Text Analytics

Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit Opening #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Steve Mills kicked off the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit. Business Analytics matter, he says, as shown by the focus of CEOs (8 out of 10 expect complexity to increase, enterprises applying analytics are more successful etc). The need for analytics is pervasive, with every industry seeing a massive expansion in the volume of data [...]

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Here’s how a Decision Management System would manage review fraud

January 30, 2012

My eye was drawn to an article in the New York Time last week – For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews.  This article drew attention to the ongoing and growing problem of fake reviews. Like many of us I increasingly rely on reviews on sites like amazon.com or yelp.com to [...]

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Many Kinds of Analytics, One Approach to Maximize Their Value

June 21, 2011

Working with clients it is clear that the interest in analytics has never been greater than it is today. Yet there is still confusion about what analytics means. We have web analytics to analyze logs and clickstream data to optimize websites; data mining and predictive analytics to analyze structured data to segment customers and to [...]

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IBM’s Big Data Platform and Decision Management

May 24, 2011

IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise. In particular this includes InfoSphere Streams v2 (announced April 12) and InfoSphere BigInsights 1.1 announced today. Big Data is an issue, of course, largely because the amount of data available to organizations is growing rapidly. Surveys show that many managers already [...]

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Decision Management Product News Recap Q1 2011

April 6, 2011

Here is a recap of product news for Q1 2011
Analytics

First Look- Eagle Eye Analytics

Advanced predictive modeling for the Property and Casualty insurance market

First Look – SAS High Performance Computing

Distributed grid environment providing parallel job execution across multiple servers with shared physical storage

First Look – Opera Solutions

Analytics service provider that aims to improve machine intelligence and [...]

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Rexer Data Mining Survey Results

March 8, 2011

Karl Rexer has just released the results from his annual survey of data miners – RexerAnalytics.com/Data-Miner-Survey-Results-2010.html. This year 735 data miners responded to an extended survey. Interesting facts from this year’s results:

CRM and Marketing remain the top focus area with goals like retaining customers and understanding them better coming top also.
Decision trees, regression analysis and [...]

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Decision Management in the New York Times

March 7, 2011

There was an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend called Smarter than you think focused on e-discovery and the use of computers rather than hordes of lawyers. Two things strike me as interesting about this article.
The first is that it is a classic example of the power of beginning with the decision [...]

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SAP Run Better Tour Keynote

February 23, 2011

Running smarter is the key theme of the BI 4/EIM4 launch (though the online event is apparently not running at all, let alone running smarter). The launch of the two together – Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management –is deliberate on SAP’s part. Information is power and being able to discover, integrate, cleanse and use [...]

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First Look – Attensity 5.5

February 16, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Attensity after a long absence recently (I last blogged about Attensity in 2008). Attensity has been doing text analytics and customer experience monitoring for 10 years or more. Their approach includesfour steps –  Listen, Analyze, Relate, Act (from a decision management perspective it is nice to see [...]

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What does IBM Watson mean for Decision Management and Analytics?

February 15, 2011

I have been thinking about IBM’s Watson for a while now. I met some of the team very early in their development and here we are today with Watson slugging it out on TV. To do this it must decompose the question, generate multiple hypotheses and then score them before synthesizing an answer and [...]

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Webinar – The Briefing Room with Attivio

February 8, 2011

[ February 15, 2011; 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] I am interviewing Sid Probstein of Attivio as part of the Virtual Circle Briefing Room series on Tuesday February 15th at 4PM ET. Attivio will be talking about their unstructured text analytics capabilities and we’ll talk about how you can bring structured and unstructured data together for better analytics. Q&A with the twittersphere too.

This event [...]

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PARC Research – Exploiting unstructured data for predictive applications #pawcon

October 20, 2010

Bo and Lawrence from PARC presented some work on contextual intelligence research designed to exploit unstructured data for novel predictive applications. PARC is now an independent business unit focused on the Business of Breakthroughs, working with Xerox and with other companies. The new focus means they work on a wide range of problems and aim [...]

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Fighting fraud at MetLife Auto and Home #pawcon

October 20, 2010

David McMichael of MetLife came next. MetLife Auto and Home is a mid size P&C insurance arm within the overall MetLife group. David runs the Quantitative Research and Modeling team within the actuarial department. Team has grown over the last few years with a diverse set of people, something they find very valuable and expanded [...]

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Customer intimacy #bas2010

September 29, 2010

Customer intimacy is a hot topic these days. Customers are getting more complex because not only are they using multiple channels but because they have multiple online personalities – work, home, on behalf of a parent or child and so on. The fact that consumers trust each other (78%) but not ads (13% trust for [...]

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First Look – IBM/SPSS Decision Management and Modeler

May 19, 2010

I received an update from IBM recently on IBM SPSS Decision Management 6 and IBM SPSS Modeler 14. IBM  sees organizations with many different data sources (inside and outside) that are moving from a traditional approach focused on reporting to one that involves “predict and act” – real-time, fact-driven decision making at the point of [...]

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IBM Advanced Case Management Technology

April 15, 2010

After the intro on Advanced Case Management, a more technical session. The idea, Carl Kessler says, is to take all the technology IBM has and create a real improvement in their case management capabilities. Carl explained how IBM takes what they see industries and customers doing and capture storyboards for these different scenarios like new [...]

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First Look – SAS Text Analytics

April 5, 2010

I got a chance to chat with some folks from SAS about their text analytics. SAS’ Business Analytics framework contains an Analytics component and within this exists a set of products from SAS such as Enterprise Miner and Model Manager as well as a set of capabilities like Operations Research, Forecasting and Text Analytics.
The text [...]

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Zappos (and others) and business analytics

April 1, 2010

Meri Gruber had an interesting post on her Competing on Execution blog this week – Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics – that prompted me to want to add my own thoughts. She says:
Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and [...]

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A story about the power of rules to improve analytic decisions

March 2, 2010

I was traveling in South Africa last week (keynoting BI 2010) and my favorite online payment system demonstrated not once but twice, why business rules are so valuable in analytic decision making. First their analytics triggered a fraud alert – presumably based on patterns of problems from South African IP addresses. As I was trying [...]

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