Thursday, August 13, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Deployment of New Website
I am looking for feedback or content suggestions for my new website my new website. It is currently in its infancy stage. I could sure use some help as to building this website in such a fashion in that it would become useful to folks like yourselves. Please go to the “Contact Us” section of the website and input anything from feedback, to content suggestions, to web features and really anything that you believe we could all leverage in the world of business intelligence.
www.businessintelligenceonline.org
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A Personal Story of Fusing Career Paths
- Intro to the Study of Interactive Communications
- Visual Aesthetics
- Media Imaging and Sound Design
- Game Development and Game Theory
- Writing for Interactive Media
- Interactive Development
- Information Animation
- Media Law
To view more about this program, please view the link below:
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x4016.xml
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Coming Superbrain
Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.
The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence” — was dubbed “The Singularity” in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.
Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.
The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation of computer hackers, engineers and programmers have come to believe deeply in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the chip maker Intel.
In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number transistors on silicon chips with each new technology generation, which led to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then “Moore’s Law” — which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of industrial change — has come to personify an industry that lives on Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner.
Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” He sought to expand Moore’s Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045.
In Dr. Kurzweil’s telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.
Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”
Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.
That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion.
The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as “the Rapture of the nerds.” Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine, notes, “People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it is going to happen before they die.”
However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own book, “The Technium,” forecasting the emergence of a global brain — the idea that the planet’s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn’t certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.
Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines.
Mr. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, still believes that. “I wasn’t saying we would be supplanted by something,” he said. “I think a catastrophe is more likely.”
Moreover, there is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the “machines of loving grace,” of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far darker, of the “Terminator” ilk.
“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, “The Artilect War,” that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.
Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea of “friendly artificial intelligence,” an engineering discipline that would seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals rather than our masters.
Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to need to rush to the barricades. The artificial-intelligence industry has advanced in fits and starts over the past half-century, since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by the Stanford University computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their Pentagon backers that the construction of an artificially intelligent machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I. start-up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as “the A.I. winter.”
Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo to proclaim: “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity.
“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”Saturday, July 11, 2009
Business Intelligence, Business Smart?
PUNE, INDIA: Mukund Deshpande, head - BI and Analytics Practice, Persistent Systems has spent eight years of action in BI that also covers heuristic driven algorithms, classification and prediction algorithms after PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA with a thesis on 'Data Mining Techniques for Sequences and Graphs'. He talks on a range of issues flanking BI today.
When it comes to day-to-day business, what role does or can BI play? How much information derived in BI is indeed actionable?
BI is important because the company wants to know about the customer, wants to analyse the competition, wants to study customer churn properly for corrective action, specially in context to today's scenario and the crowded marketplace wherein competition has become more fierce.
Churn identification, for instance, helps at the decision-making level directly for customer or campaign management. It's done by churning out reports, dashboards, predictive analysis etc from data warehouses.
How best can BI be applied to broader issues like national security?
Security is a hard management problem. It's all about how best to identify and focus on the priority areas. It's all about expanding relationships. Information in security incidents is mostly divided and scattered, but it's there. You have to find how best to link them.
The inference part is where the human comes in. But linking and tracing information is where technology can play a role. Today terror attacks are planned and managed often on Internet. What can be done better is that in reflection, one can connect the dots and we can have a frame of reference.
If we take a frank look at BI's evolution so far, how successfully has the reactive to proactive gap been covered?
Yes, EPA (Enterprise Performance Management) is where we are doing proactive work. Unlike the earlier report-generating work and focus on time-cutting, there is need for proactive work. A lot of BI is still reactive but EPM is a new breed. BI is trying to look at decisions the other way round with stuff like 'what-if' questions and scenario-based analysis.
What's the connection status, between BI and higher realms like human intelligence, artificial intelligence, robotics, cybernetics etc?
These are advanced analytics areas whereas BI is an analytics area focusing specifically on data and business problems. Its focus is mainly on decision-making.
With new scenarios like clouds and grids redefining computing and data, how does BI realign itself?
BI may go to cloud or Grid if privacy and security are taken care of. That's a challenge. But for that big leap in mindset is required. More so on areas like support and control. Guys like Google and Amazon can afford the infrastructure to do it.
What's your take on future trends and the status of BI in India?
As we move ahead, BI would graduate to real-time BI. The quicker, the better. DWA (Data Warehousing Applications) is another area that helps in how to deal in hardware to solve big data problems.
Apart from that, open source BI would be something to watch out for. The way open source has made inroads in areas of OS, Internet browser etc with Linux or Firefox, we have to see what happens in BI space.
Talking of India, the problem here is that unlike in the West, there is no unique identifier for data like the SSN in the US. I heard it's about to come in India too, and if that happens, it will take away the identification problem for BI. Not all data is captured here. Industry is still tactical in its approach towards BI.
What has been Persistent's ground of action so far in BI?
It's been traditionally an area of database. We have focused on building tools. Our work happens around BI tool vendors, and product development for some major DB and DWH vendors, which is the OPD flavour. We also build lots of applications and tools. The spectrum so far covers product engineering for leading ETL vendors where we have data cleaning, de-duping.
We also cover predictive analysis consulting area with churn analysis, targeted advertising, risk-modeling and cross-selling as some constituents. Apart from this, we have various domain-specific practices in industries like telecom, retail etc for reporting, dashboards.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
The Future of Business Intelligence
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year. -- Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.
Within three years, users will begin demanding near-real-time analysis relating to their business -- in the same fashion as they monitor stock quotes online today. Monthly and even daily reports won't be good enough. Business intelligence will be more focused on vertical industries and feature more predictive modeling instead of ad hoc queries. -- Thomas Chesbrough, executive vice president of Thazar, a Skywire Software company, Frisco, Texas
Like standards in manufacturing for product quality, "data certification" will become a critical standard in the next three years for ensuring that vendors, customers and suppliers who acquire and/or share third-party data can measure the quality of that data before it's purchased or used. With a formal methodology, published set of criteria and certification test, information purchasers will be able to analyze data for appropriateness -- and request discounts for any deficiencies. -- Frank Dravis, vice president of information quality, Firstlogic Inc., La Crosse, Wis.
In the next three years, companies (and their business managers) will become utterly dependent on real-time business information, in much the same way that people expect to get information from the Internet in one or two clicks. This instant "Internet experience" will create the new framework for business intelligence, but business processes will have to change to accommodate and exploit the real-time flows of business data. -- Nigel Stokes, CEO, DataMirror Corp., Toronto
Companies are drowning in terabytes of data. In order to exploit the growing ocean of data, businesses will focus their business-intelligence spending in the next three years on technologies that address the inefficiencies of the underlying data storage, rather than the already powerful analytic applications. -- Foster Hinshaw, chief technology officer, Netezza Corp., Framingham, Mass.
In the next two years, business-intelligence capabilities will become more democratized, with a far greater number of end users across the enterprise using the tools to get better visibility into the performance of their segment of the business. Think of it as executive dashboards for worker bees. -- Steve Molsberry, senior consultant, Stonebridge Technologies Inc., Dallas
Business-intelligence data is what allows a company to grow and exploit future opportunities and, as such, is the target for corporate espionage, computer crime and terrorism. Stealing existing financial assets creates little overall impact. Stealing a company's information assets diminishes its ability to compete in the future. This will be the year that corporate boards and shareholders ask questions about what companies are doing to protect their information assets, which will trigger more IT security spending in 2004 and 2005. -- Ryon Packer, vice president, Intrusion Inc., Richardson, Texas
By the end of next year, banks will rely more and more on information gleaned directly from customers to predict loan defaults and collections. Lenders will use notes from customer interactions and conversations with collection center agents, as well as e-mail and other streams of unstructured communication, to significantly improve the prediction of the customer behavior. Banks currently rely on historical structured transaction data that's only producing marginal returns. But higher write-off rates and debt delinquencies will force financial institutions to deploy new methods. -- Gwen Spertell, CEO, Intelligent Results Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.
By improving the targeting of marketing messages, business-intelligence technology may save more than $200 billion dollars a year in wasted advertising and direct marketing. Data mining combined with marketing automation changes the fundamental economics of marketing and will probably increase the efficiency of all marketing expenditures by as much as 20% by 2007. -- Dave Morgan, CEO, Tacoda Systems Inc., New York
In the next three to five years, business intelligence will cease to exist as a stand-alone market, as Microsoft, database vendors and application vendors make analytics a simple extension of their offerings. Integration providers, using Web services and messaging standards, will make data movement simpler and provide "right-time" access to any data source. -- Bob Zurek, vice president of advanced technology, Ascential Software Corp., Westboro, Mass.
Today, consumers may be amused at marketers' clumsy attempts to personalize service, like being offered a new Lexus while shopping for a used Pinto. But consumers won't laugh at such amateur antics in two years or so. And neither will chief financial officers, who will refuse to pay for collecting and analyzing data that gets used unintelligently. -- Helen McMillan, vice president, Experian Database Solutions, Costa Mesa, Calif.
Business is war! Like in any war, survival depends on being able to act quickly in a constantly changing environment. Business intelligence will eventually operate as a business command-and control-center (BCCC). Similar to how a missile command center constantly performs tracking and analysis and triggers countermeasures, the BCCC will track variables, such as operational performance, market conditions and competitors' performance, in real-time. -- Sol Klinger, director, Sterling Management Solutions Inc., Princeton, N.J
Unstructured customer feedback contains critical indicators for customer attrition, upsell opportunities and product enhancements. In 2003, companies that fail to utilize their customers' unstructured feedback will be left in the dust! -- Guy Jones, vice president and founder of Island Data Corp., Carlsbad, Calif.
By 2006, half of all data warehouses that exist today will be replaced by a more streamlined architecture that I will call "data shopping malls." They'll contain sets of data arranged by use for each business unit that will allow the business-unit managers to analyze data specific to their area of interest. The data shopping malls will be more accurate, more responsive and less susceptible to the statistical anomalies of large data sets in the data warehouse. -- Craig Branning, senior vice president, Tallan Inc., Glastonbury, Conn.
Knowledge workers have tended to analyze data in isolation because the software they use doesn't let them do anything else. But data analysis must move from solo to collaborative if we're ever going to eliminate the bottleneck of specialized business analysts. This means packaging analytical applications into portal interfaces that ordinary people can access online and then allowing them to share not just the static output, but [also] the actual dynamic analytical experience through online collaboration. We'll see this happen among early adopters later this year, and it will be mainstream by 2005. -- Andrew Coutts, CEO, Databeacon Inc., Ottawa
Within two to three years, companies will ditch the traditional model of making business adjustments on a quarterly basis. Instead, they'll use business intelligence and performance management tools to make real-time shifts in strategy to respond to changes in the marketplace. --Rob Ashe, president and chief operating officer, Cognos Inc., Burlington, Mass.
Vendors that promise business intelligence but capture only historical data from company databases will be tomorrow's memories -- extinct providers who simply couldn't deliver true real-time intelligence. Real business intelligence means analyzing not only documents, databases and e-mail, but also other sources of rich and constantly changing data, such as Web site content, PDF files, Internet-based discussions, call logs and survey responses. -- Mahendra B. Vora, chairman and CEO, Intelliseek Inc., Cincinnati
Within five years, terms such as business intelligence and data mining will have all but disappeared from the corporate lexicon. They'll be replaced by business actions automatically triggered by systems with "corporate foresight," based on predictive analytics. And instead of being used by a limited number of technical analysts, these technologies will be applied at all levels, from the CEO managing corporate risk to the human resources professional identifying attrition risk among the best employees. -- Colin Shearer, vice president of customer analytics, SPSS Inc., Chicago
Users will demand more integration between the numbers and the commentary. At some point, all business-intelligence applications will include content management or knowledge management tools as well. -- Brian Hartlen, senior vice president, Comshare Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.
In about five years, we'll see a dramatic 40% increase in the number of end users who use business-intelligence tools. The monolithic data warehouse strategies will be replaced with technologies that build virtual data access points based on the end user's query needs. These points will dynamically collect data from a variety of sources including data mart, data warehouse, production systems and external sources and present a single personal data view. -- Frank Gelbart, CEO, Appfluent Technology Inc., Arlington, Va.
In early 2004, some bored geek starts an open-source OLAP [online analytical processing] initiative. Suddenly, Oracle doesn't think that Linux and its ilk are that cool anymore. -- Gerald Boyd, director of research, NCS Technologies Inc., Piscataway, N.J.
In a few years, competitive advantage will come from using business intelligence to understand customer behavior and preferences at a narrow segmentation level and even an individual level and then delivering customized, context-sensitive offers. But given the cost and difficulty of actually doing this, by 2010, at least 50% of the Fortune 500 will turn to outsourcing contractors that have the next-generation technology and database marketing expertise to do it.
-- Jeff Zabin, vice president, Seurat Co., Boulder, Colo.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Oracle Business Intelligence Rates
HotGigs collects and aggregates hourly bill rate data from the thousands of consultants on our Staffing Exchange and provides rate research summary data as a free service to our visitors. Use our bill rate data to plan for contract resources and to compare bill rates against the market. The current average for 2009 hourly bill rate: $137.50. Do you feel this is on the high side or low side of appropriate professional business intelligence rates?
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Benchmarking the best there is...
Now I am embarking on a new set of information that I am collecting which is incredibly topical to what I am doing at work. As a business intelligence manager for a top of the line aerospace company, I am fortunate to be in a very entrepreneurial group that MUST become world class when it comes to the collection of statistics and providing a best in class reporting infrastructure.
Where I am going with this at this time is to look for businesses that I should benchmark when it comes to the collection and reporting of statistics. The two companies that my group have come up with to benchmark thus far are MLB (Major League Baseball) and the NASDAQ. Both companies thrive on statistics and are able to provide any type of information at any time. Does anyone else have any other ideas for companies or business models to benchmark when it comes to reporting and information gathering?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
What is the greatest challenge when it comes to enterprise software implementations?
1. Data Migration
2. User buy-in and resistance change
3. Gathering proper requirements
4. Developing accurate business test cases
5. Poor data quality
6. Limiting access to immediate results
Let me know what you think...
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Business Reporting Tools
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Business Value of Information...
What examples can you think of where these ideas are applicable to customers, suppliers, and most importantly the competitive advantage as pointed out?
Sunday, June 7, 2009
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