Dr. Watson: Concerned about Flabbiness and Sugar
August 5, 2015
The IBM PR attack continues. Today’s installment pits Watson (IBM’s Jeopardy winning, post production blind, Lucene based smart software) against flab and short chain soluble carbohydrates. Think diabetes or worse a visit to the dentist.
Navigate to “Dr. Watson: IBM Plans to Use big Data to Manage Diabetes and Obesity.” The story is not new. Once again IBM is reporting a “team up” deal. I wish the stories about Watson would talk about landing very large contracts with major government entities or Fortune 100 firms. I cannot get excited about old fashioned data mining applications. Sorry. Call me jaded.
The write up states without one whit of skepticism:
This new partnership marks a substantial leap into the healthcare sector for IBM, with CVS joining the likes of Apple and Medtronic as partners of IBM’s growing data service,Watson Health. By partnering up with CVS, Watson will be able to analyze and learn from “an unprecedented mix of health information sources”, including medical records, medical insurance claims and data from smart fitness devices.
I found the notion of the UK’s National Health Service hooking up with IBM an interesting one. Does the NHS have a functioning computer infrastructure? Has the promise of taxonomies delivered something useful to its intended users?
IBM might be able to help with systems. Will Watson remediate the NHS findability challenges? What will NHS pay to get Dr. Watson on the job? Has anyone involved in the Alphr (a former PC oriented outfit?) used Watson?
I don’t think much happens with these Watson stories than recycling what Watson’s team generates with rather amazing regularity.
Where are the billion dollar plus revenues? That is important to me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2015
YouTube Wants You to Pay For…YouTube Content?
August 5, 2015
YouTube is free and that is one of the biggest draws for viewers. Viewers pull the plug on cable and instead watch TV and movies on the Internet or via streaming device. While YouTube might be free, video streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime offer network television for a fraction of the cable price. Google wants in on the streaming service game and it is already prepped with YouTube. Google’s only problem is that it does not have major TV networks signed up. Slash Gear explains in the article that “YouTube’s Upcoming Paid Service Hasn’t Signed Up TV Networks.” Cheaper access to network TV is one of main reasons that viewers sign up for a video streaming service, without them YouTube has a problem:
“What is most notable, however, is what is missing: TV networks. And according to sources, YouTube hasn’t at this point signed up any of those networks like NBC and Fox. Those networks would bring with them their popular shows, and those popular shows would bring in viewers. That doesn’t mean the networks will never be brought in — sources said there’s still time for them to get on board, as the rollout isn’t pegged for until later this year.”
Google is currently counting on YouTube stars to power the paid platform, which users will be able to watch ad free. Without network TV, a larger movie library, and other content, paying for YouTube probably will not have many takers. Why pay for already free videos, when all you have to do is watch a thirty-second ad?
Whitney Grace, August 5, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Coauthoring Documents in SharePoint to Save Time
August 4, 2015
SharePoint users are often looking for ways to save time and streamline the process of integration from other programs. Business Management Daily has devoted some attention to the topic with their article, “Co-authoring Documents in SharePoint and Office.” Read on for the full details of how to make the most of this feature.
The article begins:
“One of the best features of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 is the way it permits co-authoring. Co-authoring means more than one person is in a document, workbook or presentation at the same time editing different parts. It works differently in Word, Excel and PowerPoint . . . With Word 2013/SharePoint 2013, co-authors may edit either in Word Online (Word Web App) or the desktop version.”
SharePoint is a powerful but complicated solution that requires quite a bit of energy to maintain and use to the best of its ability. For those users and managers that are tasked with daily work in SharePoint, staying in touch with the latest tips and tricks is vital. Those users may benefit from Stephen E. Arnold’s Web site, ArnoldIT.com. A longtime leader in search, Arnold brings the latest SharePoint news together in one easy to digest news feed.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hire Watson As Your New Dietitian
August 4, 2015
IBM’s supercomputer Watson is being “trained” in various fields, such as healthcare, app creation, customer service relations, and creating brand new recipes. The applications for Watson are possibly endless. The supercomputer is combining its “skills” from healthcare and recipes by trying its hand at nutrition. Welltok invented the CaféWell Health Optimization Platform, a PaaS that creates individualized healthcare plans, and it implemented Watson’s big data capabilities to its Healthy Dining CaféWell personal concierge app. eWeek explains that “Welltok Takes IBM Watson Out To Dinner,” so it can offer clients personalized restaurant menu choices.
” ‘Optimal nutrition is one of the most significant factors in preventing and reversing the majority of our nation’s health conditions, like diabetes, overweight and obesity, heart disease and stroke and Alzheimer’s,’ said Anita Jones-Mueller, president of Healthy Dining, in a statement. ‘Since most Americans eat away from home an average of five times each week and it can be almost impossible to know what to order at restaurants to meet specific health needs, it is very important that wellness and condition management programs empower smart dining out choices. We applaud Welltok’s leadership in providing a new dimension to healthy restaurant dining through its groundbreaking CaféWell Concierge app.’”
Restaurant menus are very vague when it comes to nutritional information. When it comes to knowing if something is gluten-free, spicy, or a vegetarian option, the menu will state it, but all other information is missing. In order to find a restaurant’s nutritional information, you have to hit the Internet and conduct research. A new law passed will force restaurants to post calorie counts, but that will not include the amount of sugar, sodium, and other information. People have been making poor eating choices, partially due to the lack of information, if they know what they are eating they can improve their health. If Watson’s abilities can decrease the US’s waistline, it is for the better. The bigger challenge would be to get people to use the information.
Whitney Grace, August 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
My Refrigerator Door Shuts Automatically or Content Processing Vendor Works Hard at Repositioning
August 3, 2015
This weekend I checked out the flow of news from several dozen search and content processing vendors. What I discovered was surprising. For example, for the set of 36 vendors, there was zero substantive news about the companies’ information access technology. More disturbing were the hints of revenue difficulties; for example, New Zealand based SLI Systems, a public traded company, continues to lose money. Search and content processing sales challenges are forcing vendors to reposition themselves or align themselves with business trends which are more likely to have traction with senior managers.
How does a semantic technology company adapt. The approach is surprising, and it involves the Internet of Things. This is the push to put a Nest in your home and an Internet node in your appliances. One benefit is energy efficiency. The other idea is increased opportunities to push advertising to the hapless consumer who just wants to nuke a burrito in a microwave (smart of dumb microwave may not matter to a hungry teen).
I am not sure about your refrigerator. My double door General Electric refrigerator (what my grandmother called an “ice box” and some folks call a “fridge”) has doors which shut automatically. The refrigerator has an odd energy efficient sticker like the ones I remove from monitors which persist in going to sleep when my intelligence does not match the gizmo’s.
I understand that someday soon I will have a refrigerator with lots of intelligence. I am confident that with a few moments thought, I can kill that puppy’s brain.
In my narrow world, bounded by gun toting neighbors and dynamite crazed bridge builders, the Internet of Things or the somewhat odd acronym “IoT”, pronounced by my Spanish tutor “Eee ooooh tay”, will be a bit like Big Data, semantic search, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and data lakes. The idea is that a search and content processing vendor can surf on a hot idea like fraud and pump some air into the sagging balloon labeled sales leads.
I am more convinced of this verbal magic each time I read about “new” technology from companies that are essentially vendors of look up functions applicable to information access.
The IoT is, in my opinion, more about getting information about a machine’s performance, the leasee’s adherence to maintenance schedules, and alerts about highly probably device failure.
One of my neighbors has a Mercedes which beeps, vibrates, and flashes when my neighbor strays across the white lines on the highway. Annoying but semi useful. The Mercedes also can phone home if my neighbor’s big expensive SUV experiences a malfunction. Useful. Maybe annoying if the malfunction occurs when the SUV is parked in front of the local Neiman Marcus or Goodwill store.
I read “Content Analysis and the Internet of Things: Never Leave the Fridge Door Open Again?” The main point of the write up is the question which I already answered. My refrigerator automatically shuts its door.
The article states:
The Internet of Things is the expanding network of physical objects that collect information, communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment according to Gartner, which reports that there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020.
Ah, yes, the mid tier firm Gartner, an excellent source of objective, unbiased, inclusion free information.
Here’s the article’s keeper passage I noted from a senior manager at a content processing company. Keep that phrase in mind: “content processing.”
With the common method of interaction, we will speak, devices will read, the design will be predicated upon our needs and less so upon the device. The trend seems so simple—for us to understand these devices, the devices must understand us. The difference is meaning. Data is an abstraction, understanding is communication, and to understand and communicate one must know meaning.
I am delighted that data have meaning. I just wonder how much of a stretch it is to apply text centric methods to outputs from an industrial machine connected to the Internet via an iGear service. My hunch is, “Not too much.”
To me the phrase “content processing” means words, not data output from my neighbor’s flashy Mercedes or an Internet enabled refrigerator.
As I said, my refrigerator door closes automatically. Do I want anyone to know that let the hinges do the work?
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2015
Sorry, Experts. NLP and Semantic Technology Will Guarantee Higher Precision and Recall
August 3, 2015
I read “5 Reasons for Developers to Build NLP and Semantic Search Skills” is one of those bait and switch write ups. The title suggests that NLP and semantic search are “skills.” The content of the article presents without factual substantiation assertions about the differences between Web search and enterprise search. The reality is that both are more closely related than they appear to some “experts.” Neither works particularly well for reasons which have to do with cost control, system management, and focus. The technology is, from my point of view, more stable than some search mavens believe.
Here’s the passage I highlighted in pale mauve because I did not have purple:
It at times feels magical that Search engines know, with unbelievable accuracy, exactly what you are looking for. This is the result of a heavy investment in NLP and Semantic technologies. These, along with speech-recognition, have the potential of enabling a future where search will transform into a smart machine that uses “connected knowledge” to answer significantly complex questions – a Star Trek Computer may not be too far away after all, if Amit Singhal – brain behind Google’s search engine evolution, has be to believed.
More remarkable was the introduction of the phrase “big, unstructured data.” I also found the notion of “commoditization” of data science amusing.
One idea warrants comment. The article calls attention to the “widening gap between enterprise search platforms and general purpose search engines.” Anyone who has attempted to index Web content quickly learns that it is a fruit basket which is in the process of being shoved into a blender. The notion of the enterprise search system was to process the content normally found inside an organization. But guess what? After the first query run on a restricted domain of content, the user says, “I need access to Internet content.” The “gap” is one of perception. The underlying components of the system and much of the gee whiz technology are similar. The fact that the Web search systems have been shaped to handle a restricted body of content is lost on some folks. Similarly the enterprise search systems are struggling because they, like Web search engines, cannot handle efficiently and automatically certain types of content. In short, neither works particularly well.
Will NLP and semantic skills help a developer? Not too much if the search system is not focused, the content is not reliable, and functions poorly defined. Forget big data, little data, and unstructured or structured data. Get the basics wrong and one has a lousy search system, which sadly, is more common than not.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2015
Bodleian Library Gets Image Search
August 3, 2015
There is a lot of free information on the Internet, but the veracity is always in question. While libraries are still the gateway of knowledge, many of their rarer, more historic works are buried in archives. These collections offer a wealth of information that is often very interesting. The biggest problem is that libraries often lack the funds to scan archival collections and create a digital library. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, one of the oldest libraries in Europe, has the benefit of funds and an excellent collection to share with the world.
Digital Bodleian boasts over 115,179 images as of writing this article, stating that it is constantly updating the collection. The online library takes a modern approach to how users interact with the images by taking tips from social media. Not only can users browse and search the images randomly or in the pre-sorted collections, they can also create their own custom libraries and sharing the libraries with friends.
It is a bold move for a library, especially for one as renowned as Bodleian, to embrace a digital collection as well as offering a social media-like service. In my experience, digital library collections are bogged down by copyright, incomplete indices or ontologies, and they lack images to perk a users’ interest. Digital Bodleian is the opposite of many of its sister archives, but another thing I have noticed is that users are not too keen on joining a library social media site. It means having to sign up for yet another service and also their friends probably aren’t on it.
Here is an idea, how about a historical social media site similar to Pinterest that pulls records from official library archives? It would offer the ability to see the actual items, verify information, and even yield those clickbait top ten lists.
Whitney Grace, August 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Elasticsearch: A Useful Overview
August 1, 2015
Want to shake free of the proprietary search and retrieval systems? I don’t blame you. Irregular and slow bug fixes and licensing handcuffs are two good reasons. Remember: The cost of search is not the licensing fee. The cost is a collection of fees, purchases, and expenses which every search system with which I am familiar is burdened.
Elasticsearch is the go to solution at this time in my opinion. If you want a useful overview of Elasticsearch, check out the Slideshare presentation “Introduction to ElasticSearch.” You may have to “join” LinkedIn / Slideshare to do anything useful, however.
The deck was prepared / delivered in the spring of 2015 by Roy Russo who is affiliated with or is “DevNexus.” The information is jargon free, an approach which the whiz kids at LucidWorks (Really?) may want to imitate. The presentation does contain a couple of buzzwords like NGram, but no MBA speak.
Stephen E Arnold, August 1, 2015
Endeca: Facets of Novelty
August 1, 2015
I am no specialist in the arcane art of legal eagle spotting. I did notice some references to a dust up between an outfit called Speedtrack and licensees of Endeca’s ageing search technology.
The Speedtrack outfit seems to have rights to an invention called “Method for Accessing Computer Files and Data, Using Linked Categories Assigned to Each Data File Record on Entry of the Data File Record.” This is explained brilliantly in US5544360, filed in February 1995.
Here’s a diagram showing how the user can click on categories to locate information. No typing required.
Compare this to Endeca’s invention, “Hierarchical Data Driven Navigation System and Method for Information Retrieval.” This is US7062483, filed in 2001. You may also find US7035864 and US7325201 interesting as well.
“Federal Circuit Reaffirms Kessler Doctrine As A Patent Infringement Defense For Customers” explains that the Speedtrack infringement case pivots on the Kessler doctrine. Here’s the explanation from the JDSupra.com article:
First, unlike res judicata, which is a defense that is personal to the parties in a prior litigation, the Kessler Doctrine “attaches to the [accused] product itself” and precludes a patentee from reasserting the same patent against the same (or “essentially the same”) product in a subsequent action.
Then noted:
Second, the Federal Circuit ruled that the Kessler doctrine may be raised by customers as well as the product manufacturer or supplier.
What I found fascinating was this infringement related statement attributed to the presiding legal eagle:
Third, the Federal Circuit held that the Kessler doctrine applied to Speedtrack’s claim even though the Endeca software allegedly infringed only when combined with the customer’s own computer hardware.
I recall that Endeca’s faceted navigation burst upon the scene in the late 1990s. Who knew that Jerzy Lewak (co founder of Speedtrack), Slawek Grzechnik, and Jon Matousek seemed to be trying to figure out a way around the problem of keyword search before Endeca?
I wonder if Oracle were surprised too. I have a hunch Speedtrack was.
Stephen E Arnold, August 1, 2015
Bing Is Very Important, I Mean VERY Important
July 31, 2015
The online magazine eWeek published, “What The Bing Search Engine Brings To Microsoft’s Web Strategy” and it explains how Bing spurs a lot of debate:
“Some who don’t like the direction in which Google is going say that Bing is the search engine they prefer, especially since Microsoft has honed Bing’s ability to deliver relevant results. Others, however, look at Bing as one of many products from Microsoft, which is still seen as the “Evil Empire” in some quarters and a search platform that’s incapable of delivering the results that compare favorably with Google. Bing, introduced six years ago in 2009, is still a remarkably controversial product in Microsoft’s lineup. But it’s one that plays an important role in so many of the company’s Internet services.”
Microsoft is ramping up Bing to become a valuable part of its software services, it continues its partnership with Yahoo and Apple, and it will also power AOL’s web advertising and search. Bing is becoming a more respected search engine, but what does it have to offer?
Bing has many features it is using to entice people to stop using Google. When searching a person’s name, search results display a bio of the person (only if they are affluent, however). Bing has a loyalty program, seriously, called Bing Rewards, the more you search on Bing it rewards points that are redeemable for gift cards, movie rentals, and other items.
Bing is already a big component in Microsoft software, including Windows 10 and Office 365. It serves as the backbone for not only a system search, but searching the entire Internet. Think Apple’s Spotlight, except for Windows. It also supports a bevy of useful applications and do not forget about Cortana, which is Microsoft’s answer to Siri.
Bing is very important to Microsoft because of the ad revenue. It is just a guess, but you can always ask Cortana for the answer.
Whitney Grace, July 31, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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