The Financial reports, “Unlocking the future—that was the theme Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer, used to close his opening remarks April 23 during the first day of the Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit 2013… ‘This topic of machine learning has become incredibly exciting over the last 10 years,’ [Rashid] said. ‘The pace of change has been really dramatic, so it’s exciting to get so many people from so many different areas to be here today to talk about it.’ Rashid recalled a time in the not-so-recent past when machine learning was in its nascent stage, using rules and pattern recognition to produce results many found less than stellar. But today, he stated, a combination of data, devices, and services has led to newfound respect for the discipline, which is having an increasingly dramatic impact on business and society.” Read more

Dave McComb of Semantic Arts recently commented on Gartner’s nod to Semantic Technology. McComb writes, “Gartner has, finally, nominated Semantic Technology as one of their Top Technology Trends. We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends. Indeed it was Gartner themselves who named the plot trajectory: the ‘hype cycle.’ It’s worth a pause to reflect on why the hype cycle exists. The hype cycle suggests that a new technology follows a development growth path as predictable as egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. In the hype cycle, the stages are [pictured above].” Read more

Max Engel of HypeBot recently identified the smart use of data as one of three major trends currently shaping the future of product development. He writes, “The role that data plays goes beyond analytics. Open platforms and API’s allow for the creation of product mash-ups that have broken down barriers to content availability. One cannot underestimate the brilliance of platform-focused companies like SoundCloud and Spotify that allow innovation to occur rapidly and unfettered. Similarly, structured data is going to be increasingly impactful. Facebook’s Open Graph, for example, projects the foundation for the oft-mentioned semantic web.” Read more

Alex Howard recently shared 14 trends to watch for in 2013. He writes, “The idea of ‘lean government‘ gained some traction in 2012, as cities and agencies experimented with applying the lean startup approach to the public sector. With GOV.UK, the British government both redefined the online government platform and showed how citizen-centric design can be done right. In 2013, the worth of a lean government approach will be put to the test when the work of the White House Innovation Fellows is released.” Similarly, “Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio is now looking at the intersection of government and technology through the lens of ‘smart government.’ In 2013, I expect to hear much more about that, from smartphones to smarter cities to smart disclosure.” Read more

Jamillah Knowles of The Next Web recently explained why 2013 will be the year of the Internet of Things. Knowles writes, “This year’s Le Web event in Paris was based around the theme of the Internet of Things (IoT); the way in which objects around us will gather data and connect to controls or other machines via the Internet… There are still issues that need to be bashed out of course, proprietary technologies and closed data systems don’t do much to help things along. Privacy, security and networks are also in need of further consideration. However, products like the Fitbit or Fuelband are already becoming commonplace and makers are experimenting with remote systems like Lockitron for front doors and Growerbot for watering house plants.” Read more

Gil Elbaz has written an article for TechCrunch in which he shares his take on emerging data markets: “The term data market brings to mind a traditional structure in which vendors sell data for money. Indeed, this form of market is on the rise with companies large and small jumping in. Think of Azure Data Marketplace (Microsoft), data.com (Salesforce.com), InfoChimps.com, and DataMarket.com. While this model allows organizations to acquire valuable data, the term is evolving to include a variety of forms, each with varying degrees of adoption success. At the heart of it, data markets enable organizations to access data in new ways, where the currency does not only have to be money, but can be in the form of data or insight.” Read more

Nicole Laskowski recently shared five developments in the text analytics industry recently cover in a talk given by Seth Grimes, owner of Alta Plana Corp. Laskowski writes, “While text analytics technology still struggles with unstructured data beyond text or how to handle a narrative or an argument as opposed to a string of sentences, it has made strides, Grime said. He noted that interest in certain aspects of the field is exploding. Tens of thousands of users, for example, signed up for a recent online course at Stanford University on natural language processing, one of the core technologies for text analytics.”

The first development is Big Data: ”Grimes said the challenge with big data is the inability to get rid of the garbage. ‘Clay Shirky, who we could call an analyst and observer, said it’s not about information overload; it’s filter failure,’ Grimes said, referring to one of the Internet’s most well-known commentators. Read more

Eric Hoffer, a regular panelist on The SemanticLink monthly podcast, summed up the most recent episode calling it a review of the past year and a look forward. Hoffer writes, “The framework for the discussion was: (1) What company, technology or issue caught your attention in 2011? (2) Are we ‘there’ yet? (3) What are people watching for 2012?” Topics that were discussed included: “schema.org and its impact on who pays attention (i.e. SEO space); linked data (and open data); increase in policy maker awareness of the need to pay attention to interoperability issues; commercial integration of technology (ontologies plus nlp capabilities) to leverage unstructured content; and of course Siri (a key example of such integration).” Read more

Data visualization firm Bime surveyed Google+ users a few weeks ago with unsurprising results – “users were mostly young American men working in technology.” However, Bime hasn’t let up. The company recently released “an updated visualization that breaks down Google Plus demographics including the month of August, now that the service has had some time to grow. This survey covered 10 million users, more than twice the size of the previous one, and some things haven’t changed. About 70% of Google Plus users still identify as men, and the vast bulk of them are American. One major shift has taken place, though: While the updated post doesn’t have the age numbers (which came from a different dataset last time), the occupation data show that students have overwhelmingly displaced tech workers, though all the same tech jobs as before dominate the rest of the top spots.” Read more

John Halamka, a prominent CIO in the health care field has posted his “top ten trends to watch as we increasingly free data from transactional systems.” According to the article, “In a world filled with highly scalable web search engines,  increasingly capable natural language processing technologies, and practical examples of artificial intelligence/pattern recognition (think of IBM’s Jeopardy-savvy Watson as a sophisticated data mining tool), there are novel approaches to freeing the data that go beyond a single database with pre-defined hypercube rollups.” Read more