Stephen E. Arnold: IBM’s Watch Goes Shopping — Big Data Heuristics Hit a New Low

IO Impotency, IO Sense-Making, IO Tools
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

IBM Watson Apps Due Next Year

December 22, 2013

To what pressing issue is IBM now applying Watson’s superior (artificial) intellect? Why, to shopping, of course. Business Insider reports, “IBM’s Jeopardy-Winning Supercomputer Will Power a ‘Cognitive, Expert Personal Shopper’ App Next Year.” Writer Dylan Love was especially taken by one app on the horizon from a firm called Fluid Retail.

He quotes IBM Watson Solutions VP Stephen Gold:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: IBM's Watch Goes Shopping — Big Data Heuristics Hit a New Low”

Stephen E. Arnold: Exploratory Search Trends Debated

IO Tools
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Exploratory Search Trends Debated

An article titled The Changing Face of Exploratory Search on Linkedin presents the current trends in search. Exploratory search is distinct from navigational search, the latter searcher-type knows what she is expecting to get in terms of results. An exploratory searcher might know the search criteria but not how many results will meet their criteria, if any. The article claims that while navigational search exploded in the last fifteen years, exploratory search is still nascent.

The trends highlighted in the article include:

1.) Entity-oriented search. Search has moved beyond words as mere strings of text and increasingly focuses on entities that represent people, places, organizations, and topics.

2.) Knowledge graphs. Search is starting to leverage the network of relationships among entities: Google has its knowledge graph; Microsoft has Satori; and networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are fundamentally social graphs of entities.

3.) Search assistance. Google popularized search suggestions nearly a decade ago, using its knowledge of common queries to reduce effort on the part of searchers.

The article goes on to explain what will happen when faceted search (a mixture of entity-oriented and knowledge graph searches) expands, allowing for precision searches. The final step is faceted search combining with search assistance to mold something akin to Facebook’s graph search. The article touts these trends as new, but they sound awfully familiar. Didn’t Inktomi and Endeca approach search in this way in the 1980s? Perhaps this is just old wine in a new semantic bottle.

Chelsea Kerwin, December 11, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Stephen E. Arnold: LinkedIn Pulse Takes Professional News Aggregation & Precision Showcasing to Next Level

IO Tools

Ever since Google left a void by discontinuing Google Reader, other RSS feeds programs have attempted to fill it. Pulse is one of the top replacements and now “LinkedIn Integrates With Pulse For Professional News Aggregation. Social Sharing.” LinkedIn purchased Pulse earlier this year and now they are offering their users professional news for both desktop and mobile platforms. LinkedIn and Pulse are now synced and sharing articles and social media interactions are as simple as a few mouse clicks.

There have been some changes made to how LinkedIn works and improvements to Pulse:

“This means that LinkedIn Today, which gathered top news related to your profession—one of the cool, little-known features in LinkedIn—has now been made defunct. Instead, even if you visit the web app, you will be taken to LinkedIn Pulse. Under the hood, the search feature has been enhanced and Pulse will now offer better autocomplete suggestions.”

It is a great idea to have all of your professional content and social interactions in one place. It makes it easier to stay on top of current events and network, but as any new venture starts this question must be asked: will the news be relevant to the individual users, advertisers, and LinkedIn’s professional standards? LinkedIn probably does not want “News of the Weird” or the latest prescription drug advertised on their Web site. Pulse already has high standards, so doubt is low but who knows.

Whitney Grace, November 29, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Stephen E. Arnold: RadioSearch Engine Updated by the Minute

IO Tools
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Never Forget a Radio Station Again

Last Christmas I was ready to annihilate my regular radio stations, because they kept playing the same carol mix over and over again. There was not one new song introduced within a twenty-four hour period. Looking for some relief, I surfed the FM waves in hopes of finding a new station. My efforts were rewarded with a station I had never heard before and I was filled with new musical glee. While I never found the station again, Michael Robertson can help me avoid WHAM’s cover of “Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart” by “Introducing the World’s First Radio Search Engine.” Robertson recently launched his beta version of RadioSearchEngine.com.

The article explains:

“There are other directories of A-Z lists of radio stations, but this is the first search engine where any song or artist can be located on stations playing from anywhere in the world. A universal web player for the first time connects to and plays nearly every station offering immediate audio satisfaction and unprecedented user control.

The search engine updates in real-time, so users will be able to track a song and instantly play it. The search engine indexes all the songs every three-five minutes for an instantaneous searchable music. Robertson’s creation also makes recommendations to the user based on the song selection, allows users to skip songs, and view popularity rankings.”

Before finishing the article, I was about to say that YouTube is just as easy, but the ability to fast forward, skip songs, and add new content is the search engine’s major selling point. Robertson might have just launched the newest music trend.

Whitney Grace, November 29, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Stephen E. Arnold: Iphone SayHi App Over Google Translate?

IO Tools
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Iphone SayHi App Preferred to Google Translate App

The article on MakeUseOf titled SayHi Translate Is Quite Possibly The Closest Thing To Star Trek’s Universal Translator promotes the Iphone app SayHi as the best translation app available. At one $1.99, the app provides translations between some 40 languages (more are available with the premium version). The user says their phrase slowly and clearly into the phone, hits done and waits a few seconds for the phrase to appear in the original and translated languages. At the same time the app reads out the translation so that the person you are attempting to communicate with can hear it as well.

The article explains:

“The star allows you to create a list of favourite phrases (accessible from the star icon at the very top of the screen). The arrow is the usual iOS sharing options (email, iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, etc), the arrow pointing right enables you to play the phrase back again if you need to hear it again, and the trash-can deletes the phrase from the screen.”

The author even claims that SayHi beats out the Google Translate app, although that may become an issue of personal preference. Ultimately, these resources are a must-have for people traveling in foreign countries where they don’t speak the language. (And in galaxies far far away?)

Chelsea Kerwin, November 29, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Stephen E. Arnold: SAIL LABS Media Mining Indexer Updated

IO Technologies, IO Tools
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

New Version of Media Mining Indexer (6.2) from SAIL LABS Technology

The release titled SAIL LABS Announces New Release Of Media Mining Indexer 6.2 from SAIL LABS Technology on August 5, 2013 provides some insight into the latest version of the Media Mining Indexer. SAIL LABS Technology considers itself as an innovator in creating solutions for vertical markets, and enhancing technologies surrounding advanced language understanding abilities. The newest release offers such features as,

“Improved named entity detection of names via unified lists across languages… improved topic models for all languages… improved text preprocessing for Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Frasi, US and international English…support of further languages: Catalan, Swedish, Portuguese, Bahasa (Indonesia), Italian, Farsi and Romanian…improved communication with Media Mining Server to relate recognized speakers to their respective profiles.”

Gerhard Backfried, Head of Research at SAIL LABS, called the latest release a “quantum leap forward” considering the system’s tractability, constancy and ability to respond to clients needs. The flagship product is based on SAIL LABS speech recognition technology, which as won awards, and offers a suite of ideal components for multimedia processing, and the transformation of audio and video data into searchable information. The features boast the ability to convert speech to text accurately with Automatic Speech Recognition and the ability to detect different speakers with Speaker Change Detection.

Chelsea Kerwin, November 09, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext