Archive for the ‘Natural Intelligence’ Category
Monday, April 12th, 2010 by Gayle Sheppard
We’re hearing it every day: Customers want better, more advanced analytic capabilities.
Customers are telling us they want to unify and apply advanced data analytics to disparate data sources –– semantic web, enterprise data, sensor data, structured and unstructured data, for example –– to improve business decisions and results.
It’s music to our ears because that’s what our associative memory technology does: We provide “beyond BI” capabilities, in a single tool, for sense-making and decision support. We can help our customers make better sense of things and make better decisions because we expose all the relevant experiences –– connections, similarities, prior outcomes for example –– across all the data in real time.
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Tags: applications, development, Partners
Posted in Natural Intelligence, Partners, SaffronSierra | No Comments »
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 by Manny Aparicio
Early in Saffron’s life, a couple of guys, Bob Cagle and Dean Pfutzenreuter from Open Field software on the West Coast, understood the power of our associative memories and applied it to spam filtering. Beyond just spam, their Electronic Learning Assistant (ELLA) was a personalized email management system for any set of folders defined by each user. As reviewed in PC User Magazine when compared against many other solutions including collaborative filtering and a naïve Bayesian, ELLA was declared “World’s Best Spam Blocker”. It was similarly praised by other reviews in Forbes and Fortune and by end users as “near perfect”. As one user wrote, “[I] Have been using Ella for a few days. But, after only two mistakes so far, Ella has been 100%. As they say, it learns as it goes. Seems to be the case.”
ELLA proves the incremental, non-parametric, nonlinear learning of associative memories. Any user – even a cave man – can simply create a folder, show ELLA a few examples though a wizard interface, and it is off and running. No “black art” parameter tweaking. Learning on the fly. Add new folders at any time or teach it new cases as spam attackers also change their tactics. By simply correcting it when it makes a filing mistake, it keeps tracking to near perfect. This is due to the highly nonlinear representation of the memories but also to the brilliance of Bob and Dean in how they represent email. Bob and Dean are shining examples of our customers and partners as “creative entrepreneurs”. Given our nonlinear engine to reason about attribute interactions, they developed the 100 email attributes that also served to make ELLA so accurate. The power of the engine was combined with the brilliance of application design.
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Tags: classifications, ELLA, email
Posted in Natural Intelligence, Partners, SaffronMemoryBase | No Comments »
Friday, January 1st, 2010 by Manny Aparicio
It is not easy to change things. It is hard enough to build a new thing and then even harder to evangelize a new market. I am encouraged by the growing understanding and need for a new analytic store – beyond databases, but as I watch the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, a radical and more rapid shift is now a matter of survival. The intelligence community has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary in its approach to technology since 9/11. The data stores and rule-based processing are “so twentieth century”, using vintage 1980 technology. The use of analytic visualization has grown but is still based on the same old data stores and manually-intensive connecting of “dots”, one by one. We are still addressing the war on terrorism with evolutionary change rather than adopting revolutionary new technologies to address a radical new enemy.
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Tags: analogies, national security, object orientation
Posted in Natural Intelligence | No Comments »
Saturday, December 12th, 2009 by Manny Aparicio
Our customers define themselves as creative entrepreneurs, whether in startups or large corporations. The SaffronMemoryBase is a new-new thing. It is a universal form of intelligence for sense making, decision making, prediction, and more. We provide the “engine” while our customers and partners make the planes, trains, and automobiles. Or perhaps a new “vehicle” we’ve never even thought about.
To help explain and demonstrate the power of associative memories, we will be providing more and more open source examples and method packaging. We will keep the REST APIs lean and mean, like a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture, but we will add methods and examples to support more and more applications.
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Tags: applications, personalization, Sociocast
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Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 by Manny Aparicio
It should be no surprise that there is growing interest in data analytics and a rise of “post-relational” analytic data stores. Traditional databases work well to load data in, but they are becoming problematic to get answers out when faced with growing scale and complexity. There is a growing problem with Big Data, defined by Adam Jacobs in a recent ACMqueue article, “Pathologies of Big Data.” Big Data is “data whose size forces us to look beyond the tried-and-true methods that are prevalent at that time.” Given our growing data tsunami, many people are looking beyond the tried-and-true methods of relational databases. Billions of rows can easily be stored, but Jacobs describes the pathologies of query scalability, even when asking for basic counts!
You can store data all day, but the value of data is in its query: in its exploitation. I remember first hearing this word, “exploitation”, from the leader of a UK intelligence agency on one of my trips to London. Whether for government or commercial interests, the time to analyze and act is what matters. The word struck me and has remained with me every since. Exploitation time is what matters. Furthermore, the number of queries is increasing faster than the growth of the data tsunami itself. Query time is what matters because response time in most critical, and critical times drive the massive load of many simultaneous requests.
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Tags: big data, joins, MapReduce
Posted in Natural Intelligence | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 12th, 2009 by Manny Aparicio
The idea of a memory base is simple. We define a memory as a matrix, keeping counts in the matrix cells between the names of things on the rows and columns. Let’s say we had a memory of me, called “Person: Manny”. If I query the row called “City: London” and ask for associated columns for “Carrier: ?”, I’d see “AA” and “BA” for American and British Airlines. Moreover, AA would be returned with a count of 6 and BA with a count of 1. More than just the existence of my travel relationships, we can also see the strength of my travel habits – in the context of going to London at least.
The idea is simple but fundamental. When we started Saffron and began working with one of the big intelligent agencies, one true believer in what we were doing would provoke others by saying, “It’s all just counts. What else is there?” What did he mean? When dealing with the analysis of massive data, so much of what is computed needs to be computed over counts. More deeply, information and knowledge is based on the frequencies of what we see in the world. Counts are fundamental to knowing what we know.
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Tags: analogies, classifications, entropy, frequency
Posted in Natural Intelligence, SaffronSierra | 1 Comment »
