Current Events in DSS

The vast amounts of raw data and new sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing that data are revolutionary advances in information technology that could lead to the solving of the Turing test, says French National Center for Scientific Research scientist Robert French. Probabilistic and connectionist approaches are utilized by many of today's real-world artificial intelligence technologies, including autonomous cars, Google searches, and automated language translation. A machine that can pass the Turing test would be similar to being able to record and access every word a user has spoken, heard, written, or read, as well as all the visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory senses experienced over the course of a lifetime, according to French. The software also would be able to catalog, analyze, correlate, and cross-link everything in that set of data. University of Michigan's Satinder Singh says big data could be the source of building a flexibly competent intelligence, but he cautions that there are many questions that haven’t been studied. “In order to be broadly and flexibly competent, one needs to have motivations and curiosities and drives, and figure out what is important,” Singh says. “These are huge challenges.” Read article

Data Mining Opens the Door to Predictive Neuroscience
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (04/11/12) Lionel Pousaz

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) researchers have discovered rules that relate the genes that a neuron switches on and off to several features of the neuron itself. The discovery increases the likelihood that it will be possible to predict much of the fundamental structure and function of the brain without having to measure every aspect of it. "It is the door that opens to a world of predictive biology," says EPFL's Henry Markram. The researchers used a dataset that included the expression of 26 genes encoding ion channels in different neuronal types from a rat brain. The researchers also used data classifying those types according to various aspects of the neuron itself. The researchers found that, based on the classification data alone, they could predict those previously measured on ion channel patterns with 78 percent accuracy. "This shows that it is possible to mine rules from a subset of data and use them to complete the dataset informatically," says EPFL's Felix Schurmann. Researchers could use the rules to study the different genes in regulating transcription processes. This discovery could lead to a new era of predictive biology and accelerate progress toward understanding and modeling the human brain. View Full Article

From ACM's Tech News, April 9, 2012

Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data
New York Times (04/07/12) Jeanne Carstensen

The U.S. National Science Foundation recently awarded $10 million to the University of California, Berkeley's Algorithms Machines People (AMP) Expedition, a research team that takes an interdisciplinary approach to advancing big data analysis. Researchers at the AMP Expedition, in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are developing a set of open source tools for big data analysis. "We’ll judge our success by whether we build a new paradigm of data," says AMP Expedition director Michael Franklin. “It’s easier to collect data, and harder to make sense of it.” The grant is part of the Obama administration's "Big Data Research and Development Initiative," which will eventually distribute a total of $200 million. AMP Expedition faculty member Ken Goldberg has developed Opinion Space, a tool for online discussion and brainstorming that uses algorithms and data visualization tools to help gather meaningful ideas from a large number of participants. Goldberg notes that part of their research focus is analyzing how people interact with big data. “We recognize that humans do play an important part in the system,” he says. View Full Article

Alan Turing: Founding Father of Computing
Business Mirror (Philippines) (04/07/12) Lyn Resurreccion

The De La Salle University Department of Philosophy recently hosted "Turing 2012: International Conference on Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science," an event that is part of a global effort to celebrate the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing in commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of his birth. "Without Alan Turing’s groundbreaking work, we might never have heard of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates," says Stephen Lillie, British ambassador to the Philippines. While Turing was a fellow at Cambridge he developed his Turing machines, which are abstract symbol-manipulating devices that can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. Turing also solved the German naval cipher, known as Enigma, during World War II. "Breaking the Enigma code had a seminal impact on the course of the Second World War, keeping the North Atlantic sea-lanes open and Britain in the war, and saving countless lives of the brave men who sailed in the transatlantic convoys," Lillie says. He notes that Turing is now considered one of Britain's greatest innovators, designers, and scientists. As part of the celebration of Turing’s birth, the Science Museum in London is planning a year-long exhibition beginning June 21, 2012. View Full Article

How we think

Rewriting Healthcare: Express Scripts lowers costs and improves health through analytics.

An interesting user experience from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders:

Keyboard as bar chart, showing frequency of letter usage

TNT Express Wins 2012 INFORMS Edelman Award, Super Bowl of Analytics

Secrets of Success

Hans Rosling is one of Time's 100 Most Influential People!

Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics

Watson and Health Care ... Our speaker on Watson and Health Care.

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

Data Presentation

Dashboards

Some modeling insights:

Lies, damn lies, and marketing data: 4 ways survey results are skewed

Correlation vs. Causation: Daily coffee tied to lower stroke risk in women

What's new in user interface

printers

A Day Made of Glass... Made possible by Corning

CNN's Magic Wall

Visualization: The Museum of Me

Why computer voices are mostly female

Big Data

No Data? Big Problem

Big data to drive a surveillance society

Warning over need for safeguards in email and web monitoring plan

Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

IBM’s famed Watson computer to be trained in cancer to diagnose, treat patients at NY hospital. Mr. Barry Mason, Vice President, Global Healthcare Payers at IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences, will speak on April 25.

Another interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Luis von Ahn

Crunching the Data of Love

The midterm.

Analytics from INFORMS

A Turing Award for Helping Make Computers Smarter

From ACM's Tech News, March 16, 2012
Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past
Technology Review (03/15/12) Tom Simonite

Microsoft scientist Eric Horvitz has created Lifebrowser, artificial intelligence-based software that processes photos, emails, Web browsing history, calendar events, and other documents stored on a user's computer to identify landmark events. The program's timeline interface can explore, search, and discover the landmarks as a kind of memory aid. "The motivation behind Lifebrowser is that we have too much stuff going on in our personal digital spheres," Horvitz says. "We were interested in making local machines private data-mining centers [that are] very smart about you and your memory so that you can better navigate through that great amount of content." Lifebrowser uses several machine-learning techniques to analyze personal data and determine what is important to the user. Lifebrowser and programs like it also could be used to personalize other software and Web services, notes Stanford University researcher Sudneendra Hangal, who has developed a program called Muse that enables people to analyze their email archives. Hangal says that approach would be very different from the kind of data mining-based personalization most common today, in which companies tailor content based upon the personal data available to them. View Full Article

‘Big Data' Emerges as Key Theme at South by Southwest Interactive
Chronicle of Higher Education (03/15/12) Jeffrey R. Young

Several panels and speakers at this year's South By Southwest Interactive festival discussed the growing ability to use data-mining techniques to analyze big data to shape political campaigns, advertising, and education. For example, panelist and Microsoft researcher Jaron Lanier says companies that rely on selling information about their users' behavior to advertisers should find a way to compensate people for their posts. A panel on education discussed the potential ability of Twitter and Facebook to better connect with students and detect signs that that students might be struggling with certain subjects. "We need to be looking at engagement in this new spectrum, and we haven't," says South Dakota State University social-media researcher Greg Heiberger. Some panels examined the role of big data in the latest presidential campaigns. Although recent presidential campaigns have focused on demographic subgroups, future campaigns may design their messages even more narrowly. "They’re actually going to try targeting groups of individuals so that political campaigns become about data mining" rather than any kind of broad policy message, says University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry. View Full Article

Google Gives Search a Refresh
Wall Street Journal (03/14/12) Amir Efrati

Google is redesigning its Web-search formula to overcome the shortcomings of modern technology and to boost its market share. Google says the new search engine will produce more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. The company aims to provide more relevant results by using semantic search, which involves understanding the actual meaning of words. Google says the redesigned search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entries. The new search will look more like "how humans understand the world," says Google's Amit Singhal. Answers that are not already in the database will be provided by a combination of the new semantic search and Google's PageRank algorithm. The company hopes the switch to semantic search will lead users to stay on the site longer. The change is based on the 2010 acquisition of Metaweb Technologies, which developed an index of 12 million entities that has since been expanded to more than 200 million entities. Sources say some of the changes will start showing up over the next several months, but Singhal emphasizes the effort is part of a years-long process to enter the "next generation of search." View Full Article

Mr. Boal's presentation and reading list.

Forced data mining?

David Brooks argues against relying solely on analytics in his interview with Steven Colbert. Correlation vs. causality: an article that discusses the problems in interpretation.

More from Hans

Lies, damn lies, and marketing data

Further analysis: Osama bin Laden

Points of Interest

A -- Abbottabad: location of Osama bin Laden when killed by American troops

B -- Parachinar: suggested location of Osama bin Laden provided by geographical analysis by Thomas Gillespie (see video)

C -- Tora Bora: site of last known location of Osama bin Laden

More: Finding Osama Bin Laden paper and blog explanation

The Coming Culture Shift for IT/Web Analysts and CIOs

Problems with the Adoption of Analytics

Class Presentations -- Evening Class

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

Class Presentations -- Day Class

Group 1

Group 2: Website and PowerPoint Presentation

BI Trends

Gartner BI And Data Warehouse Quadrants: More Science, Less 'Magic'

Research: 2012 BI and Information Management

2012 BI and Information Management Trends

Analytics and Data Mining in the News

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

The Word: Surrender to a Buyer Power (Go to the 4.46 minute point)

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission

How to Opt Out of Google's New Privacy Policy (Sort Of)

How Companies Are 'Defining Your Worth' Online

Risk and Riches in User Data for Facebook

Opt-Out Provision Would Halt Some, but Not All, Web Tracking

Manage (and make cash with?) your data online

Check your Google History

Google's New Privacy Policy

From ACM's Tech News, February 10, 2012

Weave Open Source Data Visualization Offers Power, Flexibility
Computerworld (02/08/12) Sharon Machlis

The open source Weave project is a platform designed to make it easier for government agencies, nonprofits, and corporate users to offer the public a way to analyze data. The platform enables users to simultaneously highlight items on multiple visualizations, including map, map legend, bar chart, and scatter plot. The benefits of Weave's interactivity go beyond the visual appeal of selecting an area on a chart and seeing matches highlighted on a map, notes Connecticut Data Collaborative project coordinator James Farnam. Weave aims to help organizations democratize data visualization tools, creating a way for anyone interested in a topic to explore and analyze information about it, instead of leaving the task solely to computer and data specialists, says Georges G. Grinstein, director of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell's Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, which created Weave. "Now [you're] engaging the public in a dialog with the data," Grinstein says. "That's why Weave is open source and free." Weave is so powerful that one of the challenges of implementing it is how to narrow down its offerings so that end users would not be overwhelmed with too many options, says the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's Holly St. Clair. View Full Article

The Age of Big Data

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior

Crime Trends Street by Street?

An experiment.

Research: 2012 BI and Information Management

Read the report

A Related Article

IBM to help Rochester Police Department fight crime

Intelligent Decision Support in Health Care

Business Intelligence

A Brief History of Business Intelligence

MicroStrategy World 2010 - CEO Michael J. Saylor Keynote Address

Why Data Matters: Extracting Insights, Making Better Decisions

10 Business Intelligence Tools for the iPad

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4, 2010

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

What kind of support would you provide to help decision makers evaluate these data?

A process of inquiry

Mapped pictures: image annotation

The Economics of Well-Being

Corporate-wide customer analytics strategy doesn’t start with data, tools

Risk Management and Decision Support

Europe Weighs Tough Law on Online Privacy

How to make choosing easier

New Software Designed to Improve Politics

The promise of "big analytics" from an analyst’s perspective

Personal Analytics?

CNBC features how IBM software is powering a smarter (healthier) planet: There’s good news for those who set losing weight as a New Year's Resolution. You don’t have to pay a trainer to motivate and guide you. Through the combination of IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM) software and the latest BodyMedia FIT Armband, anyone who wants to lose weight can have their own personal trainer and nutritionist.

Powered by IBM WODM software (technology that originated from our acquisition of ILOG) and business rules that IBM Business Partner Summa created, the system tracks health and weight factors like physical activity, caloric intake and sleep patterns at an astounding rate of 5,000 data points per minute.

So if you slept too little, weren’t active enough, and ate meals that were high in fat, the device will offer tips and advice on types of activities to complete to meet your weight loss target.

Watch the story CNBC recently broadcast about the FITCoach

Executive Order 200.015 Academic Inquiry, Course Discussion and Privacy

Trends: The near future for business analytics.

You Might Be a Decision Analyst If ...