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
How do You use Your Email?
April 28, 2015
Email is still a relatively new concept in the grander scheme of technology, having only been around since the 1990s. As with any human activity, people want to learn more about the trends and habits people have with email. Popular Science has an article called “Here’s What Scientists Learned In The Largest Systematic Study Of Email Habits” with a self-explanatory title. Even though email has been around for over twenty years, no one is quite sure how people use it.
So someone decided to study email usage:
“…researchers from Yahoo Labs looked at emails of two million participants who sent more than 16 billion messages over the course of several months–by far the largest email study ever conducted. They tracked the identities of the senders and the recipients, the subject lines, when the emails were sent, the lengths of the emails, and the number of attachments. They also looked at the ages of the participants and the devices from which the emails were sent or checked.”
The results were said to be so predictable that an algorithm could have predicted them. Usage has a strong correlation to age groups and gender. The young write short, quick responses, while men are also brief in their emails. People also responded more quickly during work hours and the more emails they receive the less likely they are to write a reply. People might already be familiar with these trends, but the data is brand new to data scientists. The article predicts that developers will take the data and design better email platforms.
How about creating an email platform that merges a to-do list with emails, so people don’t form their schedules and tasks from the inbox.
Whitney Grace, April 28, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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