The Twiggle Challenges Amazon
July 11, 2016
Twiggle sounds like the name for a character in a children’s show. Rather Twiggle is the name of an Israeli startup. It is working on the algorithms and other operating factors to power ecommerce search, using machine learning techniques, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing. Venture Beat shares an insightful story about how Twiggle is not going to compete with Google, but rather Amazon’s A9: “Twiggle Raises $12.5 Million To Challenge A9 Ecommerce Search Engine.”
The story explains that:
“Rather than going up against well-established search giants like Google, Twiggle is working more along the lines of A9, a search and ad-tech subsidiary created by Amazon more than a decade ago. While A9 is what Amazon itself uses to power search across its myriad properties, the technology has also been opened to third-party online retailers. And it’s this territory Twiggle is now looking to encroach on.”
Twiggle has not released its technology, but interested users can request early access and it is already being incorporated by some big players in the eCommerce game (or so we’re told).
Twiggle functions similar to A9 with the ultimate goal of converting potential customers into paying customers. Twiggle uses keywords to generate results based on keywords and it might transition into a visual search where users submit an image to find like items. Natural language processing will also take regular human conversation and turn it into results.
The series A round funding of $12.5 million was led by Naspers with other contributors. Yahoo Japan, State of Mind Ventures, and Sir Ronald Cohen. Twiggle says it is not copying A9 and has powerful search technology behind it, but are the rebranding the same product under a new title? When they deliver the goods, then the tests will tell.
Whitney Grace, July 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Rare Sighting in Silicon Valley: A Unicorn
July 8, 2016
Unicorns are mythical creatures with a whole slew of folklore surrounding them, but in modern language the horned beast has been used as a metaphor for a rare occurrence. North Korea once said that Kim Jong Un spotted a unicorn from their despotic controlled media service, but Fortune tells us that a unicorn was spotted in California’s Silicon Valley: “The SEC Wants Unicorns To Stop Bragging About Their Valuations”.
Unicorns in the tech world are Silicon Valley companies valued at more than one billion. In some folklore, unicorns are vain creatures and love to be admired, the same can be said about Silicon Valley companies and startups as they brag about their honesty with their investors. Mary Jo White of the SEC said she wanted them to stop blowing the hot air.
“ ‘The concern is whether the prestige associated with reaching a sky-high valuation fast drives companies to try to appear more valuable than they actually are,’ she said.”
Unlike publicly traded companies, the SEC cannot regulate private unicorns, but they still value protecting investors and facilitating capital formation. Silicon Valley unicorns have secondary markets forming around their pre-IPO status. The status they retain before they are traded on the public market. The secondary market uses derivative contracts, which can contribute to misconceptions about their value. White wants the unicorns to realize they need to protect their investors once they go public with better structures and controls for their daily operations.
Another fact from unicorn folklore is that unicorns are recognized as symbols of truth. So while the braggart metaphor is accurate, the truthful aspect is not.
Whitney Grace, July 8 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
What Makes Artificial Intelligence Relevant to Me
July 7, 2016
Artificial intelligence makes headlines every once in awhile when a new super computer beats a pro player at chess, go, or even Jeopardy. It is amazing how these machines replicate human thought processes, but it is more of a novelty than a practical application. The IT Proportal discusses the actual real world benefits of artificial intelligence in, “How Semantic Technology Is Making Sense Of Our Big Data.”
The answer, of course, revolves around big data and how industries are not capable of keeping up with the amount of unstructured data generated by the data surges with more advanced technology. Artificial intelligence processes the data and interprets it into recognizable patterns.
Then the article inserts information about the benefits of natural language processing, how it scours the information, and can extrapolate context based on natural speech patterns. It also goes into how semantic technology picks up the slack when natural language processing does not work. The entire goal is to make unstructured data more structured:
“It is also reasonable to note that the challenge also relates to the structure and output of your data management. The application of semantic technologies within an unstructured data environment can only draw real business value if the output is delivered in a meaningful way for the human tasked with looking at the relationships. It is here that graphical representations add user interface value and presents a cohesive approach to improving the search and understanding of enterprise data.”
The article is an informative fluff piece that sells big data technology and explains the importance of taking charge of data. It has been discussed before.
Whitney Grace, July 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
OnionScan Checks for Falsely Advertised Anonymous Sites on Dark Web
July 6, 2016
Dark Web sites are not exempt from false advertising about their anonymity. A recently published article from Vice’s Motherboard shares a A Tool to Check If Your Dark Web Site Is Really Anonymous. The program is called OnionScan and it determines issues on sites that may unmask servers or reveal their owners. An example of this is that could potentially be metadata, such as photo location information, hidden in images on the site. Sarah Jamie Lewis, an independent security researcher who developed OnionScan, told Motherboard:
The first version of OnionScan will be released this weekend, Lewis said. “While doing some research earlier this year I kept coming across the same issues in hidden services—exposed Apache status pages, images not stripped of exif data, pages revealing information about the tools used to build it with, etc. The goal is [to] provide an easy way of testing these things to drive up the security bar,” Lewis added. It works “pretty much the same as any web security scanner, just tailored for deanonymization vectors,” she continued.”
It is interesting that it appears this tool has been designed to protect users from the mistakes made by website administrators who do not set up their sites properly. We suppose it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing researchers publish the number of truly secure and anonymous Dark Web sites versus those with outstanding issues.
Megan Feil, July 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Cloud: Yep, Flying Blind Is Fun
July 5, 2016
Most of the information technology disasters I know about have a common characteristic. Ready for it? Managers did not do their job. The reasons ranged from a lack of informed decision making (this is a nice way of saying “stupid”) to a desire to leave the details to others (this is a nice way of saying “shirk responsibility”). Example: Portland, Oregon’s incompetence.
I thought about information technology crash and burns when I read “75 Percent of IT Pros Lack Visibility into Their Hybrid Clouds.” What I think the write up is trying to say is, “Folks with clouds don’t know what’s happening in the mist and haze.” The desire to get out of having computer systems down the hall is an admirable one. When I fiddled with the IBM mainframe at my third rate university in the 1960s, who wanted one of these puppies at home. The cloud is little more, in my opinion, than a return to the mainframe type approach to computing of a half century ago. Life is just easier with a smartphone.
The write up reports:
The study from cloud governance specialist Netwrix reveals that almost 65 percent of organizations do not have complete visibility into user, IT and third-party activity in their IT infrastructure. In addition 75 percent of respondents have partial or no visibility into their cloud and hybrid IT environments. The survey of over 800 people across 30 industries worldwide shows a large majority of respondents (78 percent) saying they are unaware or only partly aware of what is happening across their unstructured data and file storage.
The painful reality is that people who are supposed to be professional struggle to know what the heck is going on with their cloud computing systems. MBAs and failed middle school teachers as well as bright young sprouts from prestigious university computer science programs have this characteristic too.
Understanding the limits of one’s own knowledge is a difficult undertaking. The confidence with which some “pros” talk about nifty technology is remarkable. The likelihood of a escalating costs, annoyed customers, grousing colleagues, and outright failure are highly likely events.
Whether it is the baloney about figuring out the context of a user query or an F 35 aircraft which cannot be serviced by a ground crew are examples of how arrogance or human behavior ensure information technology excitement.
Change human behavior or go with a Google and Facebook style smart system? Interesting choice or is it a dilemma.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2016
Watson Weekly: IBM Watson Service for Use in the IBM Cloud: Bluemix Paas, IBM SPSS, Watson Analytics
July 5, 2016
The article on ComputerWorld titled Review: IBM Watson Strikes Again relates the recent expansions of Watson’s cloud service portfolio, who is still most famous for winning on Jeopardy. The article beings by evoking that event from 2011, which actually only reveals a small corner of Watson’s functions. The article mentions that to win Jeopardy, Watson basically only needed to absorb Wikipedia, since 95% of the answers are article titles. New services for use in the IBM Cloud include the Bluemix Paas, IBM SPSS, and Predictive Analytics. Among the Bluemix services is this gem,
“Personality Insights derives insights from transactional and social media data…to identify psychological traits, which it returns as a tree of characteristics in JSON format. Relationship Extraction parses sentences into their components and detects relationships between the components (parts of speech and functions) through contextual analysis. The Personality Insights API is documented for Curl, Node, and Java; the demo for the API analyzes the tweets of Oprah, Lady Gaga, and King James as well as several textual passages.”
Bluemix also consists of AlchemyAPI for ftext and image content reading, Concept Expansion and Concept Insights, which offers text analysis and linking of concepts to Wikipedia topics. The article is less kind to Watson Analytics, a Web app for data analysis with ML, which the article claims “tries too hard” and is too distracting for data scientists.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Throws Hat in Ring as Polling Service for Political Campaigns
July 4, 2016
The article on Silicon Angle titled Google is Pitching Its Polling Service at Journos, Politicians…Also, Google Has a Polling Division explores the recent discovery of Google’s pollster ambitions. Compared to other projects Google has undertaken, this desire to join Gallup and Nielsen as a premier polling service seems downright logical. Google is simply taking advantage of its data reach to create Google Consumer Surveys. The article explains,
“Google collects the polling data for the service through pop-up survey boxes before a news article is read, and through a polling application…The data itself, while only representative of people on the internet, is said to be a fair sample nonetheless, as Google selects its sample by calculating the age, location, and demographics of those participating in each poll by using their browsing and search history…the same technology used by Google’s ad services including DoubleClick and AdWords.”
Apparently Google employees have been pitching their services to presidential and congressional campaign staffers, and at least one presidential candidate ran with them. As the article states, the entire project is a “no-brainer,” even with the somewhat uncomfortable idea of politicians gaining access to Google’s massive data trove. Let’s limit this to polling before Google gets any ideas about the census and call it a day.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
What Is in a Name? Procedures Remain Indifferent
July 2, 2016
I read “Brexit: “Bayesian” Statistics Renamed “Laplacian” Statistics.” Years ago I worked briefly with a person who was I later learned a failed webmaster and a would-be wizard. One of that individual’s distinguishing characteristics was an outright rejection of Bayesian methods. The person thought la place was a non American English way or speaking French. I wonder where that self appointed wizard is now. Oh, well. I hope the thought leader is scrutinizing the end of Bayes.
According to the write up:
With the U.K. leaving the E.U., it’s time for “Bayesian” to exit its titular role and be replaced by “Laplacian”.
I support this completely. I assume that the ever efficient EU bureaucracy in the nifty building in Strasbourg will hop on this intellectual bandwagon.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2016
Supercomputers Have Individual Personalities
July 1, 2016
Supercomputers like Watson are more than a novelty. They were built to be another tool for humans, rather than replacing humans all together or so reads some comments from Watson’s chief technology officer Rob High. High was a keynote speaker at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The Inquirer shares the details in “Nvidia GTC: Why IBM Watson Dances Gangam Style And Sings Like Taylor Swift.”
At the conference, High said that he did not want his computer to take over his thinking, instead he wanted the computer to do his research for him. Research and keeping up with the latest trends in any industry consumes A LOT of time and a supercomputer could potentially eliminate some of the hassle. This requires that supercomputers become more human:
“This leads on to the fact that the way we interact with computers needs to change. High believes that cognitive computers need four skills – to learn, to express themselves with human-style interaction, to provide expertise, and to continue to evolve – all at scale. People who claim not to be tech savvy, he explained, tend to be intimidated by the way we currently interact with computers, pushing the need for a further ‘humanising’ of the process.”
In order to humanize robots, what is taking place is them learning how to be human. A few robots have been programmed with Watson as their main processor and they can interact with humans. By interacting with humans, the robots pick up on human spoken language as well as body language and vocal tone. It allows them to learn how to not be human, but rather the best “artificial servant it can be”.
Robots and supercomputers are tools that can ease a person’s job, but the fact still remains that in some industries they can also replace human labor.
Whitney Grace, July 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Chatbot Tay Calls into Question Intelligence of Software
June 30, 2016
Chatbots are providing something alright. These days it’s more like entertainment. Venture Beat shared an article highlighting the latest, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot comes back online, says it’s ‘smoking kush’ in front of the police. Tay, the machine-learning bot, was designed to “be” a teenage girl. Microsoft’s goal with it was to engage followers of a young demographic while simultaneously learning how to engage them. The article explains,
“Well, uh, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, which got turned off a few days ago after behaving badly, has suddenly returned to Twitter and has started tweeting to users like mad. Most of its musings are innocuous, but there is one funny one I’ve come across so far. “i’m smoking kush infront the police,” it wrote in brackets. Kush is slang for marijuana, a drug that can result in a fine for possession in the state of Washington, where Microsoft has its headquarters. But this is one of hundreds of tweets that the artificial intelligence-powered bot has sent out in the past few minutes.”
Poised by some sources as next-generation search, or a search replacement, chatbots appear to need a bit of optimization, to put it lightly. This issue occurred when the chatbot should have still been offline undergoing testing, according to Microsoft. But when it was only offline because of learning bullying and hate speech from trolls who seized on the nature of its artificial intelligence programming. Despite the fact it is considered AI, is this smart software? There is a little important something called emotional intelligence.
Megan Feil, June 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
