london online 2008
DESCRIPTION
Presentation at London Online, Dec. 2008TRANSCRIPT
Unlocking Innnovation in a Sea of Information
Joe BuzzangaProduct Manager, Science and [email protected]
Online Information 2008Dec. 3, 2008London, UK
Topics
• R&D Challenges• The “Sea of Information”• Limits of Keyword• Next Generation Search
Investment in R&D
Successful Innovation=Market Success
Business Week Innovation Scorecard
Amazon “Kindle”
Technology Moves Fast
~$200 Laptop (OLPC initiative)
Amazon “Kindle”
Winners? Losers?
Winners
Losers
Supporting R&D and the Innovation Process
– Successful innovation requires superior information retrieval systems
– Delivering critical information on trends, competitors, substitute technologies, experts, etc. ie., “technology intelligence”
•“Technology Intelligence is the activity that enables companies to identify the technological opportunities and threats that could affect the future growth and survival of their business.”•“It aims to capture and disseminate the technological information needed for strategic planning and decision making”
Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge
Critical in industries characterized by technology turbulence and rapid change
“Searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data like images, video clips, documents, and the numbers and characters in databases is the rocket science of the digital universe.” IDC
Source: IDC Whitepaper, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, March 2008
The “Sea” of Information
The “Sea” of Information
Today’s Researcher?
Search for Meaning?
5.5 hours / week *Searching and gathering information
* Source: 2007 survey of 6,300 knowledge workers, Outsell, Inc.
4.7 hours / week *Organizing and analyzing and applying information
Challenge for Information Retrieval?
• Separate the Signal from Noise
• Signal processing
Current Search Has Reached Its Limit
A keyword search for “biodegradable film” will yield over 1,000,000 links to documents.
The “key” in Keyword
• Keyword is a misnomer in context of an index• Keyword is in the mind of the searcher• Every word is indexed, since the computer is not smart enough to know significant words (i.e., the “key” in “keyword”)
– Brute force approach, feasible with compute power
Search and Its Discontents
What is illumin8?
Research and discovery tool powered by the world’s largest natural language processing engine:
– Designed for Corporate R&D professionals
– One search across billions of web pages, premium scientific articles & patents
– Find organizations, products, experts, approaches, technical landscapes & more
– Growing customer base across leading Fortune – 500 companies
Natural Language Processing at Internet Scale!
How does illumin8 work?
Full Text
Abstracts
Internet
Patents
illumin8 index1.1 billion semantic extractions
7 Billion web pages, blogs and forums
3 Million full-text scientific and technical articles from 1,800 Elsevier journals
36 Million scientific records from 15,000 peer reviewed journals & more than 4,000 publishers
22 Million patents from 5 world-wide patent offices
Extract and Summarize Results
Search
illumin8 discovers and extracts “Results” rather than bibliographic citations
How does illumin8 work?
Content
• Premium Scientific• Patent• Web
-Crawl-Load
NLP Applied
SemanticIndex
Problems, Solutions, Benefits
Search
NLP Applied
Results
Fuse, Classify, Summarize
NLP Applied
NLP applied throughout the system: index, query, result set
Taking Search Beyond Keyword
Keyword Indexing
• Meaning is lost
Sentence processing
• Meaning is maintained
• Identify & classify problems,
solutions and benefits
Neural Network used in handwriting recognition
Solution Problem
“ We have found illumin8 to be a unique and effective way to mine the internet and premium content for solutions to technical problems and questions. The value for us is the unique search capability with the deep and broad content set. Further, doing the research without illumin8 would have taken weeks and I would have spent countless hours looking at data that was not relevant to my project”
“ The company… has signed up a long list of major innovators, including 3M, Proctor & Gamble, General Mills and a couple of dozen other Fortune 500 companies. By all accounts, Illumin8 is set to become the Google of the innovation space...”
The Economist - March 2008
A Proven Solution