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A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It’s looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating.

It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations’ leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk.

What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

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Ryan Kim recently spoke to Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori regarding the company’s role in the growing smart personal assistant field. Kim writes, “When I first heard of Zemanta, I thought of it as a great tool for bloggers, helping recommend links, content and images. And it does that quite well, helping some 80,000 active users. But after talking with Zemanta’s CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori, our conversation turned to the bigger picture of what New York-based Zemanta is doing. And it’s really in a similar vein as Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson and other services. We’re now entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests and questions in real time.” Read more

What do big companies have that most emerging businesses don’t have to help them get value from Big Data? Well, to start with, there’s lots of money and a ton of technology resources.

Never fear. At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business conference in Berlin, Christopher Testa, CTO of startup WhiteBox Inc., plans to give companies with considerably fewer resources than giants like Google and IBM insight into how to use Big Data as a small, lean startup. His guidance will draw from his own past experiences at Google training AdSense; lessons learned studying the development of IBM’s Watson; and his current efforts to apply Big Data principles to create an expert system for amateur radio operator license exams at his own startup, with limited engineering resources. Most recently Testa was head of engineering at Ad.ly, and that will factor into advice about how to run a data center with free and open source solutions, too.

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

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IBM recently published a technical paper entitled Toward a Basic Profile for Linked Data. In the introduction, the writers begin, “There is interest in using Linked Data technologies for more than one purpose. We have seen interest in it to expose information — public records, for example — on the Internet in a machine-readable format. We have also seen interest in using it for inferring new information from existing information, for example in pharmaceutical applications or IBM Watson™ (see the Resources section for links to more information). The IBM® Rational® team has been using Linked Data as an architectural model and implementation technology for application integration.” Read more

Video of the full presentation referenced in this article is available here.

During the three-day Jeopardy challenge that saw IBM’s Watson emerge victorious over mere mortals Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, viewers learned a bit about the future IBM envisioned for its Deep QA system outside the game show circuit. At SemTech in San Francisco, IBM research staff member Aditya Kalyanpur provided a little more insight into the technology’s capabilities and its suitability for other domains where structured and unstructured data abound.

“What the technology really enables is better decision-making over vast amounts of structured and unstructured data,” said Kalyanpur, who joined the Watson project a couple years back after working on other research at IBM. (The Semantic Web Blog featured Kalyanpur in his pre-Watson days as one of the young guns moving the technology forward in this article.) “It’s applicable in so many domains. The bottom line is any domain where you need to make sense of vast amounts of information, this can work,” he told the crowd assembled to hear more about the inner workings of the charismatic computer system.

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At the 2011 SemTech San Francisco, there was a special presentation by Aditya Kalyanpur, of IBM Research. Kalyanpur was part of the algorithm team on the Watson project. You remember Watson, right? The computer who won Jeopardy earlier this year?  We covered the story, if you need a reminder of what happened.

Here is the full presentation by Kalyanpur. (Slides were not made available to the general public):

Following this presentation, our own Jennifer Zaino caught up with Kalyanpur for this interview.

If it’s been a while since you have looked in on the conference program for SemTech SF, you may have missed the addition of some significant, exciting sessions.  Recent additions to this year’s conference include:

Aditya Kalyanpur, research staff member for IBM Research will lead a session entitled “Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project for the Jeopardy! Challenge,” a discussion of the the DeepQA technology and describe what it was like to build a Watson, the computer system that won on Jeopardy!.

“The rise of the Interest Graph: How Semantic Technology Will Lead What’s Next for the Social Web.” Dave S Copps, CEO of PureDiscovery Corporation, will discuss the reasons why transactional searches will be replaced by social filtering. The real power and potential of semantic technologies will be unleashed as semantic vendors integrate the richness of the data being generated by the social graph (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to create networks that share more than just a relationship.

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A recent article discusses the lessons that can be learned from Watson, IBM’s champion computer: “Big Blue has set its sights on many commercial applications for the technology in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.  But the question remains, is it practical? Does Watson embody an approach that enterprises can exploit, or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise?” Read more

IBM is looking for a Research Staff Member for their Semantic Analysis and Integration Department in Hawthorne, NY “to work on research and applications of intelligent human language technologies. The project focuses on developing general and reusable Question Answering(QA) systems to achieve reproducible high-performing results for open-domain and specialized-domain question answering. This project offers the opportunity to work with more than 30 IBM researchers with backgrounds in NLP, IR, ML, KR&R, and DB across multiple IBM research labs, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with our university partners.” The current focus of the project is work on Watson, the computer that recently competed on Jeopardy. Read more