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Posts Tagged ‘the future’

That, of course, is where things get complicated. Taking comfort in technology's potential powers to fix what ails the nation is a common SotU trope. George W. Bush, on script, did it with global warming. And President Obama has internalized it as a core belief of his presidency. It's inevitable: In the last decade alone, we've seen more and more of what constitutes success for a state directly shaped by the pace of innovation. Energy, finance, medicine, culture—there's nothing that intensive technological development hasn't transformed. This has always been the case, really--bigger bombs and smarter people have historically been effective benchmarks for the state of a nation. But never before has technology woven itself so deeply (and so quickly!) into literally everything we do.

The challenge for our presidents, then, is no longer about selling us on this idea. It's about taking that as a starting point and actually getting things done.

"What we can do -- what America does better than anyone else -- is spark the creativity and imagination of our people," Obama said last night. Aside from a more abstract sense of our can-do attitude, our indefatigable American spirit, there are other, more tangible sparks. Regulation, government spending, crisis--these are the things that have historically driven surges of innovation. And words like "regulation," "government spending" and "crisis" are not exactly welcome in our current political dialog.

First, let's talk about regulation. To see how smart, considered regulation can drive innovation, you don't have to look very hard:

This figure, published by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in December 2004, shows a standardized comparison of fuel efficiency regulations around the world. It remains a sad chart, one that illustrates directly how a lack of regulation can stunt innovation toward absolutely critical technology. We can talk and dream all we want, applying plenty of American gumption, about how great the day will be when our cars don't burn so much expensive gasoline, emit less greenhouse gas, or maybe even forsake fossil energy altogether. But a firm nudge, perhaps uncomfortable at first, is often what it takes to get behemoths like our auto companies into action. It's clearly worked elsewhere around the world.

Encouragingly, regulation wasn't omitted from Obama's speech entirely. "When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them," he said to applause. "But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people." Even with its context here in consumer protection, it's nice to hear the word "rules" spoken at least. We need more.

The other two sparks--government spending and crisis--often appear in close proximity. One of the leading sound bites of the night was our current "Sputnik moment," referring of course to the great national wake-up following the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race, which kickstarted our own space program, along with a general push for better math and science education.

As Fred Kaplan over at Slate points out as well today, our response to Sputnik was fueled above all by massive amounts of government spending. NASA did not yet exist, keep in mind, when Sputnik sent down its first beeps from orbit. That we put a man on the moon just 12 years later remains one of the most amazing things our country has ever done, but the reasons for our haste went beyond pure scientific curiosity. The space race was also an arms race, and when total nuclear annihilation at the hands of a single, powerful enemy is a possible outcome, money tends to more easily flow to high-tech sectors. That threat is what gave us the microprocessor, NASA and the Internet.

Summoning similar innovation in the midst of a financial crisis (and with regulation and spending being such unpopular words) is, of course, where the challenge lies. What's encouraging is that the first step--selling everyone on the idea--seems to be complete. We can stand together now, knowing that the solution to so many of our current problems lies in our ability to innovate. Now, hopefully, the real fun begins.

Speaking to Technology Review, company founder Christopher Ahlberg described how its software goes deeper than search engines like Google that simply rank the relevance of results by links. Rather, it analyzes the more nuanced, invisible connections between events and people that shape the future. Doing so, he says, lets Recorded Future look for patterns that suggest certain outcomes, like when a product might release or when a company might clear a patent hurdle or offer an IPO.

Recorded Future’s software does this semantically, using linguistic tools that identify certain types of events and the sentiment conveyed in the wording. It aims for articles with some degree of established veracity, like government filings, news articles, and speeches by leaders or heads of industry, but the software also scans Twitter updates and other measures of general feeling or sentiment surrounding an event, person, company, or product.

In other words, it’s less a matter of Recorded Future wagering an educated guess about a future event and more like an aggregation of predictions that have already been made. That aggregate collated prediction about the future is influenced by all the factors listed above and gives, say, a stock analyst a reasonable measure of when an event is likely to happen.

Right now Recorded Future has fewer than 100 clients paying to use its tools, but those that are using them aren’t lightweights – Ahlberg tells TR a mix of government analysts and financial firms are taking advantage of the insight the company offers. Those are players whose decisions are tied to serious stakes in both security and finance, lending Recorded Future an air of serious credibility. Indeed, studies of its past performance have shown its models tended show increased strength of activity around an event or entity that correlated to real time market activity.

Which means Recorded Future, and analytic tools like it, might have a future after all.

[Technology Review]

Recorded Future appears to be a data analytics company that tries to calculate what the future might hold by applying search-engine like capabilities to highly specific data sets in order to deduce what's probable to happen down the road. By scanning the Web for the frequency and nature of references to a certain person or occurrence, Recorded Future computes what it calls a "momentum value" for each entity in its database. From there, it tries to project future happenings, be they stock market swings or terrorist attacks.

A blog post on Recorded Future's Web site explains:

The momentum value indicates how interesting a certain event or entity is at a particular time, and is continuously updated. In computing the momentum value, we take into account the volume of news around an entity or event, as well as what sources it is mentioned in, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors.

The post continues:

The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface, but it can also be analyzed using statistical methods to predict possible future changes in momentum, which in turn can be valuable e.g. for trading decisions.

It sounds more reliable than a crystal ball, and honestly it sounds like a good fit for Google. Recorded Future's analytics tools could prove valuable to the search giant, especially if they prove useful at crunching large volumes of data into useful, actionable information -- a task that is Google's bread and butter. We'll try to guard our optimism and not dwell on the fact that such prediction models sounds vaguely similar to some of the risk management models employed by once-mighty investment firms.

Google plans to invest $100 million in startups through Google Ventures this year alone, so regardless of whether Recorded Ventures pans out, we predict Google will be just fine.

[ComputerWorld]