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Blog: David Loshin

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May 18, 2007

BI and Search: Interview with Philip Russom

This past week I attended TDWI, and was lucky enough to conduct a podcast interview with Philip Russom, TDWI's Senior Manager of Research and Services. In our conversation, we hit upon a number of interesting topics regarding upcoming trends in business intelligence, but most interesting was his opinion about the integration of search technology into BI in a way that is likely to change the way we think about discovering actionable knowledge.

Posted by at 6:21 AM | | Comments (0)

July 5, 2006

Brain Rewiring and Self-Organizing Systems

Over the past few days, news items such as this one have told the story of Terry Wallis, a man who, 19 years after entering a comatose state of minimal consciousness, emerged from that coma as his brain spontaneously rewired itself back into awareness. Cells in undamaged areas had formed new axons, establishing new connectivity around the damaged parts of his brain.

Two quick questions to ponder: Is this an unique event, with little expectation of recurrence? And how does this natural occurrence compare to computational self-organization?

The answer to the first question is that while this rewiring is rare, there are other documented occurrences, which may introduce some hope that scientists can better understand the process by which this phenomenon occurs, and whether it can assisted externally.

The answer to the second question does hold some challenges computationally. The brain rewiring is reminiscent of self-organizing programs, and even neural networks, which are programs intended to recreate the network structure of intelligence as part of an Artificial Intelligence initiative. Understanding what the brain can do naturally may help in exploring other ways to lead to automated "thinking." Embedding these kinds of utilities/services/agents within operational applications could be just one more way to incorporate business intelligence into ongoing business processes.

Any comments?

Posted by at 7:34 AM | | Comments (1)

May 22, 2006

Overloading Signals...

I had heard about this overloaded use of technology a few years back, but a few conversations last week at TDWI reminded me of an interesting exploitation of one technology to provide a service completely unrelated to the technology's original intent. This article from last October describes how one can use cell phone monitoring to track traffic patterns through highly-traveled routes.

Basically, the way mobile phones work is that they transmit and receive signals from particular antenna towers scattered across the region. As you are traveling, the mobile phone sends a message to establish its appearance within the nearest tower's range. As your phone leaves that tower's area, it will connect with another tower. As you can guess, one can calculate relative rates of speed by looking at the timestamps at which the same phone registers itself with a series of towers. When the reference space includes towers along an interstate highway, averaging those durations over a number of cell phones allows one to get an idea of how fast traffic is moving along different sections of the highway. That information can be routed back to subscribers (individuals or even news sites) to help in relieving congestion.

According to the article, a number of localities have, or are interested in deploying these kinds of systems. Is this a public service piggy-backed on harmless data collection, or a potential invasion of privacy... let me know what you think?

Posted by at 11:39 AM | | Comments (0)

November 30, 2005

Analytics: Excessive Demand!

Last week, Google announced that it was giving away its web analytics product as part of its online services. Today, they announced that they were freezing the application to new users, citing "high demand." Of course, any large scale demand for a free service is likely to overwhelm a system, but isn't it great that there is so much interest in an analytics application?

Think about how starved people are for quality quantitative information. This can only be good news for companies that develop more intriguing interfaces for analyzing data and presenting the results of that analysis in creative and insightful ways.

Posted by at 7:41 PM | | Comments (0)