A new article out of Concept Searching reports that the company “has entered into a partnership agreement with Discovery Machine, Inc., developer of knowledge capture and deployment technologies for subject matter expertise automation. This arrangement brings together Concept Searching’s expertise in metadata generation, search, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, and combines it with Discovery Machine’s proven methodology for capturing subject matter expertise. Discovery Machine has leveraged its success with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Naval Air System Command (NAVAIR), and Boeing to develop a suite of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software solutions.” Read more

This week a new Big Data startup company launched, Ayasdi, co-founded by Stanford mathematics professor Gunner Carlsson and based on his DARPA-funded research in the area of applied topology, with $10+million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
The technology, dubbed the Insight Discovery platform, is explained to be the “first machine learning platform that combines computer science and a branch of mathematics known as Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that visualizes the entire dataset.” Hundreds of machine learning algorithms, it says, go to work exploring datasets to in minutes automatically discover insights that can’t be determined through query-based or ad hoc approaches.

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Konstantin Kakaes of the New America Foundation recently discussed the NLP challenges of language translation. Kakaes writes, “Recently, on the eighth floor of an office building in Arlington, Va., Rachel held her finger down on a Dell Streak touchscreen and asked Aziz whether he knew the village elder. The handheld tablet beeped as if imitating R2-D2 and then said what sounded like, ‘Aya tai ahili che dev kali musha.’ Aziz replied in Pashto, and the Streak said in a monotone: ‘Yes, I know.’ Rachel asked: ‘Would you introduce me to him?’ Aziz failed to understand the machine’s translation (though he does speak English), so she asked again: ‘Could you introduce me to the village elder?’ This time, there was success, after a fashion. Aziz, via the device, replied: ‘Yes, I can introduce myself to you.’ Aziz, who is at most middle-aged and was wearing a sweater vest, was not the village elder.” Read more

Michael Cooney reports that next month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is set to detail “the union of advanced technologies from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning, natural-language fields it hopes to bring together to build an automated system that will let analysts and others better grasp meanings from large volumes of text documents.”

DARPA stated, “Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. Read more

A new article reports, “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD progenitors of revolutionary tech like passive radar and the Internet, is calling for research applications of social media to strategic communication. According to an agency announcement (PDF), DARPA is looking to shell out $42 million in funding for ‘innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.’ The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.” This push toward the innovative social technology is hardly new territory for DARPA – the agency has been at the forefront of the semantic web for years with initiatives like DAML, the US flagship R&D program in semantic web. Read more