Content Marketers at Risk
April 19, 2016
I read “Goldman Sachs Leads a $30 million Round for Persado’s AI-Based, Automated Copywriting Service.” My first reactions:
- Search engine optimization wizards will have a tool to increase the flow of baloney search and content marketing to people who write blogs
- Journalists, who have been subject to reduction in force actions, may face fierce competition from a smart software
- Teachers of college composition will have a tough time figuring out if the student essays are coming from fraternity and sorority reference files or from a cloud based writing service.
According to the write up, the service is a “cognitive one.” Poor IBM. The company wants Watson to be the cognitive champion. Now an outfit which uses software to create articles has embraced the concept. I noted:
The company [Persado] has cataloged 1 million words and phrases that marketers use in their copy, and scored those words based on sentiment analysis and the structure of marketing pitches defined by a message’s format, linguistic structure, description, emotional language, and its actual call to action. The software can create a message, optimize its language, and then translate that message into any of 23 language…
There is a bright side. IBM could purchase Persado and then use the system to flog its confection of Lucene, acquired technology, and home brew code into a system which tirelessly promotes IBM.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2016
The Marketing Case for Value from Dark Web
April 19, 2016
For marketers crying for more user data, the Dark Web may present a challenge — or not. A longread article, Bitcoin Remains Most Popular Digital Currency on Dark Web from Coin Desk reiterates the landscape of the Dark Web is more nuanced than the headlines screaming cybercrime suggest. Despite the inability to know users’ locations, identities and interests, which may worry marketers, several points are raised asking marketers if there is possibility for value in the Dark Web. Explaining more about the potential benefits to marketing and sales, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs is quoted,
“‘Plenty of would-be, legitimate consumers come from regions of the world where perhaps governments don’t want their consumers visiting certain places or buying certain items. And for those consumers, [the Dark Web] can be a boon, and potential positive for retailers and marketers,’ Krebs writes in an e-mail. Krebs goes on to say that much of the supposed danger posed by the Dark Web is nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to cybersecurity.”
This useful piece not only provides insights into how the marketing industry views Tor, but also serves as a handy layman’s guide to Dark Web (synonymous with darknet and dark net) terminology and a brief history. Additionally, the founder of Adland presents an interesting case for opening a .onion site to complement a site on the Surface Web, or the “regular” internet.
Megan Feil, April 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Data on Dark Web Not Excused from Fact or Fiction Debate
April 19, 2016
Remember when user information was leaked from the extramarital affairs website AshleyMadison? While the leak caused many controversies, the release of this information specifically on the Dark Web gives reason to revisit an article from Mashable, Another blow for Ashley Madison: User emails leaked on Dark Web as a refresher on the role Tor played. A 10-gigabyte file was posted as a Torrent on the Dark Web which included emails and credit card information among other user data. The article concluded,
“With the data now out there, Internet users are downloading and sifting through it for anything – or, rather, anyone – of note. Lists of email addresses of AshleyMadison users are being circulated on social media. Several appear to be connected to members of the UK government but are likely fake. As Wired notes, the site doesn’t require email verification, meaning the emails could be fake or even hijacked.”
The future of data breaches and leaks may be unclear, but the falsification of information — leaked or otherwise — always remains a possibility. Regardless of the element of scandal existing in future leaks, it is important to note that hackers and other groups are likely not above manipulation of information.
Megan Feil, April 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bing: Search Engine for Developers. Git Moving
April 18, 2016
I read “Bing Just Became the Best Search Engine for Developers.” I was surprised that the word “operators” was left out of the headline. DevOps has become a rallying cry for many. According to the write up:
Almost always as developers we end up on Stack Overflow or Mozilla Developer Network, but now Microsoft’s Bing has given us something even better: executable code directly in search results.
I noted this statement:
Thanks to a collaboration with HackerRank, if you search for something like
string concat C#, you’ll get an interactive code editor with a result that can be run directly from that page to see how it works.
My thought is that Bing is nosing into new territory. Is it possible that there could be some unforeseen consequences along the lines of the Microsoft Tay chatbot? Nah, Microsoft would not provide a function that might compromise a searcher’s computer.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2016
Google Is Many Things: Racial Bias in Hair May Be Brushed Aside
April 18, 2016
I read a story about matching up user queries with images. I don’t think Google’s image search is particularly good. Examples range from Google’s obsession with taking a query like “truth” and returning images of pictures with the word “truth” in them. And this image:
What about the query for “watson.” Google showed a picture of a computer, a person named “sherlock,” and images of this guy:
The write up “Do Google’s ‘Unprofessional Hair’ Results Show It Is Racist?” wants to point out that Google’s methods have a nasty side. I noted this passage:
We’ve always conceived of search engines as arcane but neutral creatures, obedient only to our will and to the precious logic of information. Older engines from the advent of the internet reflected this: Remember “Ask Jeeves,” the genteel butler? Dogpile, which would “fetch” things for you? Despite this fantasy, the things engines and their algorithms are able to know and to find are influenced by the content we give them to work with, which means they may reflect our own biases.
AskJeeves was a human powered system. The Google is algorithmic. Google does not “give” its image search system content. The image search system indexes what it finds, within the depth settings for the crawl. Sorry, gentle reader, Google does not index everything available via the Internet. Bummer, right?
I circled this statement:
is its [image search’s] purpose to reflect and reinforce what its users feel, do and believe? Or is it to show us a fuller picture of the world and all things contained in it as they really are? Google Images was conceived in response to what people most wanted to see. Maybe it hasn’t decided yet what we most need to see.
The Guardian itself is an interesting legal search. Run the query “guardian” on Google Images and what does one find? Here you go:
The logo of the “real” journalistic thing and the word “truth.” Now is that biased?
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2016
Mindbreeze Breaks into Slovak Big Data Market Through Partnership with Medialife
April 18, 2016
The article titled Mindbreeze and MEDIALIFE Launch Strategic Partnership on BusinessWire discusses what the merger means for the Slovak and Czech Republic enterprise search market. MediaLife emphasizes its concentrated approach to document management systems for Slovak customers in need of large systems for the management, processing, and storage of documents. The article details,
“Based on this partnership, we provide our customers innovative solutions for fast access to corporate data, filtering of relevant information, data extraction and their use in automated sorting (classification)… Powerful enterprise search systems for businesses must recognize relationships among different types of information and be able to link them accordingly. Mindbreeze InSpire Appliance is easy to use, has a high scalability and shows the user only the information which he or she is authorized to view.”
Daniel Fallmann, founder and CEO of Mindbreeze, complimented himself on his selection of a partner in MediaLife and licked his chops at the prospect of the new Eastern European client base opened to Mindbreeze through the partnership. Other Mindbreeze partners exist in Italy, the UK, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the USA, as the company advances its mission to supply enterprise search appliances as well as big data and knowledge management technologies.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Natural Language Takes Lessons from Famous Authors
April 18, 2016
What better way to train a natural language AI than to bring venerated human authors into the equation? Wired reports, “Google Wants to Predict the Next Sentences of Dead Authors.” Not surprisingly, Google researchers are tapping into Project Gutenberg for their source material. Writer Matt Burgess relates:
“The network is given millions of lines from a ‘jumble’ of authors and then works out the style of individual writers. Pairs of lines were given to the system, which made a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision to whether they matched up. Initially the system didn’t know the identity of any authors, but still only got things wrong 17 percent of the time. By giving the network an indication of who the authors were, giving it another factor to compare work against, the computer scientists reduced the error rate to 12.3 percent. This was also improved by a adding a fixed number of previous sentences to give the network more context.”
The researchers carry their logic further. As the Wired title says, they have their AI predict an author’s next sentence; we’re eager to learn what Proust would have said next. They also have the software draw conclusions about authors’ personalities. For example, we’re told:
“Google admitted its predictions weren’t necessarily ‘particularly accurate,’ but said its AI had identified William Shakespeare as a private person and Mark Twain as an outgoing person. When asked ‘Who is your favourite author?’ and [given] the options ‘Mark Twain’, ‘William Shakespeare’, ‘myself’, and ‘nobody’, the Twain model responded with ‘Mark Twain’ and the Shakespeare model responded with ‘William Shakespeare’. Asked who would answer the phone, the AI Shakespeare hoped someone else would answer, while Twain would try and get there first.”
I can just see Twain jumping over Shakespeare to answer the phone. The article notes that Facebook is also using the work of human authors to teach its AI, though that company elected to use children’s classics like The Jungle Book, A Christmas Carol, and Alice in Wonderland. Will we eventually see a sequel to Through the Looking Glass?
Cynthia Murrell, April 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Watson Weekly: IBM Watson Hooks Up with Hana
April 17, 2016
Is this a Tinder tech date or what? I read “IBM to Bring Watson’s Cognitive Capabilities to SAP Customers.” IBM’s strategy for cognitive is to either partner with or acquire every possible technology company it seems. The write up reports:
IBM Corp. is turning to its partners for help with widening the adoption of Watson in the enterprise. As part of the effort, the company this morning announced an alliance with SAP SE that will see the capabilities of the cognitive computing platform made available for users of the latter’s flagship S/4HANA business software suite.
Has anyone asked an SAP customer if he or she needs Watson?
I learned:
If the current feature set is anything to go by, then SAP and IBM are probably looking to deliver something akin to what mutual rival Microsoft Corp. offers with its Cortana Intelligence Suite. The bundle combines the virtual assistant with a number of Redmond’s cloud-based analytics services to make complex operational information accessible to everyday knowledge workers. Big Blue’s announcement specifies that the Watson integration will similarly target a “broad range of business users and … all C-suite professions.”
I wonder if SAP customers using Microsoft technology will eagerly embrace Watson.
Keep the PR machine, if not the revenues, flowing.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2016
Watson Impresses a Stakeholder
April 16, 2016
I read “IBM Shows Me What Watson Can Do.” One of the points I noted about the write up was that it was written by a person who sort of thought Watson was a “computer language.” I think of Watson as open source software, acquired technology, and home brew code.
I noted this statement:
The folks at IBM ran me through a couple of examples of what Watson does. Some were more impressive then others, but one example stuck in my mind because of the language component. The company wouldn’t reveal its partner’s name, but an insurance company is using Watson to help increase online sales. According to IBM that customer has seen a high single-digit uptick in online sales because of Watson.
I love rock solid case examples.
I noted this statement:
But, like a human, Watson doesn’t always come up with the right answers at first. Watson makes mistakes while it’s learning. It understands things in the wrong way and pulls the wrong answers out of the information it has at its disposal. The team working with Watson then corrects it and tries again with another question. The time this takes depends on a lot of different variables, of course, but one customer took a year to train Watson.
How do I know that this write up may not reflect the sentiments of an objective, “real journalist.” Here’s the disclaimer:
I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Stakeholders, how did you like the write up? More important: Watson, how do you feel about the write up?
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2016
Interface Design: An Argument for the IBM i2 Approach
April 15, 2016
i read “Why I Love Ugly, Messy Interfaces — and You Probably Do Too.” I have been checking out information about interfaces for augmented intelligence or what I call “cyber OSINT.” The idea I am exploring is how different vendors present information functions to people who are working under pressure. Now the pressure in which I am interested involves law enforcement, intelligence, and staying alive. I am not too worried about how to check the weather on a mobile phone.
The write up points out that
…there is no single right way to do things. There’s no reason to assume that having a lot of links or text on a page, or a dense UI, or a sparse aesthetic is fundamentally bad — those might be fine choices for the problem at hand. Especially if it’s a big, hairy problem. Products that solve big, hairy problems are life savers. I love using these products because they work so damn well. Sure they’re kind of a sprawling mess. That’s exactly why they work!
Consider the IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook interface. Here’s an example courtesy of Google Images:
The interface has a menu bar across the top, display panels, and sidebar options. In order to use this application which is called Analyst’s Notebook, one attends classes. Years ago I did a little work for i2 before it became part of IBM. Without regular use of the application, I would forget how to perform certain tasks.
There is a competitor to i2’s Analysts Notebook: Palantir Gotham. Again, courtesy of Google Images, here’s an example of the Palantir Gotham interface:
The interface includes options in the form of a a title bar with icons, a sidebar, and some right click features which display a circular context menu.
The principal difference between the two interfaces boils down to color.
There are some significant differences, and these include:
- Palantir provides more helper and wizard functions. These allow a user to perform many tasks without sitting through five or more days of classroom and hands on instruction.
- The colors and presentation are more stylish, not exactly a mobile phone app approach but slicker than the Analyst’s Notebook design
- The interface automates more functions. Both applications require the user to perform some darned tedious work. But once that work is completed, Gotham allows software to perform some tasks with a mouse click.
My point is that interface choices and functionality have to work together. If the work flows are not assisted by the interface and smart software, simple or complex interfaces will be a barrier to quick, high value work.
When someone is shooting at the person operating the laptop with either of these applications in use, the ability to complete a task without confusion is paramount. Confusing pretty with staying alive is not particularly helpful.
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2016
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
