There’s no question the kind of data collection Google has to do in the background to power its Google Now service can be a little intrusive — perhaps too intrusive for some. But it also makes the results extremely useful. Read more »
Thiel Foundation subsidiary Breakout Labs has funded two new startups called SkyPhrase and Stealth Biosciences that, respectively, are trying to reinvent natural language processing and improve our ability to interact with individual cells. Read more »
New research suggests that a phenomenon called biased assimilation makes people view new, inconclusive evidence in ways that support existing biases, leading to increased polarization on topics such as politics or even what we read online. Read more »
Netflix computes information in different ways, depending on how soon the data needs to get served up to customers or evaluated internally. The nuanced approach extends to Facebook, LinkedIn and other webscale companies. Read more »
Medical researchers are using a mathematical process similar to Google PageRank in order to identify organs most likely to spread lung cancer throughout the human body. Read more »
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm for predicting workloads, which cloud providers can use to distribute workloads across servers in a more efficient way. Read more »
We talk a lot about big data, but only analyze 1 percent of what’s available. In order to take advantage of the other 99 percent, we need to reconsider how we do big data. Read more »
When it comes to discoverability and walled gardens, there’s a flip side. Read more at paidContent »
The long-delayed Bookish, a website backed by Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster and designed to promote book discovery and sell books, launched Monday night and is designed to be a one-stop shop for readers looking for their next book. Read more at paidContent »
Numenta, the latest startup from Palm creator Jeff Hawkins, aims to help us make sense of fast-flowing machine-to-machine data by recognizing patterns and building models. Its latest customer is smart-grid efficiency expert EnerNOC. Read more »
Big data technologies are like manufacturing robots: they let people do what they’re already trying to do, only faster than before and at a much greater scale. But as with any other product, that analyzed data is nothing without humans to do something with it. Read more »
Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine-learning algorithms to recommend news and other content to users based on their social activity, has raised a $15-million Series A round from a star-studded group of investors including Accel Partners and Russian investor Yuri Milner. Read more »
An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money. Read more »
A team of University of Notre Dame researchers has developed an algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles that doesn’t require it to guess at all. Rather, it’s able to discern patterns even with sparse available information and automatically determine which numbers go where. Read more »
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee’s brain. Read more »
Data science competition platform Kaggle is opening up the leaderboards for its invitation-only private competitions, meaning anyone can watch and see how the world’s best data scientists are faring in these special challenges. Can data science actually become a spectator sport in the analytics community? Read more »
Thanks to the popularity of everything from social media sites such as Twitter to email to mobile phones, it’s easier than ever to get data about who’s connected to whom. With the right tools, we can apply it solve certain problems faster and easier than ever. Read more »
A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything — from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics — back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom. Read more »
A group of researchers have created a computing system capable of identifying the unique features that help create a city’s look and feel, beyond just its famous landmarks. Their project is just the beginning, however, as the researchers note numerous artistic and commerical applications. Read more »
According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. Read more »
One solution to the big data skills shortage has been consulting firms that specialize in deploying big data systems companies need to make sense of their information. These companies will continue to play a vital role in helping us make sense of the the data deluge. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
BloomReach emerged from stealth mode a message about how it will help ensure companies get their web pages heard above the noise online. Using a potent brew of big data techniques, BloomReach says it can significantly improve traffic by making pages more relevant to consumers. Read more »
More news from the Google-data-scientists-conduct-the-coolest-research desk: YouTube has created an algorithm for determining what videos are funniest based on the intensity of viewer comments. It sounds fairly unimportant, but YouTube’s work actually speaks volumes about the potential of social-media sentiment analysis. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Netflix dominates the business of streaming movies and television into consumers’ homes, but a new business model developed by big data firm Opera Solutions could help give cable companies the inside track. The model is combination of peer-to-peer networking via set-top boxes and big data algortihms. Read more »
Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook have all been in the news recently because of their control over our access to certain information, and the ways in which they could potentially restrict it. How much does that affect the way we perceive the world around us? Read more »
Ebay’s recent purchase of Hunch illustrates how social media has leveled the playing field for e-commerce recommendations engines. Mixing human-powered reviews with algorithm-powered recommendations will be a key driver of social ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
