The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: January 2021 (Page 3 of 4)

Gilbane Advisor 1-19-21 — TSDBs, platishers, AI ethics, facets

January 19, 2021 /

The rise of the time-series database

This certainly caught me off guard. Graph databases have been leading the popularity contests for the last five or six years, but in the last twenty four months Time Series databases have leapt ahead, as this DB-Engines chart dramatically demonstrates. Peter Wayner looks at why.

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Medium is adding ebooks to its business

Business models based on being both a publisher and a platform have always been fraught. In some ways Medium has managed this better than most. They just acquired “social ebook platform” Glose, but it’s not clear how this fits into their platform/publisher model. One clue may be Ev Williams’ earlier statement that Medium’s…

top-line metric is “TTR,” which stands for total time reading. It’s an imperfect measure of time people spend on story pages. We think this is a better estimate of whether people are actually getting value out of Medium.

But in a short post about the acquisition Williams says they “are not planning to bundle books into Medium Membership, though there could be book-related benefits. TBD.”

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Ethical issues in privacy, advertising and machine learning

Informed and interesting interview with Oxford philosopher Dr. Carissa Véliz. Don’t worry, this is not a long dry treatise, but an engaging and accessible discussion that does not require a technical or philosophical background.

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Facets of faceted search

Both search engine developers and users treat facets as useful for refining broad search queries. But there’s a tendency to conflate broad queries with ambiguous queries. There’s an important distinction between the two.

Fortunately, we have the ever-reliable Daniel Tunkelang to explain.

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Also…

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We also publish curated content technology news weekly We do not sell or share personal data.

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Google introduces table-to-text generation dataset

January 15, 2021 /

Google introduced “ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset”, an open domain table-to-text generation dataset created using a novel annotation process (via sentence revision) along with a controlled text generation task that can be used to assess model hallucination. ToTTo (shorthand for “Table-To-Text”) consists of 121,000 training examples, along with 7,500 examples each for development and test. Due to the accuracy of annotations, this dataset is suitable as a challenging benchmark for research in high precision text generation. The dataset and code are open-sourced on our GitHub repo.

In the last few years, research in natural language generation, used for tasks like text summarization, has made tremendous progress. Yet, despite achieving high levels of fluency, neural systems can still be prone to hallucination (i.e.generating text that is understandable, but not faithful to the source), which can prohibit these systems from being used in many applications that require high degrees of accuracy.

While the process of assessing the faithfulness of generated text to the source content can be challenging, it is often easier when the source content is structured (e.g., in tabular format). Moreover, structured data can also test a model’s ability for reasoning and numerical inference. However, existing large scale structured datasets are often noisy (i.e., the reference sentence cannot be fully inferred from the tabular data), making them unreliable for the measurement of hallucination in model development.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/01/totto-controlled-table-to-text.html

Medium acquires social ebook platform Glose

January 15, 2021 /

Medium announced the acquisition of Glose, a social digital book platform based in Paris, France. Founded in 2014, Glose reaches more than one million readers in 200 countries. With a range of fiction and nonfiction, Glose carries ebooks and audiobooks from all major publishers, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster.

Medium supports a wide range of publishing, from short blog posts to in-depth investigative journalism, and everything in between. With the integration of Glose, Medium will have more than 1.5 million books available within its ecosystem. Readers will be able to find more of what they are looking for by an author or on a subject, and writers can have their different content forms all in one place, elevating their voice and perspective. Built as a reading hub, Glose allows readers to access ebooks and audiobooks on any device: laptop, tablet or smartphone, online and offline. On Glose, readers can create booklists, engage in reading groups, share highlights and annotations of the books they read, follow their daily and weekly reading activity, and set personal reading goals.

https://blog.medium.com/medium-acquires-social-ebook-platform-glose-cf2e94485d8, https://ev.medium.com/lets-rethink-the-book-experience-3087baa3cc91

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Gilbane Advisor 6-9-21 — stacks & aggregation, JavaScript for data, news

X1 launches Social Discovery On-Demand

January 13, 2021 /

X1, announced the availability of X1 Social Discovery On-Demand, a solution for the outsourced preservation and collection of social media data and website content. Full metadata collections and PDF reports from the X1 Social Discovery software can now be had within hours by corporate clients, law firms, investigators, law enforcement and government entities, with no hardware, software, staff investment or training required. Unlike other types of information, social media data can be challenging to preserve and collect due to constant changes in the underlying social media platforms themselves. Preserving and collecting social media information has become increasingly difficult, especially all-important ‘metadata’ which can corroborate or dispute key claims or defenses made in court.

With X1 Social Discovery On-Demand, organizations can begin receiving forensically collected social media and website data within hours of a request being made. Customers of X1 Social Discovery On-Demand simply contact X1 to initiate the preservation and collection for them with X1 returning to the customer a PDF and/or load file output. Customers are able to take advantage of this end-to-end solution provided by X1 in a secure cloud instance of X1 Social Discovery On-Demand. X1 can accommodate credentialed or non-credentialed collections.

https://www.x1.com

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Gilbane Advisor 6-9-21 — stacks & aggregation, JavaScript for data, news

Oracle releases Oracle Database 21c

January 13, 2021 /

Oracle announced that Oracle Database 21c is available on Oracle Cloud, including the Always Free tier of Oracle Autonomous Database. Oracle Database 21c contains more than 200 new capabilities, including immutable blockchain tables, In-Database JavaScript, native JSON binary data type, AutoML for in-database machine learning (ML), and persistent memory store, as well as enhancements for in-memory, graph processing performance, sharding, multitenant, and security. Oracle Database 21c provides support for multi-model, multi-workload, and multi-tenant requirements within a single, converged database engine.

In addition, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle APEX (Application Express) Application Development, a new low-code service for developing and deploying data-driven enterprise applications quickly and easily. The browser-based, low-code cloud service enables developers to create modern web apps for desktops and mobile devices using an intuitive graphical interface.

Oracle Database 21c is the database engine that powers Oracle database services in the cloud and on-premises, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Exadata Database Cloud@Customer, and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-database-21c-011321.html

Expert.ai adds commercial options for NL API

January 11, 2021 /

Expert.ai announced the availability of commercial options for its NL API. Powered by expert.ai technology, which mimics the human ability to understand language and complex textual information, the expert.ai NL API provides advanced linguistic analysis out of the box, so developers and data scientists can reduce development costs and increase productivity while optimizing their natural language processing (NLP) applications. The introduction of the commercial offering builds upon the previously released freemium model to give users the ability to expand their usage of the expert.ai NL API and scale their apps, either standalone or embedded into an enterprise’s existing AI processes, by supporting larger volumes of data.

Expert.ai NL API features include linguistic analysis tools, embedded taxonomies for classification, and sentiment analysis. By resolving complexity associated with language, it streamlines the development of apps that rely on and process natural language content and unstructured data (contracts, internal database, news articles, academic papers, customer service emails, insurance policies, medical reports etc.) that typically is either not analyzed because it is inefficient or is analyzed manually which is expensive.

https://www.expert.ai/products/nl-api/, https://policies.expert.ai/nlapi/pricing/

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Gilbane Advisor 6-9-21 — stacks & aggregation, JavaScript for data, news

Nuance launches patient engagement virtual assistant platform

January 11, 2021 /

Nuance Communications, Inc. launched an AI-powered patient engagement virtual assistant platform to transform voice and digital experiences across the patient journey. Combining healthcare expertise with intelligent engagement technology, the platform integrates and extends the capabilities of the electronic health record (EHR), customer relationship management (CRM), and Patient Access Center systems to enable healthcare provider organizations to modernize their ‘digital front door’ and improve clinical care. Leveraging the same conversational AI technology that consumer brands use to power their provider facing virtual assistant solutions, Nuance’s patient engagement platform now enables healthcare provider organizations to deliver improved patient experiences. Nuance’s new patient engagement platform provides an array of leading capabilities and business outcomes including:

  • Seamless, consistent and unified omnichannel experiences – No longer do healthcare organizations need separate siloed virtual assistant/bot systems for their voice (IVR), web, mobile/SMS and smart speaker/IoT devices.
  • Integrates and extends capabilities of core systems infrastructure – including the EHR, Patient Financial systems, CRM and patient access center (call center).
  • Provides “out-of-the-box” solutions and an advanced Do-It-Yourself (DIY) development tool.
  • Advanced and unified data analytics.
  • Runs on the Microsoft Azure HITRUST CSF-certified cloud platform.

https://www.nuance.com

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Gilbane Advisor 6-9-21 — stacks & aggregation, JavaScript for data, news

Pega acquires Qurious.io for speech analytics

January 11, 2021 /

Pegasystems Inc. announced its acquisition of Qurious.io, Inc., a cloud-based real-time speech analytics solution powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service teams. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Qurious.io’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering uses speech-to-text, natural language processing (NLP), and emotion detection capabilities to analyze the dialog within each customer service call as it happens. The software then provides agents with real-time insights and coaching so they can improve customer interactions, make better recommendations, and boost customer loyalty and sales. Pega plans to add Qurious.io’s capabilities to its software portfolio with an initial focus on Pega Customer Service use cases.

https://www.qurious.io/home, https://www.pega.com/about/news/press-releases/pega-acquires-quriousio-ai-powered-speech-analytics

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