Google, in the midst of its I/O conference (see our story here), also has teamed up with NASA to form the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the agency’s Ames Research Center.

According to a post on Google’s Research Blog, the lab will house a D-Wave Systems quantum computer. The goal is to study how quantum computing can solve some of the most challenging computer science problems, with a focus on advancing machine learning. Machine learning, as Director of Engineering Hartmut Neven writes, “is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions,” but it’s hard work to build a really good model. Real-world applications that he discusses include building a more useful search engine by better understanding spoken questions and what’s on the web to provide the best answer.

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Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is looking for a Software Engineer in Columbia, MD. The post states, “The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is a not-for-profit center for engineering, research, and development. Located north of Washington, DC, APL is a division of one of the world’s premier research universities, The Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The Laboratory has been a major asset to the nation since it was organized to develop a critical World War II technology in 1942.” This position will “Make critical contributions as part of a multi-disciplinary team working on novel methods for solving critical homeland security problems, using Java and/or .Net technologies, information management and distribution, and software engineering techniques employing advanced analytics.” Read more

“With more features in the Knowledge Graph and more languages, with conversational voice search and hot-wording coming to Chrome on desktops and laptops, and with new Now functionality like reminders….search is becoming a really beautiful and ubiquitous experience that intelligently answers your questions and assists you throughout the day across all screens.”

That’s how Google Fellow Amit Singhal summed up the evolving search experience at today’s Google I/O event. Here’s more about the latest features:

• Google’s Knowledge Graph, now some 570 million entities strong and growing, is taking it to the stats. Now, users will get important stats powered by the Knolwedge Graph, he said. “Already you can find answers to questions like what is the population of India,” he told the audience, “but starting today we will anticipate your next question,” which may be how that population compares to the population of other countries. So, you’ll get the answer alongside the trends line and see all that in comparison to the population of the two countries whose population is most often compared to India, China and the U.S. Google Knoweldge Graph is also boosting its language support, adding to the existing eight Polish, Turkish, simplified and traditional Chinese.
• Users in the Gmail search trial already have the capability of finding answers – like when is their upcoming flight or restaurant reservation — without having to sift through email, docs and calendar data. But, said Singhal, things can get better when it comes to letting users get those answers in the most natural way possible, which means Google has been working hard on technologies like voice recognition and natural language understanding. To that end, conversational search, already available on Android and iOS, is coming to all desktops and laptops through Chrome, he said.
• Joining conversation search is hot-wording, a new interface, or, as he calls it, a “no interface,” where users can ask their search questions without clicking on the mike. Just preface a voice question with, “OK Google,” and Google will speak back the answer to you, drawing among other sources on its Knowledge Graph for the response. Google product manager Johanna Wright gave a demo of the voice experience courtesy of Chrome on a mobile device, working her way through planning a day trip to Santa Cruz through to images of its beach boardwalk, asking “OK Google, how far from here to it?,” where Google, in speaking back the answer, recognized that it referred to the boardwalk and that here was her current location.
• Enter Google Now: Singhal talked up anticipation (it’s more fun if you pronounce it like Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show number), and the usefulness of having the right answer suggested at the right time, even before a user asks. That’s what is set to happen with an on-the-way feature that lets users set reminders in Google Now to show up when they need them. Also launching on the Google Now front are other new cards: public transit commute time cards and more cards for music albums, tv shows, and video games. Google is now “even more useful as an assisted tool,” he said.

Of the new age of search, Singhal said it’s not around the corner, that it will be some time before this becomes the predominant search experience. “There are lots of complex and scientific problems to solve, but our investment and commitment to getting there sooner rather than later is immense.”

BOCA RATON, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LinguaSys, Inc., the international provider of human language technologies producing highly customized multilingual text analytics and natural language processing software, today announced the release of CCC Interpreter to improve accuracy and efficiency in the implementation of Chinese Commercial Codes (CCC). CCC’s are used to identify people and businesses without using Chinese characters in banking, compliance, foreign currency, law enforcement, immigration and trade transactions. Read more

[Article edited for clarity.] Moscow, Russia, May 10, 2013 –(PR.com)– Center of Intelligent Information Technologies INTELTEQ, a small but fast-growing Russian company that specializes in semantic modeling, was included in Gartner’s list of Cool Vendors in Information Governance and MDM (Master Data Management) 2013 report. The company utilizes a semantic modeling tool called Semantic Topology. Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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Walmart is looking for a Big Data Engineer in San Bruno, CA. The post states, “Do you like big data? Like really big data? Like multi-terabyte data sets with billions of rows? Do you like the idea of pulling, pushing, slicing and dicing this data in real-time using using Hadoop, Hbase, Hive and more? Now let’s add some intelligence to the mix using machine learning, data mining and predictive analytics and shazam – you have the underpinnings of @WalmartLabs.” Read more

Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch reports, “Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before. It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.” Read more

Lucena Research, a leading provider of investment decision support technology, today announced the launch of QuantDesk™ Back Tester, the trading strategy simulator component of QuantDesk™. QuantDesk™ Back Tester is a realistic market simulator that allows investors to test trading strategies over critical market periods. Back Tester represents a fourth component of Lucena’s flagship QuantDesk™ cloud-based platform, which allows users to build a strategy using Lucena’s modular algorithms such as scanning, forecasting, optimizing and hedging to help investment professionals validate and refine quantitative investment strategies. Read more

SAN DIEGO, Calif., May 13, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Algebraix Data Corporation, the semantic web company(TM), today announced the launch of Algebrize(TM), the industry’s first cost-effective automated implementation of Schema.org. With this new W3C compliant Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, SEO agencies can now help website owners significantly increase traffic and conversion rates by improving SEO authority, product detail visibility and click-through rate. Algebrize is the first application of Algebraix’s proprietary and patented technology to power semantic computing. Read more