recycled procedures that few think about. Quick question: How many smart software systems rely on Thomas Bayes’ methods? Give up? Lots.
I don’t have a remedy for this problem, and I am not sure too many people care, want to talk about the “accuracy” of a smart system’s outputs. That’s a happy thought for the weekend. Imagine bad outputs in an autonomous drone or a smart system in a commercial aircraft? Exciting.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2019
Stephen E Arnold,
NLP: A Primer or Promotion?
April 19, 2019
The role of natural language processing has expanded greatly in recent years. For anyone who needs to get up to speed on this important technology, take note of this resource: IBM Developer shares “A Beginner’s Guide to Natural Language Processing.” Writer M. Tim Jones introduces his topic:
“In this article, we’ll examine natural language processing (NLP) and how it can help us to converse more naturally with computers.
Now the promotional part:
NLP is one of the most important subfields of machine learning for a variety of reasons. Natural language is the most natural interface between a user and a machine. In the ideal case, this involves speech recognition and voice generation. Even Alan Turing recognized this in his “intelligence” article, in which he defined the “Turing test” as a way to test a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior through a natural language conversation. …
We noted this statement:
“One of the key benefits of NLP is the massive amount of unstructured text data that exists in the world and acts as a driver for natural language processing and understanding. For a machine to process, organize, and understand this text (that was generated primarily for human consumption), we could unlock a large number of useful applications for future machine learning applications and a vast amount of knowledge that could be put to work.”
NLP actually represents several areas of research: speech recognition, natural language understanding, querying, ontology, natural language generation, and speech generation. Jones covers the history of NLP from 1954 to the present, then delves into some current approaches: word encodings, recurrent neural networks, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. The article closes by noting that the use of NLP continues to grow. Jones even points to Watson’s Jeopardy championship as evidence the technology is here to stay. Gee, I wonder why a more recent Watson success story wasn’t cited? And how about those IBM financials? Watson, what’s up?
Cynthia Murrell, April 19, 2019
Facebook Search: Fun for Some?
April 19, 2019
Ah, Facebook. The news about millions of exposed passwords was almost lost in the buzz sparked by the now infamous “Report.” Every week, it seems, there is a Facebook goodie to delight.
Despite its modest flaws, Facebook might be a social media network becoming a fave of the Mashable reports in “Facebook’s Search Feature Has Some Pretty Creepy Suggestions” about the firm’s search function.
Allegedly the Facebook search function allowed users to search for photos of women, but not men. Inti De Ceukelaire, a Belgian security researcher, discovered that when he typed in “photos of my female friends,” he got the desired results. However, doing the opposite with “photos of my male friends” yielded memes Risqué search phrases were also automatically suggested:
“That discrepancy is troubling enough, but it gets worse. While testing out these searches, the first automatically suggested query was “photos of my female friends in bikinis,” which returned photos of women in bikinis, as well as one image of a topless woman, which would appear to violate Facebook’s rules against nudity. Facebook removed the image following Mashable’s inquiry. Separately, “photos of my female friends at the beach” was also suggested.”
Mashable continued to test the big and discovered more questionable searches that contained what might be thought of as a “creep” factor. Searches with male in the search phrase, though, were more innocuous. Facebook reports that suggested search phrases are not based on an individual user’s history, but all of Facebook. In other words,
Who coded this search function? Maybe some men? Men just having fun?
Whitney Grace, April 18, 2019
Quantum Search: Consultants, Rev Your Engines
April 18, 2019
Search is a utility function. A number of companies have tried to make it into a platform upon which a business or a government agency’s mission rests. Nope.
In fact, for a decade I published “Beyond Search” and just got tired of repeating myself. Search works if one has a bounded domain, controlled vocabularies, consistent indexing, and technology which embraces precision and recall.
Today, not so much. People talk about search and lose their grip on the accuracy, relevance, and verifiability of the information retrieved. It’s not just wonky psycho-economic studies which cannot be replicated. Just try running the same query on two different mobile phones owned by two different people.
Against this background, please, read “How the Quantum Search Algorithm Works.” The paper contains some interesting ideas; for example:
It’s incredible that you need only examine an NN-item search space on the order of \sqrt{N}N?times in order to find what you’re looking for. And, from a practical point of view, we so often use brute search algorithms that it’s exciting we can get this quadratic speedup. It seems almost like a free lunch. Of course, quantum computers still being theoretical, it’s not quite a free lunch – more like a multi-billion dollar, multi-decade lunch!
Yes, incredible.
However, the real impact of this quantum search write up will be upon the search engine optimization crowd. How quickly will methods for undermining relevance be found.
Net net: Quantum or not, search seems destined to repeat its 50 year history in a more technically sophisticated computational environment. Consultants, abandon your tired explanations of federated search. Forget mere geo-tagging. Drill right into the heart of quantum possibilities. I am eagerly awaiting a Forrester wave report on quantum search and a Gartner magic quadrant, filled with subjective possibilities.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2019
Google: SEO Like a True Google Human Actor
April 18, 2019
We know Google’s search algorithm comprehends text, at least enough to produce relevant search results (though, alas, apparently not enough to detect improper comments in kiddie videos on YouTube). The mechanisms, though, remain murky. Yoast ponders, “How Does Google Understand Text?” Writer Jesse van de Hulsbeek observes Google keeps the particulars close to the vest, but points to some clues, like patents Google has filed. “Word embeddings,” or assessing closely related words, and related entities are two examples. Writing for his SEO audience, van de Hulsbeek advises:
If Google understands context in some way or another, it’s likely to assess and judge context as well. The better your copy matches Google’s notion of the context, the better its chances. So thin copy with limited scope is going to be at a disadvantage. You’ll need to cover your topics exhaustively. And on a larger scale, covering related concepts and presenting a full body of work on your site will reinforce your authority on the topic you specialize in.
We also noted:
Easier texts which clearly reflect relationships between concepts don’t just benefit your readers, they help Google as well. Difficult, inconsistent and poorly structured writing is more difficult to understand for both humans and machines. You can help the search engine understand your texts by focusing on: Good readability (that is to say, making your text as easy-to-read as possible without compromising your message)…Good structure (that is to say, adding clear subheadings and transitions)…Good context (that is to say, adding clear explanations that show how what you’re saying relates to what is already known about a topic).
The article does point out that including key phrases is still important. Google is trying to be more like a human reader, we’re reminded, so text that is good for the humans is good for the SEO ranking. Relevance? Not so much.
Cynthia Murrell, April 18, 2019
Human Trafficking: Popular and Pervasive
April 18, 2019
Sex trafficking is one of the greatest crimes in the world. Sex trafficking is one of the crimes facilitated by digital environments, but the same technology the bad actors use for their crimes is always being used to catch them. USA Today shares how the technology is used to put an end to sex trafficking in the article, “Technological Tricks Can Help End Sex Trafficking: Former IBM Vice President.”
In January 2019, the US Institute Against Human Trafficking launched the Reach Out Campaign in Tampa, Florida. The program used web scraping technology to gather phone numbers of Web sites selling sex in Tampa. It was discovered that most of the numbers linked to cell phones of people sold for sex so they could communicate and book appointments with their “clients.” Reach Out gathered over 10,000 numbers and a mass text was sent out to the numbers with information to leave the sex industry.
The Reach Out Campaign received a 13 percent response. The program needs to be launched across the country in order to assist more sex trafficking victims, who deal with complicated psychological issues. AI bots called Intercept Bots are deployed to create fake sex ads on the Internet, then when someone responds it collects the user’s information. The bot will then share that it is a lure and that the user’s information will potentially be given to law enforcement. While it is important to assist the victims, it is also helpful to address the perpetrators, generally men, and prevent them from committing the crimes in the first place:
It is important, however, that we not just focus on punishing those engaged in buying sex. Many of these men suffer from sex addictions that can be treated. This is why the Intercept Bots program also sends potential sex buyers information on where to get this help. A study in the medical journal Neuro psycho pharmacology estimates that between 3-6 percent of Americans suffer from compulsive sexual behavior. And studies estimate that the percentage of American men who have engaged in commercial sex at least once is 15 to 20 percent; compared to their peers, these men think about sex more often.
Thee are also ad campaigns targeted at people buying sex share the consequences of getting caught buying sex.
Combating trafficking is difficult, but spreading information and using technology to catch bad actors saves victims from further abuse.
Whitney Grace, April 18, 2019
Phishers Experience Some Tiny Google Pushback
April 17, 2019
Hiding urls is a phisher’s best friend. Google wants to eliminate those pesky urls. The problem is that spoofing a Web site is easier when the GOOG simplifies life. There’s nothing like a PDF with malware to make one’s day.
If the information in “Google Takes a Tiny Step Toward Fixing AMP’s URL Problem” is accurate, the Google may be pushing back against the opportunities bad actors have to deceive a Web user. The write up does describe Google’s action as “tiny” and “tiny” may be miniscule. I learned:
When you click a link on your phone with a little lightning bolt next to it in Google search, you’re getting something in the AMP format. AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” and you’ve probably noticed that those pages load super quickly and usually look much simpler than regular webpages. You may have also noticed that the URL at the top of your browser started with “www.google.com/somethingorother” instead of with the webpage you thought you were visiting.
Yeah, about that “quickly.” Maybe not.
Phishers will be studying this alleged “tiny” change. Why? Phishing and spear phishing are one of the methods which are bring Dark Web type excitement to users of the good, old-fashioned Web. There are six or seven additional examples of metastatic technology in my keynote at the TechnoSecurity & Digital Forensics Conference in June 2019.
“Tiny”. Yep. And what about the “speed” of AMP pages?
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2019
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