8 March 2009 by Sanjay Saigal.

I recently mentioned LaserSearch, an engine for user-guided web search. Now comes the news that Steve Wolfram, among other things the inventor of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science (NKS), has also devised something new: a computation-driven semantically-aware knowledge search engine called Wolfram Alpha. (Was Alpha Wolfram taken?)

Here is Wolfram’s description of his approach:

… what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.

As with everything Wolfram touches, there is much that intrigues. Let’s suppose that Wolfram Alpha can answer a question of the following form: in which US counties did the Libertarian Party get more than 1% of the vote in the 2008 election cycle? If so, can it also compute for you the covariance of the Libertarian party’s electoral success (so to speak) with the prevalence of advanced degrees? And if it can do that, can it automatically estimate Libertarian votes in 2012 based on country demographic forecasts? Etc.

Taking the above process to its limit, can Wolfram Alpha – say, sometime in the distant future – become an all-purpose web-based Analytics engine?

Posted in Business Intelligence | 1 Comment »

6 March 2009 by Sanjay Saigal.

The primary professional society for advanced analytics – INFORMS – has a distinguished history and an impressive membership. But like most volunteer-driven groups, INFORMS operates on the basis of consensus and professional fellowship. It is emphatically not an opportunity-driven enterprise akin to a private company or even a lobbying-savvy professional group such as the American Medical Association.

This sort of self-branding – as an agency for the advancement of a specialized kind of knowledge rather than as a guild devoted to nurturing and expanding professional hegemony – affects both the operation of INFORMS and the development of the profession. An interesting manifestation of this phenomenon is the slow adoption of information technology by INFORMS. Things are, however, improving: As of today, INFORMS boasts an official blog!

This official blog doesn’t quite get us to INFORMS 2.0; it’s still one-way communication. The society has supported blogging at previous national-level meetings through the efforts of individual INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) members (see here). And the very nifty eNews Daily, which debuted at last year’s Washington, DC meeting, looks to me like a keeper.

I anticipate that these efforts will take a more definite form over time, to the point that non-attendee members (as well as the interested public) can feel connected to events as they occur. The nominal goal, of course, is to increase the dispersion and penetration of the profession’s message. But more interestingly, proliferating Web 2.0 technologies should increase the engagement of INFORMS members in the society’s affairs and the attractiveness of its scheduled events.

A milestone of the development of Web 2.0 ideas within INFORMS should appear in late April, from the 2009 Practice Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The Marketing folks at the society are mulling over what should and could be done. Let them know! Are you planning to attend? If so, does the prospect of (you) blogging from the meeting grab you? Does it seem like unnecessary work when you’d rather be schmoozing with grad school friends? Does it raise the question, “would anyone want to read my impressions?”

And if you are not planning to attend, what might most make you keenly regret your decision not to? Would blogposts help you better stay in touch with goings-on at the meeting? Or is something like the aforementioned eNews Daily already too much information? Or perhaps, going for a diametrically opposed extreme point, do you wish someone would set up an INFORMS Twitter feed?

Posted in INFORMS, Operations Research | 5 Comments »