Answer Me!

The Mystery Of The ChaCha Eiffel Tower Fail Pic

Mobile QA oops.

The Mystery Of The ChaCha Eiffel Tower Fail Pic.

Some fairly funny answers occasionally come back from the human guides, who early on at least had to deal with a lot of prank queries. But none of the ones we’ve seen compare to the one to the right, which is a Digg favorite tonight. It describes the Eiffel Tower sexual position (yes, you learn something new every day) in response to a completely unrelated query about a Randy Newman show in Seattle.

MaineBusiness.com | Maine News Direct

An NL bot for foiling identity thieves in their online lairs?  Yowza!

MaineBusiness.com | Maine News Direct.

Portland, Maine – February 17, 2009. Identity Cops Inc. announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a Notice of Allowance for... a bot which locates identity thieves and engages them in a natural language trade of information.

The patent application, U.S. Application Serial No. 11/532,039: “System and Methods for an Identity Theft Protection Bot,” relates back to an earlier filing prosecution, dated May 24, 2000 for an overall Identity Theft Protection and Reversal System.  [Here's the patent application.]

Identity Cops President & CEO, Rebecca Weinstein stated: “This is very exciting news. We truly have the cutting edge software for the detection and prevention of identity theft. With all those out there claiming to have the “best,” we can now say that in fact our technology, the first of its kind in the world, is also the definitive tool.”

» Top 5 Semantic Search Engines

from Pandia:

» Top 5 Semantic Search Engines.

    Semantic search has the power to enhance traditional web search, but it will not replace it.

    A large portion of queries are navigational and semantic search is not a replacement for these. Research queries, on the other hand, will benefit from semantic search. Read on to see our list of the top 5 semantic search engines and learn how they can improve your search experience.

Article discusses Hakia, Powerset, DeepDyve, Cognition and SenseBot. 

Must figure out what is going with PowerSet now that MSFT bought it.

The Spy Factory: The New Thought Police

I'm surprised James Banford would write such a hyperventilated story about the Aquaint project and conflate legitimate info gathering/privacy concerns with fearmongering about a nefarious "super brain" at NSA.  From the demos I've seen of Aquaint participants, the technology is a long way from being an independent super analyst.  The performance I saw was more like that of a promising intern.

The Spy Factory: The New Thought Police.

In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news stories taken from the New York Times, the AP news wire, and the English portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire covering 1998 to 2000. Then, 13 U.S. military intelligence analysts searched the data and came up with a number of scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of those topics created a series of questions for Aquaint's computerized brain to answer. "Will the Japanese use force to defend the Senkakus?" was one. "What types of disputes or conflict between the PLA [People's Liberation Army] and Hong Kong residents have been reported?" was another. And "Who were the participants in this spy ring, and how are they related to each other?" was a third.

Since then, the NSA has attempted to build both on the complexity of the system—more essay-like answers rather than yes or no—and on attacking greater volumes of data. "The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions," said a former Aquaint researcher. "Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL." A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years but eventually left due to moral concerns.

"The system can answer the question, 'What does X think about Y?'" she said. "Working for the government is great, but I don't like looking into other people's secrets. I am interested in helping people and helping physicians and patients for the quality of people's lives." The researcher now focuses on developing similar search techniques for the medical community.

Thought policeman

A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions such as "What were the major issues in the last 10 presidential elections?" would be very useful for the public. But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA—absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information about Americans—could be a privacy and civil liberties nightmare. "We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to transfer research results into operational use," said Aquaint project leader John Prange, in charge of information exploitation for IARPA.

in4 Ltd. Launches iGlue, a Search and Content Organizer Based on Semantic Web Technology

in4 Ltd. Launches iGlue, a Search and Content Organizer Based on Semantic Web Technology.

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY--(Marketwire - February 2, 2009) - Power of the Dream Ventures, Inc. (OTCBB: PWRV), Hungary's premier technology acquisition and development company, today announced that in4, Ltd. has launched the registration procedure for 1,000 beta testers of the company's iGlue technology. iGlue is an integrated online content manager and search application that goes beyond today's widespread, language-dependant search mechanisms based on identifying character strings.

iGlue identifies and manages entities, not keywords. Whether he is called Alejandro Magno, Büyük Iskender or Lissandru lu Granni, these names all refer to the same person; Alexander the Great, and most likely we would like to find information about the person himself. This is the principle iGlue uses to manage entities appearing in web content, and it will find relevant information even if the given element appears in a form that is different from what we used in launching the search.

Maybe this just isn't a very good press release, but synonym-based search isn't very novel.  Verity was featuring that about 8 years ago.