Novetta Solutions is looking for a Software Engineer in Reston, VA. The post states, “Novetta Solutions specializes in providing innovative, mission-critical technology products and solutions to the Intelligence Community, Department of Defense and other organizations.   As a trusted partner of the Department of Defense, U.S. Government civilian and international agencies, and businesses throughout the world, we work closely with teams working interesting and difficult customer issues to anticipate break-through technologies that are needed in the immediate future.  Become part of a dynamic team where you have the ability to apply your skills to a variety of cutting-edge challenges.” Read more

John Abell of GMA News recently told the story of Summly, a company developed by 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio and sold to Yahoo! for $30 million. Abell writes, “D’Aloisio’s youth—he’s 17—and windfall are interesting data points, even if all the work behind the magic algorithm isn’t the sole product of this high schooler’s brain. Like all really good ideas, Summly’s is simple: Anything can be summarized, but by having a computer do it,  the number of things you can summarize—and the speed with which it can be done—are massively increased. As an app, it filtered news stories and—Presto Chango!—spit out the CliffsNotes version, optimized for a smartphone’s tiny screen (and our infinitesimal attention span).” Read more

Nick Vivion of Tnooz reports, “The latest foray into voice-tech comes from CheapAir.com. The voice activation feature is integrated with the company’s latest iPhone and iPad release, allowing customers to use voice to search for flights amidst the 25 million aggregated fares. The app works very simply: state your departure and destination points, date and time preferences, and the app will process the verbal input to deliver query results.” CheapAir CEO Jeff Klee stated, “We know that more and more travelers want to research flight options with their phones… We’re doing everything we can to make it easier to find the lowest fares and the best flight options. CheapAir was the first travel site to let people search for fares using natural language, we were the first to show which in-flight amenities are on every flight, and now we’ve launched the first voice-activated iPhone app.” Read more

ZoomInfo is looking for a Software Engineer – Data Generation Team in Waltham, MA. The post states, “We’re changing the way business information is found and managed. And the Core Development Team sits at the heart of this effort. We employ cutting-edge NLP technologies to empower America’s knowledge workers. With in depth profiles on millions of business people and companies, ZoomInfo will find people you know and those you need to know. As a member of Zoom’s CoreDev team, you’ll be responsible for improving the data that thousands of customers see every day. In case you hadn’t noticed, we take a different approach than our competitors for how we get our data. Read more

The ACM – Infosys Foundation Award will be presented to Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. The pair “led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary software infrastructure, which has transformed the practice and understanding of Internet-scale computing. Their efforts, along with those of their collaborators, created the first software designs for systems that harness the power of tens of thousands of computers. Their designs for systems such as MapReduce and BigTable are remarkable for scalability, the grace with which they tolerate faults, and the ease with which they support the construction of many new distributed services. We are in a new age of Internet-scale computing thanks in significant measure to the engineering innovations of Dean and Ghemawat.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently wrote, “The best thing about the Big Data hype in pharma is how effectively it’s shed light on all of the Small Data problems the industry is facing. The roots of the Big Data movement in pharma were innocent enough: challenges in storage, data access, and data analytics that organizations started seeing with shifts toward high-throughput screening and massive genomics data sets. But as Big Data became more and more mainstream, the range of business challenges that got slapped with the “Big Data” label started ranging further and further afield. Industry analysts noticed this quickly, redefining Big Data in terms of the three (or four) Vs–not just volume but also variety, velocity, and variability. Others have been quick to follow. At a recent conference on data-driven drug development, speaker after speaker stood up to talk about their approach to Big Data, and each speaker immediately qualified that they were speaking about the variety of data, rather than the volume of data.” Read more

“We want to help the world make sense of data and we think graphs are the best way of doing that.”

That’s the word from Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology, which makes the open-source Neo4j NoSQL graph database. He’s not talking in terms of RDF-centric solutions, even though he says he’s 100 percent in agreement with the vision of the semantic web and machine readability. “The world is a graph,” Eifrem says, “and RDF is a great way of connecting things. I’m all in agreement there.” The problem, in his opinion, is that execution on the software end there has been lacking.

“This comes down to usability,” he says, and the average developer, he believes, finds the semantic web-oriented tools largely incomprehensible. Eifrem says he’s speaking from real-world experiences, having worked directly with RDF and taught classes on the semantic web layers. Where it took a week to get students up to speed on things like Jena and Sesame, they ‘get’ the property graph and graph databases in half-a-day, he says. Neo4j stores data in nodes connected by directed, typed relationships with properties on both – also known as a property graph.

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Cambridge Semantics is looking for a Senior Java Engineer in Boston, MA. According to the post, “Cambridge Semantics is seeking a highly skilled outstanding Java Engineer to work on the core of their semantic platform. The successful candidate will be a seasoned java professional with 5+ years of experience. This is an opportunity to join an extremely talented team pioneering Web 3.0 semantic technologies… Cambridge Semantics Inc. is an industry-leading semantic information management company. Semantic technology is revolutionizing data collaboration & content management within the enterprise and on the Web and is one of the most exciting technological innovations since the advent of the Internet. We are a high-energy, high-tech company that is experiencing rapid growth. Our team comprises some of the world’s leading experts in Semantic Web technology.” Read more

TEMIS, the leading provider of semantic content enrichment for the enterprise announced today it has completed a conclusive series of tests of its flagship Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Azure, opening the door to customer application deployments on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. Read more

[Editor's Note: This guest post is from Antonia Bradford, who attended "ICT Days" in Trento Italy, and offered this report.]

Trento, Italy, hosted a technology conference ‘ICT Days 2013’ between 20th and 23rd March. Like all such events it was interesting, dynamic and informative, but it was also quite different from the normal conferences.

It broadcast a very loud message that Semantic Technology, Big Data, and the interconnectivity of things will – without any doubt – affect everything and everyone; that these technologies will change the way everyone interacts with public services, the way in which dwindling natural resources are distributed and managed, the way citizens interact with each other, the way in which public and private bodies cooperate to support the needs of the citizen and the way in which public bodies are monitored and held accountable to the people that elected them.

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