Microsoft Does Cognitive Too
April 8, 2016
I read “Microsoft Launches Cognitive Services Based on Project Oxford and Bing.” I immediately thought of MIcrosoft’s smart chatbot adventure. Do I doubt the efficacy of Microsoft’s smart systems? No, I just think that the same approach manifested in Tay probably exists in the suite of APIs announced on March 30, 2016.
I learned:
The brand name Cognitive Services is a nod to IBM’s Watson, which for the past few years has been marketed as a “cognitive computing” product — that is, one that’s based on the way the human brain works.
That is working out very well for IBM. There is a recipe book and many projects. Revenues? Well, sure. Some.
Microsoft offers a search API. That, one hopes, will actually work reasonably well. Microsoft’s track record in the information access department has been interesting.
According to this Microsoft page, there are give search APIs which are available for preview. Use is like a taxi ride, and that type of metered pricing is often unsettling.
The five APIs are:
- Bing Autosuggest
- Bing Image Search
- Bing News Search
- Bing Video Search
- Bing Web Search.
I assume one can mix in academic knowledge, entity linking, and knowledge exploration. In addition, it appears thate is a language understanding intelligent service called Luis. I noted linguistic analysis as an API as well. And for good measure, one can tap text analytics.
For a developer, these Lego blocks offer an opportunity to code up a solution.
On the other hand, there are goodies from outfits from Baidu to Facebook, from Google to X.ai from which to choose.
Just as IBM is saddled with the Jeopardy and recipe book, Microsoft is going to have to live with Tay’s capabilities.
What happens if Tay works into a routine search query? That will be intriguing. Perhaps Tay and Watson can get together and do smart thing?
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2016
Analysis of Microsoft Chatbot Fail
April 3, 2016
I am looking forward to artificial intelligence adventures. I got a bang out of the Google self driving auto running into a bus. I chuckled when I learned that a Microsoft AI demo went off the rails.
If you want to know what happened, I suggest you scan “Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-FAIL (Microsoft’s AI Twitter Bot).” The write up works through many explanations.
The reason, however, boils down to lousy quality assurance. I would suggest that this explanation is not unique to Microsoft. Why did those construction workers demolish the house that was A OK? I wonder how one can get Microsoft’s smart auto numbering to work.
Pesky humans.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2016
Google Joins Microsoft in the Management Judgment Circus Ring
April 2, 2016
First there was Microsoft and the Tay “learning” experiment. That worked out pretty well if you want a case example of what happens when smart software meets the average Twitter user. Microsoft beat a hasty retreat but expected me to fall for the intelligent API announcements at its home brew conferences.
Buy this management reminder poster at this link.
Then we had the alleged April 1 prank from the Alphabet Google thing. Gentle reader, the company eager to solve death created a self driving car which ran into a bus. A more interesting example, however, was the apparently “human” decision to pull a prank on Gmail users.
According to “Google Reverses Gmail April 1 Prank after Users Mistakenly Put GIFs into Important Emails”:
“Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Everyone will get your message, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won’t see it,” Google explained when it launched the button on April 1.
Let’s step back from these interesting examples of large companies doing odd duck things and ask this question:
Does financial success and possibly unprecedented market impact improve human decision making?
I would suggest that the science and math club mentality may not scale in the judgment. Whether it is alleged malware techniques to force an old school programmer to write Never10 or creating a situation in which an employee to employee relationship gives new meaning to the joke word “glasshole”, the human judgment angle may need some scrutiny.
Tay was enough for me to consider creating a Tortured Tay segment for this blog to complement Weakly Watson. Alphabet Google’s prank, however, is in a class of its own.
Fiddling with Gmail’s buttons was an idea without merit. Users are on autopilot. Think how users wince when Apple fools with iTunes’ interface. Now shift from an entertainment app to a “real work” app.
Judgment is important. Concentration of user attention requires more than a math club management style. What worked in high school may not work in other situations.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2016
AI Works Really Well. The Microsoft Chatbot Edition
April 2, 2016
I read “How The Internet Turned Microsoft’s AI Chatbot Into A Neo-Nazi.” Now that’s a catchy headline. I understand that artificial intelligence is a great suite of technologies. I know that self driving cars do not get into accidents. Well, mostly. Microsoft’s chat bot Tay is very good.
I learned in this write up:
A key flaw, incredibly, was a simple “repeat after me” game, a call and response exercise that internet trolls used to manipulate Tay into learning hate speech.
Yep, flaws and pesky humans. What can possibly go wrong with smart software?
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2016
Microsoft and the Open Source Trojan Horse
March 30, 2016
Quite a few outfits embrace open source. There are a number of reasons:
- It is cheaper than writing original code
- It is less expensive than writing original code
- It is more economical than writing original code.
The article “Microsoft is Pretending to be a FOSS Company in Order to Secure Government Contracts With Proprietary Software in ‘Open’ Clothing” reminded me that there is another reason.
No kidding.
I know that IBM has snagged Lucene and waved its once magical wand over the information access system and pronounced, “Watson.” I know that deep inside the kind, gentle heart of Palantir Technologies, there are open source bits. And there are others.
The write up asserted:
For those who missed it, Microsoft is trying to EEE GNU/Linux servers amid Microsoft layoffs; selfish interests of profit, as noted by some writers [1,2] this morning, nothing whatsoever to do with FOSS (there’s no FOSS aspect to it at all!) are driving these moves. It’s about proprietary software lock-in that won’t be available for another year anyway. It’s a good way to distract the public and suppress criticism with some corny images of red hearts.
The other interesting point I highlighted was:
reject the idea that Microsoft is somehow “open” now. The European Union, the Indian government and even the White House now warm up to FOSS, so Microsoft is pretending to be FOSS. This is protectionism by deception from Microsoft and those who play along with the PR campaign (or lobbying) are hurting genuine/legitimate FOSS.
With some government statements of work requiring “open” technologies, Microsoft may be doing what other firms have been doing for a while. See points one to three above. Microsoft is just late to the accountants’ party.
Why not replace the SharePoint search thing with an open source solution? What’s the $1.2 billion MSFT paid for the fascinating Fast Search & Transfer technology in 2008? It works just really well, right?
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2016
Slack Hires Noah Weiss
March 29, 2016
One thing you can always count on the tech industry is talent will jump from company to company to pursue the best and most innovating endeavors. The latest tech work to jump ship is Eric Weiss, he leaps from Foursquare to head a new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group at Slack. VentureBeat reports the story in “Slack Forms Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group On ‘Mining The Chat Corpus.’” Slack is a team communication app and their new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group will be located in the app’s new New York office.
Weiss commented on the endeavor:
“ ‘The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack,” Weiss wrote today in a Medium post. “The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people.’”
For the new group, Weiss wants to hire experts who are talented in the fields of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. From this talent search, he might be working on a project that will help users to find specific information in Slack or perhaps they will work on mining the chap corpus.
Other tech companies have done the same. Snapchat built a research team that uses artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Flipboard and Pinterest are working on new image recognition technology. Meanwhile Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are working on their own artificial intelligence projects.
What will artificial intelligence develop into as more companies work on their secret projects.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Hefty Guide to Setting up SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Search Center
March 8, 2016
The how-to guide titled Customizing SharePoint 2013 Search Center on Code Project provides a lengthy, detailed explanation (with pictures) of the new features of SharePoint 2013, an integration of the 2010 version and Microsoft FAST search. The article offers insights into certain concepts of the program such as crawled properties and managed properties before introducing step-by-step navigation for customizing the result page and Display template, as well as other areas of Sharepoint. The article includes such tips as this,
“Query rules allow you to modify the users keyword search based on a condition. Let’s say when the user types Developer, we want to retrieve only the books which have BookCategory as Developer and if they type ‘IT Pro’, we only want to retrieve the Administrator related books.”
Nine steps later, you have a neat little result block with the matching items. The article outlines similar processes for Customizing the Search Center, Modifying the Search Center, Adding the Results Page to the Navigation, and Creating the Result Source. This leads us to ask, Shouldn’t this be easier by now? Customizing a program so that it looks and acts the way we expect seems like pretty basic setup, so why does it take 100+ steps to tailor SharePoint 2013?
Chelsea Kerwin, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Progress and Obstacles for Microsoft Delve When It Comes to On-Premise Search
March 7, 2016
The article titled Microsoft Delve Faces Challenges in Enterprise Search Role on Search Content Management posits that Microsoft Delve could use some serious enhancements to ensure that it functions as well with on-premises data as it does with data from the cloud. Delve is an exciting step forward, an enterprise-wide search engine that relies on machine learning to deliver relevant results. The article even goes so far as to call it a “digital assistant” that can make decisions based on an analysis of previous requests and preferences. But there is a downside, and the article explains it,
“Microsoft Delve isn’t being used to its full potential. Deployed within the cloud-based Office 365 (O365) environment, it can monitor activity and retrieve information from SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook in a single pass — and that’s pretty impressive. But few organizations have migrated their entire enterprise to O365, and a majority never will: Hybrid deployments and blending cloud systems with on-premises platforms are the norm… if an organization has mostly on-premises data, its search results will always be incomplete.”
With a new version of Delve in the works at Microsoft, the message has already been received. According to the article, the hybrid Delve will be the first on-premise product based on SharePoint Online. You can almost hear the content management specialists holding their breaths for an integrated cloud and on-premise architecture for search.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Microsoft Predictions for the Oscars in 2016
March 5, 2016
I know that Microsoft has a prediction system. I don’t pay much attention to Bing or other Microsoft technology. I understand that I am an analog brontosaurus.
The point, for me, is that predictive systems need to be based on numerical recipes which perform in a consistent manner. One can fiddle the definition of “consistency,” but when a predictive system is driving an autonomous vehicle, identifying a treatment for death, or identifying the worthy individuals as Oscar winners—the systems have to be pretty darned accurate.
The write up points out:
In 2015, Microsoft Bing’s prediction engine nailed the Academy Awards, guessing 20 out of 24 Oscar winners. The year before that, it did even better, going 21 for 24.
But in 2016, the Bingster, according to the write up:
only guessed 71% of the winners correctly, with 17 out of 24 correct choices.
In the real world, Bing’s predictive methods can chop out some highly probable losers. That may be quite useful for some applications like narrowing down a list of potential contractors.
For certain real world applications involving risk to life and limb in some far off war zone, I am not sure the Bing predictive engine will be number one on my list of systems upon which to rely.
The write up does not share my opinion, describing the result as “pretty okay.” Well, for me, a two thirds outcome is not pretty okay. It is below average, almost C minus or D plus territory.
The consumer angle suggests that Microsoft in terms of search and content processing may be prepping to become the next Yahoo.
Stephen E Arnold, March 5, 2016
IBM Continued to Brag About Watson, with Decreasing Transparency
February 29, 2016
A totally objective article sponsored by IBM on Your Story is titled How Cognitive Systems Like IBM Watson Are Changing the Way We Solve Problems. The article basically functions to promote all of the cognitive computing capabilities that most of us are already keenly aware that Watson possesses, and to raise awareness for the Hackathon event taking place in Bengaluru, India. The “article” endorses the event,
“Participants will have an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate, co-create and exchange ideas with one another and the world’s most forward-thinking cognitive experts. This half-day event will focus on sharing real-world applications of cognitive technologies, and allow attendees access to the next wave of innovations and applications through an interactive experience. The program will also include panel discussions and fireside chats between senior IBM executives and businesses that are already working with Watson.”
Since 2015, the “Watson for Oncology” program has involved Manipal Hospitals in Bengaluru, India. The program is the result of a partnership between IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Watson has now consumed almost 15 million pages of medical content from textbooks and journals in the hopes of providing rapid-fire support to hospital staffers when it comes to patient records and diagnosis. Perhaps if IBM put all of their efforts into Watson’s projects instead of creating inane web content to promote him as some sort of missionary, he could have already cured cancer. Or not.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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