Text Analytics Offers Summit, Podcast
December 28, 2011
Social media has exploded, with billions and billions of pieces of content hitting the Web every day; making sense of it all can be overwhelming. That’s why Text Analytics News is sponsoring the first ever two day conference dedicated solely to social media analytics– the Social Media Analytics Summit in San Francisco next April 17–18. The conference description informs us:
The Social Media Analytics Summit offers unmatchable networking and knowledge sharing opportunities for social media and analytics professionals. The Summit will be a true forum for vendors, end users, and consultants alike to develop long-lasting business relationships. The conference agenda has been designed based on meticulous research with industry experts and is well-rounded with presentations, panels, case studies, and workshops, giving you deep insights into the social analytics industry from many angles.
Social media analytics is only going to keep growing; learning about this key field now is a wise investment. Here’s an inside tip: register with discount code BSEARCHSMA to save $150.
Text Analytics News’ Chief Editor Erza Steinberg also has a podcast available called the “Social Media Analytics Perspectives Panel,” which he recently recorded with professionals from Social Media Today, Radian6, J.D. Power & Associates, and Beyond The Arc. The podcast explores:
- Effective ways for leveraging social media information to gain a competitive advantage
- The cutting edges of social media analytics and sentiment analysis technology
- How to make business sense out of the flood of user-generated content across social media channels
Two sources of important information from Text Analytics News. Here’s hoping you can take advantage of both.
Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Role of Enterprise Search within Product Lifecycle Management
December 15, 2011
…it is the fact that the PLM world is changing from databases towards networks. It is not about capturing all data inside one single system, but to be able to find the right information through a network of information carriers. This suits also very well with the new generation of workers (generation-Y) who also learned to live in this type of environments and collect information through their social networks.
Catherine Lamsfuss, December 12, 2011
Google Manages Conference Size with an Entrance Exam
December 9, 2011
New marketing spin from Google, a company which is now advertising on television, a medium the company once reviled.
As most conference organizers try to increase paid attendance, the Google is taking action to reduce the number of attendees and make sure that only “real” Googley people attend. Google marketing professionals and okay partners are, of course, exempted from the conference attendance admissions test. Silicon Filter reported that prospective attendees to the 2012 Google I/O conference have to take a test. Point your browser to “Google I/O Moved to June and Extended to 3 Days, Developers Will Have to Code for Tickets.”
According to Monica Tran from the I/O team, the search giant received a unique opportunity to extend the conference to three days so it will be postponing the conference by two months. The new dates are June 27 to 29 at the Moscone Center West In San Francisco.
In addition to the date and length change, Google has also found a unique way of controlling the event size.
The article states:
Tran also hinted at a new application process for I/O. The last event famously sold out in less than an hour. This time around, it looks like developers will have to compete for spots at I/O. Tran tells potential attendees to use the two extra months to “brush up on [their] coding skills,” as this will “come in handy when the new application process opens in February.
Google is always on the cutting edge, it only makes sense that it’s I/O conference application process would be as well. Interesting idea. How many other conference organizers will adopt the admission’s test? As Jack Benny allegedly said, “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”
Jasmine Ashton, December 9, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Dr. Jerry Lucas, Telestrategies
November 14, 2011
An Exclusive Interview from ArnoldIT.com
In October 2011, I had a chance to talk informally with Dr. Jerry Lucas, an expert in telecommunications and the owner of the Telestrategies conference series. I was quite interested in his views about content processing. His interest spans text and the large volumes of information that accrue in modern telecommunications systems. One theme which threaded thought his observations was the large volume of data that is now available in digital form. I don’t want to denigrate the commercial services who chit chat about “big data” for figuring out which soap detergent is perceived as having a “smiley face” on the brand. I do want to point out that the Telestrategies’ conferences are designed for law enforcement agencies, intelligence professionals, and practitioners who either work as advisors to agencies or as product developers. Put that your AtomicPR water balloon, insert XML tags, and spam the connected world.
The full text of the interview with him appears as part of the Search Wizards Speak series, which is the largest, free collection of first person narratives about information retrieval. The full text of my conversation with him is at this link. The master index for the series is available on the Beyond Search Web site at Wizards Index.
I wanted to highlight two points Dr. Lucas made in our discussion.
First, I asked him, “What is your view of the challenges flows of digital information pose to government professionals working in law enforcement or the intelligence community?” He told me:
First and foremost are the lack of updated laws creating new lawful interception mandates. In the US the last technical mandate law passed by Congress was the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA was passed in 1994 and enacted in 1995. The key players providing today’s communication services used by bad guys—specifically, Apple, Facebook, Google, Second Life, Skype, etc.–are not covered by CALEA mandates nor any other interception assistance laws. These companies have to respond to court orders but these companies don’t have to deploy any infrastructure features to assist law enforcement. I think this is a challenge which must be resolved. A second big challenge law enforcement and intelligence professionals is the lack of educational and budget support by their senior management. As you know, today’s senior management developed professionally in their careers depending on voice calls and e-mail messaging as their prime electronic communications tools. Today many senior managers still make phone calls and send e-mails during working hours and likely watch TV during off hours. So here is my point. To understand what’s needed to police a community you have to live in that community. I call this Policing 101. But Today’s senior managers usually don’t live in the Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Second Life and other cyber space environments as part of their every day activities.
Second, I asked Dr. Lucas, “You have a unique vantage point on some quite interesting technologies. If you were to advise a developer at a large firm specializing in digital information analysis, what would be the three most important features the company should include in their next product release?”
I know you are aware of the phenomenal requirements regarding data privacy or who can access data in a law enforcement agency. Privacy policies and safeguards for open source search in an enterprise can be very lax with regard to a law enforcement agency. Data gathered on a bad guy from a communications service provides under a court order is not fair game for searching over time by law enforcement professional. Those data may have to be erased over time and more. So compliance is an essential characteristic of many products and service. Second, product feature to consider is interoperability with legacy lawful intercept and intelligence gathering products. Interoperability is very important. So called “fork lifts” are rare events in this space and no one in this space wants to see an additional screen introduced in the central monitoring center. I want to emphasize that the user interface must be simple and shouldn’t require the user to be highly computer literate.
I found that the Apple influence is extending beyond the iPhone and iPad crowd. For more of Dr. Lucas’ insights and views, point your browser to the Dr. Jerry Lucas Interview. Information about Telestrategies is located at www.ISSWorldTraining.com.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Text Analytics Summit Freight Train Arrives in November 2011
October 5, 2011
We wanted to remind you that the Text Analytics Summit West is November 10th and 11th in San Jose, California. The conference venue is the Convention Plaza Hotel. Among the speakers are:
- Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner of Anderson Analytics
- Cliff Figallo, Senior Site Curator and Editor at Smart Data Collective and Social Media Today
- Vincent Granville, Chief Architect, Executive Director of AnalyticBridge and many other analytics visionaries and practitioners.
You can read an informative transcript of a discussion among these three experts at http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/text-mining-conference-west/summit-news.shtml.
The conference program is available on the Text Analytics News Web site. The conference offers special student discounts.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2011
Sponsored by Text Analytics News
Are Text Analytics Companies Learning the Silicon Valley Way?
August 11, 2011
Seth Grimes, founding chair for the Text Analytics Summit, interviewed three experts in order to find out what it is that Silicon Valley and the world of text analytics have in common. The full interview, “What Can Text Analytics and Silicon Valley Learn From Each Other?” can be found at Text Analytics News.
Grimes reports, “Business markets are global, yet the Bay Area stands out as a source and consumer of innovative technologies and in particular, as a pace-setter for the online and social worlds. With the Text Analytics Summit coming to San Jose, I reached out to a few west-coasters who are making Valley text analytics news: Nitin Indurkhya, principal research scientist at eBay Research Labs; YY Lee, COO of FirstRain; and Michael Osofsky, co-founder and chief innovation officer at NetBase.”
Osofsky explains the balance between precision and recall in text analytics, and urges Silicon Valley to understand that time and energy should be devoted to experimenting to find a balance between the two principles. On the other hand, Silicon Valley’s fast and exciting nature could be a good influence on the text analytics world. Software can be launched, edited, and evolved quickly and risks can be taken. Absorbing a bit of that mentality could enable text analytics to be a little more innovative and adventurous.
Indurkya encourages the text analytics world to adopt the Valley principle of “fail often and fail quickly.” In this way, he explains, innovation happens and failure does not bog down the overall momentum.
Lee encourages text analytics companies to focus separately on each of three equally important components: 1) Input 2) Internal process 3) Presentation. Each of the categories falls broadly under the category of text analytics and yet Lee stresses each must be treated independently during development.
Grimes concludes with his own collective thoughts on the three interviews.
The key takeaways that I see in these responses involve problem and product focus, agility, and the desirability of pulling and integrating information from multiple sources with the application of a variety of analytical techniques, in order to achieve technical and business goals. There’s no “Do X, Y, and Z” formula here, but there is definitely a sense of the rewards that are possible if text analytics is done right.
Out-of-the-box thinking is beneficial in any business arena, but especially those known more for rigidity than innovation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. And our own Stephen E Arnold is speaking at this year’s November 2011 event.
The Text Analytics Summit has been a staple of the text analytics community for the past 7 years. To help this community grow, the Text Analytics Summit is finally coming to the west coast to foster new networking opportunities, promote more healthy knowledge sharing, and create strong, long-lasting business relationships. Text Analytics is essential for maximizing the customer experience, effectively monitoring the social media world, conducting first-class data analysis and research, and improving the business decision making process. Attend the summit to discover how to unlock the power of text analytics to leverage new and profitable business opportunities. Whether you’re interested in taking advantage of social media analytics, customer experience management, sentiment analysis, or Voice of the Customer, Text Analytics Summit West is the only place to get the inside information that you need to stay ahead of the competition and profit from text mining. For more information, click here.
Must Attend Conference: Text Analytics Symposium
July 25, 2011
Analysis on another level
PRWeb.com has released information on the newest trend in business technology and marketing. Sentiment Analysis. In the press release “Sentiment Analysis Symposium to Spotlight Agency, Finance, Technology, and Social Media Thought Leaders, November 9,2011 in San Francisco,” we are able to gauge the excitement that is building behind this new approach to consumer marketing. The release asserted:
“Businesses are eager to extract and exploit consumer and market sentiment and opinion from the broad array of information sources online and in the enterprise,” said symposium chair Seth Grimes.
The conference is going to provide agency leaders with multiple solutions and networking opportunities. In its third year the conference boast participation from TripAdvisor, Saltlux, Acrolinx, and Amazon. The announcement added:
“They focus on online and social media measurement and analytics — on business intelligence for enterprise, Web, and social opinion sources — whether representing an enterprise-software leader or start-up, research firm, an online information provider, an agency, or a consultancy.”
The sentiment analysis approach to marketing, business and technology is becoming more and more prevalent. It promises to be an ‘area to watch’ and may explode into an industry to invest in somewhere in the near future.
We think the conference is a must attend affair. The US enterprise search conferences have been flapping and panting. The European conferences wobble around governance and content management. This conference is different. It has zing and substance.
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Forensic Logic: Open Source Search and Law Enforcement
May 20, 2011
An exclusive interview with Ronald Mayer, chief technical officer of Forensic Logic, reveals how open source search is contributing to law enforcement activities. Mr. Mayer will be one of the featured speakers at the Lucene Revolution conference in San Francisco the week of May 24, 2011. In the interview, Mr. Mayer observed:
he flexibility of Lucene and Solr interest are what really attracted me to Solr. There are many factors that contribute to how relevant a search is to a law enforcement user. Obviously traditional text-search factors like keyword density, and exact phrase matches matter. How long ago an incident occurred is important (a recent similar crime is more interesting than a long-ago similar crime). And location is important too.
When asked about law enforcement’s use of commercial proprietary search solutions, Mr. Mayer said:
Where appropriate, we also use commercial search solutions. For our analysis and reporting product that works mostly with structured data we use a commercial text search solution because it integrates well with the relational tables that also filter results for such reporting. The place where Solr/Lucene’s flexibility really shined for us is in our product that brings structured, semi-structured, and totally unstructured data together.
To learn more about Forensic Logic, navigate to www.forensiclogic.com. For more information about Lucene/Solr, register now to attend the Lucene Revolution.
Stephen E Arnold, May 2011
Sponsored by Lucid Imagination
Search Technologies: Makes the Google Search Appliance Sing
April 12, 2011
According our information here at Beyond Search, There are more than 35,000 Google Search Appliances in organizations worldwide. Although data are sketchy, some US government agencies have more than 50 GSAs providing search and retrieval functions. To put the number 35,000 in context, Autonomy has more than 30,000 licensees of its search system worldwide. In short, since 2002, the Google Search Appliance has moved from novelty to one of the most widely used enterprise search and retrieval systems in the world. Only public Web search systems reach more users than Google’s GSA.
In order to learn the ins and outs of the Google Search Appliance one had to put in long hours scrutinizing Google’s copious online documentation and then work through a GSA set up. Google makes a low cost appliance available, but many managers and system administrators need a fast start and insider tips for getting the most out of GSA.
Until now, combining the basics with the “need to know” information to make the Google Search Appliance sing was knowledge that simply was not available in an easy-to-digest form. Search Technologies, one of the world’s leading search consultancies and integration firms, has responded to this market need. We learned that Search Technologies will participate in a Federal Search Seminar on May 5, 2011. The location is the Google office at 1101 New York Avenue. You can get additional information at this link. You can register via the Search Technologies Web site at this link.
The program will include how to plan a sophisticated search application. The Search Technologies and Google team will discuss the most common pitfalls and how planning can mitigate these challenges. The return on investment will be discussed with particular reference to the payoffs from Google’s simplified approach to deployment and the next-generation methods for integrating disparate content into the GSA’s retrieval system. In addition, the session will dig into how to connect to multiple repositories within an organization. Running separate queries across many different enterprise and desktop systems is no longer feasible in today’s fast growth data environment. The session will also include a review of the most recent technological advances in search, including the innovations in the latest version of the GSA.
According to Search Technologies’ founder, Kamran Khan:
This session is about how to fit search into real life business issues. Technology is important, but a focus on the business problem is paramount. The presentations provide the attendee with expertise gained through implementation of the GSA in a variety of different work situations. A focus on specific business objectives makes the GSA sing.
Appliances, like toasters, are made to plug in. but the GSA benefits from being implemented with a business focus. The Search Technologies’ team has handled more than 60 GSA implementations. You can benefit from this direct knowledge in the Google Washington, DC office. Space is limited.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2011
Search Technologies
Lucid Imagination and a German Open Source Summit
March 9, 2011
In case you weren’t able to make it to Lucid Imagination’s recent 2011 Solr meet-up in Germany, the company has posted a couple of presentations here. We think you will want to download these. Our favorite is Marc Krellenstein’s but you should make your own determination based on your information needs.
The offerings include a piece on search trends by Marc Krellenstein, one of Lucid’s founders. He looks at such factors as evolving challenges, best practices, and the “current competitive landscape.” He also takes a look at Google as compared to enterprise search, and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of his company’s own Lucene/Solr.
We also liked Thomas Kwiatkowski’s and Oliver Schönherr’s discussion of the online real estate site Immobilien Scout. They detailed their methodical transfer from their legacy search and data infrastructure to Solr.
You will want to check the Lucid download location. When we tried to snag the presentation form Olaf Zschiedrich, head of German-language eBay, (eBay Kleinanzeigen), it was unavailable.
Lucene/Solr continue to gain traction in the Web and enterprise search market. For more information about Lucid Imagination, navigate to www.lucidimagination.com.
Cynthia Murrell, March 9, 2011
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