Petzoldt

(via Visualizing citations in research literature)

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:02:29 +0200

(via Visualizing citations in research literature)

Wired on The future of search

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:30:24 +0100

Search has become strangely intimate, a trusted friend pointing you in the right direction […] We once used search engines to look for information, now we use search to find us — what once seemed transactional now seems an extension of ourselves.

[…] in the search of the future that Singhal and his masters of disambiguation are constructing in Mountain View, Google will understand that these things are not simply matching sequences but that they are “things” with an internet life and place and history of their own.

[…] “I don’t think we’ll ever get to the semantic web as it was envisioned — detailed labelling and descriptions of web pages by humans — but we are getting closer to its goal: deep descriptions and understanding of the web, through artificial intelligence and natural language understanding.”

[…] “the future of search is verbs.” People, the argument goes, want search to do things, not just suggest things. With the Knowledge Graph, Google is building a world-historical collection of nouns. But will it help book a restaurant table? Or the cheapest flight? As synonymous as search is with Google, much of our search activity now occurs on apps.

[…] As Battelle notes, “the largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young. When the universe was complete, the entire web was searchable,” he says. “Now our digital lives are utterly fractured — in apps, in walled gardens such as Facebook, across clunky interfaces. Reuniting our digital lives into one platform that is searchable is, to me, the largest problem we face today.”

Significance Magazine on Tailored News

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:30:32 +0100

Significance Magazine on Tailored News:

How can Yahoo! use modeling techniques to make me read their news? Well, the model takes some predictor variables, information about me, in order to build a profile of the user currently browsing their site. This information has been gathered by the website about the readers, and include data such as my location, time in my place and even my gender and my age if I’m a registered Yahoo! user. Other information about my habits online is also useful for the algorithm, particularly the places I’ve visited when I visited Yahoo! in the past, and the stories, the news I’ve already seen today. With this information, the model builds a particular profile around me. Yahoo! can then present a ‘Today Page’ specially fitted for me, by matching my profile with the optimized news and headlines that people like me are clicking on. Don’t forget, the point is to make you click! In order to find the perfect “Today Page” for you, Yahoo! analyzes more than 13 million different combinations of headlines, news, images, stories, photographs and even positions on their website displayed every day. They will show only one from those millions, the one that optimizes the clicks in people like you.

Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon Says Maybe

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:30:11 +0100

Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon Says Maybe:

#socialnetworks #analytics project at US department of defense. Quote:

Defense is seeking ways to predict the future by monitoring Twitter, blogs and news, and determining the “frequency of contacts between nodes or clusters.” As networks grow larger and more complex, researchers have found it harder to monitor group behavior. ONR also wants researchers to discover networks that could be hidden within networks, and how information and money flows through a community.
[…]
Officials also want tools that fuse and assimilate multiple, incomplete data sets on agriculture, weather, terrain, demographics and economic indicators to find patterns. ONR is especially interested in ways to comb text-based information to provide more nuanced views of how groups, such as terrorists, operate by extrapolating the “stated values and beliefs that motivated behaviors of interest,” “community structure and clusters of social networks” and the level of “emotional support expressed towards topics or persons.

“Common myths of predictive analytics”. There are...

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:05:32 +0200

“Common myths of predictive analytics”. There are many but this illustration highlights one of them pretty well.

Source: SAS Knowledge Exchange.

"You can become a top coder if you want. But the bigger task is to think about the data like a..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:09:00 +0100

“You can become a top coder if you want. But the bigger task is to think about the data like a journalist, rather than an analyst. What’s interesting about these numbers? What’s new? What would happen if I mashed it up with something else? Answering those questions is more important than anything else.”

- True beyond data journalists for every business analyst.

Infographic on infographics (via Infographic / Feel free to use...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:13:03 +0100

Infographic on infographics (via Infographic / Feel free to use this image anywhere)

(via Visualizing citations in research literature)

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:12:23 +0100

(via Visualizing citations in research literature)

Photo

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:52:23 +0100

McKinsey Report: Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’?

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:50:06 +0100

Great study on the opportunity and challenges of Big Data. While every industry can benefit from big data analytics some will more than others:

Quotes from the article:

Over time, we believe big data may well become a new type of corporate asset that will cut across business units and function much as a powerful brand does, representing a key basis for competition. If that’s right, companies need to start thinking in earnest about whether they are organized to exploit big data’s potential and to manage the threats it can pose. Success will demand not only new skills but also new perspectives on how the era of big data could evolve—the widening circle of management practices it may affect and the foundation it represents for new, potentially disruptive business models.

…

Big data ushers in the possibility of a fundamentally different type of decision making. Using controlled experiments, companies can test hypotheses and analyze results to guide investment decisions and operational changes. In effect, experimentation can help managers distinguish causation from mere correlation, thus reducing the variability of outcomes while improving financial and product performance.

"Approximately 90 percent of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data"

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:25:38 +0100

““Approximately 90 percent of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data””

- IBM - 11 Oct 2011

MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Data

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:50:00 +0100

MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson shares insightful implication of big data in this 9 min interview. My notes:

Many revolution in science had been preceeded by revolutions in measurements.
Big data requires a cultural change of how companies make decisions: Use data to learn instead to confirm. Vulnerability of being open to data. Different kind of confidence.
Big data allows to go beyond financial measures, e.g. customer satisfaction instead profitability.
big data = nano data. Not just more, but more detailed data.
BI is the natural evalotution/add-on to an ERP system. Improve operations instead just managing it.

KDnuggets Poll Results: Top Algorithms for Analytics/Data Mining

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:30:06 +0100

KDnuggets Poll Results: Top Algorithms for Analytics/Data Mining:

Puzzled decision trees and others top visualization and descriptive statistics: Noone I know would do predicition without those two basic exploration steps.

McKinsey: Second Economy

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:31:05 +0100

McKinsey recently published on the “Second Economy”. Below two quotes on how it is defined and it what sense it acts intelligently. (This pragmatic definition of intelligence is extremly helpful, because it acknowlege that a service like Google Search is intelligent even though it will - hopefully - never posses consciousness.)

Interestingly business analytics is a much bigger player in this second economy as in the visible one. Think credit scoring, price optimiation or campaign optimization.

Quotes from the article:

If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent—a great computer expression—which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.

[…]

There’s a parallel in this with how biologists think of intelligence. I’m not talking about human intelligence or anything that would qualify as conscious intelligence. Biologists tell us that an organism is intelligent if it senses something, changes its internal state, and reacts appropriately. If you put an E. coli bacterium into an uneven concentration of glucose, it does the appropriate thing by swimming toward where the glucose is more concentrated. Biologists would call this intelligent behavior. The bacterium senses something, “computes” something (although we may not know exactly how), and returns an appropriate response.

7bn humans. Great infomap about population growth...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:37:06 +0100

7bn humans. Great infomap about population growth at theguardian.

Factor Analysis by Richard B. Darlington

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:30:06 +0100

Factor Analysis by Richard B. Darlington:

Neat introduction on factor analysis. Little math and lots of concepts and motivation of this classic tool.

High Performance Analytics is about co-location of data and...

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:30:06 +0100

High Performance Analytics is about co-location of data and math, according to Paul Kent from SAS R&D.

"A decision is reduced to a simple, pre-determined rule. Once the rule is established, the decision..."

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:33:06 +0200

“A decision is reduced to a simple, pre-determined rule. Once the rule is established, the decision is out of the executive’s hands – so the executive no longer feels important. If the campaign fails, the failure will be clearly documented, chipping away at the executive’s reputation and sense of confidence. Moving from gut-feel decision making to data-driven making doesn’t play into the average executive’s sense of power.”

- Interesting observation why business analytics may impose a psychological challenge for executives.

Forrester study strengthens case for social network analysis

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:35:06 +0200

Great opportunity for Social Network Analysis: According to Forrester only 4% of European online users are responsible for 80% of all so-called influence impressions.

Not what I expected: Under the hood of Business Objects Predicitve Analytics offering

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:36:06 +0200

Predictive analytics is one of the most valuable elements of analytics. Yet, not every vendor claiming to offer analytics is strong in predictive analytics.

One example is Business Objects (BO) which was aquired by SAP to complement it’s analytics portfolio. Despite its claim to be a leading analytics vendor BO a closer look reveals it has little to offer in advanced analytics. Its “Business Objects Predictive Workbench” brochure (see cover below or full document here) demonstrates that what you really get is IBM’s SPSS Modeller. This is consistent with BO’s 2007 reseller agreement which SAP just renewed.

There is nothing wrong with bundled third party software and SPSS isn’t a bad choice. But I don’t think communication is appropiate. It should be more transparent that advanced analytics with BO requires a totally different piece of software (which typically disturbs user experience, adds integration challenges and complicates maintanance) and that “analytics” is for BO what others just call, well, reporting.