While visualizations have gotten plenty of attention as options for getting good stuff out of data, In-Q-Tel’s investment in Narrative Science suggests information in paragraphs could work too. Read more »
Ancestry.com wants to help users of the family-history site share their discoveries. Now it’s devised methods for turning isolated facts into full-on stories. Read more »
Looking for a book suggestion? Culling information from your Twitter feed and turning that into accurate recommendations is harder than it looks, but Parakweet is looking to use natural language procesing to do just that. Read more »
When it comes to using big data technology effectively, there’s a lot to like about SaaS. When companies like BloomReach create and analyze massive web-wide data sets, they automate insights that almost no individual company could discover on its own. Read more »
With its acquisition of Lucky Sort, Twitter seems to be acknowledging that it’s a data company after all. The plan appears to be building a services that would do for Twitter equivalent to services such as Google Trends and Google Analytics. Read more »
MailChimp wasn’t always a big data company, but 12 years into its existence the company is using its mountains of email data to do everything from modeling spam to connecting subscribers. Read more »
In a post on Facebook’s engineering blog, engineers discuss the ways in which natural-language processing helps interpret what users plug in to suggest the best possible queries. Read more »
“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Sherpa is trying to build a more flexible virtual assistant technology that can easily adapted for new tasks. To that end it has developed its own conceptual meta-language which it uses to process all voice commands. 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 »
A San Francisco company has raised $1.4 million in seed funding to bring to market a tool for processing text in any language in the world. Read more »
A team of Stanford researchers has developed a method for mining the text of doctors’ notes to identify adverse reactions from prescription drugs. The technique could spot problems years before the current FDA-reporting process can. Read more »
Natural-language processing powers the Instant Answers feature from business intelligence startup DataRPM, which could help more people easily get insights from their big sets of data. Read more »
Natural language user interfaces show great promise for a variety of situations, but Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha sees a need for standard formats if new entrants aren’t to be blocked as data sources. Read more »
Just when you thought spam was under control, a new breed of spammers is taking up new methods to infiltrate our inboxes, search results and social media feeds. Data science could make them very effective. Read more »
IBM is turning Watson loose on lung cancer, offering up a cloud-based service designed to let doctors from around the country find the best-possible treatments for their patients. Read more »
First, it was semantic search and knowledge graphs surfacing information related to our keyword searches. But there’s a handful of companies working to make relevant content come to us, whatever we’re doing. Read more »
IBM is giving Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York its own Watson system similar to the one that crushed its human competitors on Jeopardy!. The goal is to give Watson new skills and push it into new industries. Read more »
A group of British researchers recently analyzed 2.5 million newspaper articles in order to prove that new data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and natural-language processing, can accurately classify media content. They hope their approach can save academicians untold hours of manual labor. Read more »
A new research paper from Google highlights the importance of big data in creating consumer-friendly services such as voice search on smartphones. More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next — letting you keep your eyes on the road. Read more »
Social data pulled from online health forums and the comments section of blogs is helping patients learn about side effects to various drugs and could ultimately help them figure out the medications that suit them best. Read more »
The Todai Robot project has received attention because of its goal to build a system capable of passing a college entrance exam — a tough test for a supercomputer that’s all the more difficult when confined to a single laptop computer. Read more »
Now that touch input has revolutionized the mobile device market, what’s next? Voice interaction and natural language processing (NLP) surely have to be high on the list. But it’s not always easy for app developers to enable voice features. Enter OneTok, a cloud-based NLP solution. Read more »
In yet another move to simplify the process of patent search, Google is now tackling the particularly tough problem of prior with a new feature. But all this innovation begs the question of whether Google, not the USPTO, should become the de facto patent search engine. Read more »
Solariat Founder and CEO Jeffrey Davitz has a message for anyone trying to leverage social network data to make money: “The fundamental problem with social is yes, it’s big data, but it’s mostly big, sucky data.” Targeting users means deciphering what they really want. Read more »
Artificial intelligence has to be a siren’s song for application developers that want to strike it rich. It enables revolutionary apps suchs Siri, but it’s also very difficult to do well. A San Diego-based startup called ai-one wants to change that by giving apps brains. Read more »
Even if you haven’t heard of LivePerson, chances are you’ve encountered one of its products while browsing online. It’s the company behind those pop-up windows offering real-time chat with a representative, and it uses big data to decide which visitors are worth what type of attention. Read more »
The moods of men can be captured by a web app, which can then recommend the appropriate spiciness of chicken wings they should eat, and even suggest appropriate mood music thanks to Spotify. Welcome to the data-driven future. Adjust your personal privacy setting accordingly. Read more »
DataPop, a startup using big data to deliver custom online ads, has raised a $7 million Series B round. The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched for. Read more »
Companies are hot on social media for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them should be that social platforms can create focus groups at a scale never before possible. Given the right big data tools and techniques, the insights can be fantastic. Read more »
We’re entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests in real time. Siri and Watson have gotten a lot of attention but we’ll see this type of service in a variety of areas. Read more »
Beepl opened its social Q&A site to the public, with the hopes of challenging Quora and others by finding specialists to answer user questions. It does that with technology that matches users with the queries that they are most interested in and most qualified to answer. Read more »
Big data is often talked about as a phenomenon that lets organizations create narratives from their volumes of data. That is an apt characterization when we are talking about connecting the dots among disparate and possibly disconnected data sets. However, when we are talking about anything ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Are Google, Yelp and Facebook scared of Siri? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising. Siri is the first user interface that shifts our attention away from our phones’ screens, but it won’t be the last. Read more »
Speech technology is poised to be a game-changer for smartphones, especially as they get embedded into operating systems and hardware. Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha said speech is transforming from an alternative to text input into a powerful tool that can connect users more quickly to information. Read more »
Thanks to a slew of recent technology advances, the smartphone is turning into a truly personalized information assistant that can handle everything from your appointments to traffic reports. A new Android app called reQall Rover wants to turn your smartphone into an intelligent information assistant. Read more »
