Sierra Applications

As Saffron Technology prepares to launch our new SaaS version of the Associative Memory Base (AMB), we are thinking about some example uses for the application. Because the AMB is so flexible, there are lots of possibilities, but we want to be sure to pick one that has both wide-spread appeal AND shows off the unique capabilities of the AMB.

Here are some example applications we are considering:

• Tracking exercise activity sites (http://www.mapmyrun.com/)

Online tracking of exercise activity is booming, but it’s not clear exactly what we could analyze here (it would depend a lot on what is available). But looking for patterns (grouping by age, diet, activity, etc..) and determining outcomes based on those observations is one possibility. Maybe an application that can suggest the best exercise routine based on real data of people like you (not just statistical averages).

• Build upon data set from http://www.data.gov

Data.gov has a ton of data available, but it arguably of little value unless we can see associations and patterns in the data. But finding a clean use case may be difficult.

• Swine Flu/H1N1 research using CDC data

This, or other, CDC data could be very powerful. Imagine being able to identify where an issue originated based on the pattern of previous disease profiles.

• Cell phone call log analysis

Although this data is private, it might be useful for either individual users, businesses or phone companies to be able to identify patterns in usage.

• Twitter/Social Media analysis

This is a hot topic right now and we have thought of several apps that might be a good fit. One example is an application that you feed all your social media contacts (twitter, facebook, myspace, delicious, etc…) and point out a few “important” contacts in the data set. These could be people that you know personally, or people that matter to you (or your org) because they have been influential in the past. Then Sierra could look for people like them based on any qualities (things they tweet, location, connections, etc…) and tell you who else might be influential.

• Website widget (what people are saying about…)

Similar to the previous example, but you would feed it blogs, twitter accounts, comment feeds and other conversational information and it could pick out the stuff important to your organization. Then it could be displayed as a widget on your site showing “what people are saying about us”. Would need some serious filters on this one though…

• Analyzing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits data (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/)

Gordon Bell has been collecting data for quite some time and has several search and indexing applications to find his stuff. But Sierra would be so much more effective and finding things because it works much like the human brain: looking for patterns of associations. Now we just need to figure out how to get all that data from Gordon….

What we are looking for is complex data sets (and unstructured data) where finding a “needle in a haystack” would be of value.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under SaffronSierra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.