Detective by Charlie to Enhance, Speed Research

We took a look at early ideas like these,  look forward to trying.  Recall rhis used to be don by just running multiple searches nd combining results. We may finally be at the point where this is possible, when powered by better natural-language capabilities.  Combining internal and external knowledge.   Remembrance engines again.  See also Zakta, which I tried in this space as well.

Detective By Charlie Is The AI Tool That Enhances And Speeds Up Your Research Time  By Curtis Silver,     In Forbes

Detective by Charlie is today's example of artificial intelligence working to make our daily lives easier in some specific regard. AI is constantly being referred to as a thing that may destroy us all but the reality is that AI is more of a tool to enhance and streamline our workflows than it is something that will take our jobs. Detective by Charlie is one such AI tool, designed to save you time when performing browser-based research.

Every day we sit down at the computer and work on maintaining our lists, or compiling our lists or adding to our lists. Whether they be sales lists, lists of journalists to receive terribly composed PR pitches or a newsroom intern researching a story. Instead of hundreds of individual searches, 

Detective by Charlie is programmed to intelligently aggregate relevant information from a wide array of sources, presenting it in a cogent manner. It does this through AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is automated, accurate and takes about a second.

Detective by Charlie can run dozens of Google searches in a second with whatever Boolean strings you've indicated. It is a product that is aimed at the sales industry. So think about how you would normally conduct that research for each lead. You'd hit up Google and Linked in to figure out the current CIO at a company. You'd hit up Crunchbase and Google News to check on any funding news. You'd do a Twitter search then Google News again to find any other relevant company news. That's a lot of searches for one lead. A whole bunch of tabs (which many of you pride yourself in having open) and time out of your day that could be spent making money instead of figuring out who to make it from. ... " 

More from Detective Labs.

A Chat Bot for Company Knowledge

I got a note recently that I should try Obie as a chat bot based on corporate knowledge provided in Slack.  I have now used Slack for several projects,  fine as a chat space for team projects,  somewhat quirky,  hard to integrate with typical and existing knowledge streams.    One of our AI goals had been to figure out how to link AI with corporate knowledge streams, old and new, static and dynamic, internal, supplier and public knowledge, structured and unstructured.    A remembrance engine we called it.  Perhaps a Knowledge Graph?   Is that what we are approaching here.?  Back to the wall we ran into:   How will it be maintained?   Just by updates in chats?   Back to the general problem of intelligent dialog.

Q&A With the Developers of Obie: A Chatbot for Company Knowledge  by Roland Meertens 

 Tasytt launched Obie: a Slack chatbot for company knowledge. Teams can ask "what, how, or where" questions such as "What is our computer policy". Obie either finds the answer in one of your documents or will ask you to provide him with the answer so he can give it next time someone asks the same questions.

Obie has integrations with several existing services: Google Docs, Confluence, Google sites, Evernote and Dropbox. This means companies don't have to start from the ground up with training Obie. Giving Obie access to this existing knowledge ensures a short training period for Obie.

InfoQ reached out to founder and CEO Chris Buttenham to ask him some questions about Obie.

InfoQ: We tried Obie a little bit in our Slack, but had the idea that it did not analyze our previous conversations. Is this a feature that will be added in a future version?

You could probably imagine you’re not the first to ask this question! Although it would seem that content living in Slack would be a natural place Obie would start, we actually feel that most conversations are fairly unstructured and somewhat useless when it comes to organizing team knowledge. We’re definitely considering adding content that lives within Slack as something Obie can reference, but we feel the low hanging fruit is the rich content scattered across multiple sources within an organization.    ... " 

Google Keep and AI

Makes sense to integrate the idea of note taking and reminding with bot-like AI.    An idea we tested.  Have been a user of Evernote for some time and they recently added an intelligence method which finds articles related to what you are writing.    Then I was introduced to Google Keep recently, and found it interesting.    Intrigued that Google might integrate more meaningful AI into the mix.    The notion that it will be integrated into something like Google Home is also fascinating.  I can't say that the header statement below is right yet,  but look forward to further examination.

Why you should start using Google Keep right away
Artificial intelligence is transforming Google's yellow sticky note app into an indispensable peripheral to your own mind.  .... " 

Google Explore in Docs using Semantics

Google continues to move towards business useful business Apps and intelligence.  This has similarities to 'Research' in Word.  Reminds us of looking at 'remembrance engine' approaches to link work in progress to existing knowledge.   Good example is shown how this goes beyond classic search to use semantic networks to determine relevance.

Research suggestions at your fingertips with Explore in Docs
Posted by Kishore Papineni, Research Scientist, Google Research NY

Enabling easy access to vast amounts of information across multiple languages and modalities (from text to images to video), computers have become highly influential tools for learning, allowing you to use the world’s information to aid you with your research. However, when researching a topic or writing a term paper, gathering all the information you need from a variety of sources on the Internet can be time-consuming, and at times, a distraction from the writing process. 

That’s why we developed algorithms for Explore in Docs, a collaboration between the Coauthor and Apps teams that uses powerful Google infrastructure, best-in-class information retrieval, machine learning, and machine translation technologies to assemble the relevant information and sources for a research paper, all within the document. Explore in Docs suggests relevant content—in the form of topics, images, and snippets —based on the content of the document, allowing the user to focus on critical thinking and idea development.   .... "

A Conversation with David Bunnell

A visionary of the personal computer.  I remember reading of his work long ago.

David Bunnell (1947-2016): A Remembrance

PC MEMORIES, HOW I CREATED THE PC
A Conversation with David Bunnell [3.13.00]

My epiphany came while I was looking at microfiched back issues of Scientific American. I came across an article penned by a nerdy Xerox scientist named Alan Kay. The article discussed some experiments for which Kay had built a prototype "personal computer" called the Alto that used a mouselike pointing device and a keyboard to communicate through a connected video screen. The great, unbelievable thing about this was that no one at that point had commercialized the idea because each Alto machine cost a few hundred thousand dollars to build. And Xerox was a bit lame in any case.

My vision started to take shape: As chips got cheaper and faster and could hold more memory, the day would come when we could build a true personal computer—one that was affordable to most people.     ...  " 

Skipflag Rover

Furthers look at workplace bots.

What would you first want from a workplace conversation bot?  Reminders of how the current conversation relates to the knowledge derived from previous conversations, documents and analyses. Internal and external.

We looked at systems (bots)  that would watch while one developed a document, searched in wikis and other resources, and suggested and filled in links to past knowledge.  Is such straightforward search enough?  Perhaps best linked to a knowledge graph.  With deeper knowledge of natural language and context.

See work by  Skipflag   

" ... Turning conversations into knowledge ... 

Tired of sifting through information at work? .... 
Rover automatically discovers and organizes what you need to know. ... 
SkipFlag is using machine intelligence to build the knowledge graph for teams. Our software understands the people, projects, and topics in your company, organizing and connecting the dots to proactively keep you up to date. Join our waitlist at http://skipflag.com "   .... '

Memory Implants for the Brain via Advisory Systems

I think we are some ways from being able to do this, at least in the sense it can be connected directly to the brain. Perhaps sooner as an external interface that forms a 'remembrance engine'.  Search engines by themselves already do this to a degree.  Perhaps they can be augmented to do it better.   Beyond the military, It has also been suggested for Alzheimer therapy.  Essentially it can be seen as an advisory system based on context.    In Military.com: 

" ... Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to expand on that cutting-edge work to build other potential breakthrough medical technologies, including a pacemaker-sized device that might someday improve the memory of troops who suffered a traumatic brain injury. Think of it as a hard drive of sorts for the brain.  ... "

Context for Evernote

Have now used the Evernote note taking and information management system for years.  I like it, especially since they improved their multiple interfaces.  It also acts as a cloud for your writing from multiple devices.  I see they have just added a module called Context, which automatically does a search (on limited sources) based on the information you are entering.  More on Context.

Had examined this idea in the enterprise.  Once called a 'remembrance engine', which would augment your memory based on stored information.  In the enterprise it could be particularly useful since it could quickly point to internal information:  Local definitions, your previous writing, other people people writing about the same thing, local experts, etc.  Ideally making your composition more efficient, and interlinked with related knowledge.  In theory it could create a 'wiki' of corporate knowledge.  The AI required to do this effectively would be impressive.

How well does Context work?   It is often all in the implementation.  Will report back after I try it. Some commenters suggest this is a ploy to get associated advertising in front of the users.   Others worry about the privacy implications of your text being analyzed by the system, and the difficulty of turning Context off, separately on each device.

Update:  The content given is thin, unclear when I should expect some information.   Unclear if the results will remain attached to a document, or if I have to save or pin them.  Results on different platforms seem to be very different.  In some cases where I know there is a very relevant article on one of the sources, it is not brought up.   So far: Fair.

John Curran (Updated)

I see that John Curran, who we worked with extensively in our innovation centers and with retail innovations using advanced display technologies, has unexpectedly passed away.  I mentioned him a number of times in this blog.   He was most recently connected with MCOSM Digital signage solutions.   And the 5th screen startup addressing multiple media delivery modes.  Our condolences to his colleagues and family.  I will follow with more information as it is received.

I see that the 5th screen blog has put up a remembrance post

Please pass this on to others that may have known John, especially regarding his work at P&G.

Update: Another tribute from the DOOH (Digital Out of Home) site for John.  I can relate to this, several times when I met with John he was keying away developing software for clients.

Live Online Tomorrow: Turing Celebration

If you can't attend ACM's Turing Centenary Celebration, you can still experience the thrill of rubbing elbows with ACM Turing Award winners—virtually! On Friday, June 15 and Saturday, June 16, more than 30 Turing Award recipients will gather to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth with personal remembrances, talks, and panel discussions. And ACM plans to webcast the entire event live! Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about computing's past and future, from the unique perspectives of its pioneers and leading contemporary thinkers.  Bookmark this site in your browser now: http://turing100.acm.org/webcast, and please note that all times listed are Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).

Turing Centenary

ACM Turing Centenary Celebration to Be Webcast Live!

If you can't attend ACM's Turing Centenary Celebration, you can still experience the thrill of rubbing elbows with ACM Turing Award winners—virtually! On Friday, June 15 and Saturday, June 16, more than 30 Turing Award recipients will gather to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth with personal remembrances, talks, and panel discussions. And ACM plans to webcast the entire event live! Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about computing's past and future, from the unique perspectives of its pioneers and leading contemporary thinkers.

bookmark this site in your browser now: http://turing100.acm.org/webcast

First Time Scents

In Neuromarketing: On the memorability of first time scents, as opposed to the well-known Proustian remembrances. We did much innovation in the area of understanding of how scent interacted with shoppers in retail contexts. It is a powerful tool, but also the most difficult of the senses to control in retail spaces. Previously on this topic.