data-mining

Networked Insights: A peek at social-media analytics

Earlier this week I spoke with representatives from Networked Insights, a Madison, Wisc., company that tracks social network data and works it into analytics and "customer intelligence" for clients. It's a niche that might raise a few eyebrows for its watching-your-every-move nature, but let's face it--there are search analytics and blog analytics, so we shouldn't be a bit surprised that social network analytics are starting to take off.

Networked Insights is set to announce Wednesday that it has relaunched its Customer Intelligence Platform, an interface that clients can use to gauge what members of social-media … Read more

Data-mining detects the disaffected

Here's another reason to get off that antisocial kick and get with the networking.

The Air Force is developing a data-mining technology meant to root out disaffected insiders based on their e-mail activity--or lack thereof, according to an article in this month's International Journal of Security and Networks.

The technology, based on something called Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PDF), scours an organization's e-mail traffic and constructs a graph of social network interactions illustrating employee activity. If a worker suddenly stops socializing online, abruptly shifts alliances within the organization, or starts developing an unhealthy interest in "sensitive … Read more

What your phone knows about you

Does your cell phone have the 411 on you?

Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people's social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that MIT professor Sandy Pentland has dubbed "reality mining."

Read the full report at Technology Review: "What your phone knows about you"

Patent by numbers

Growth in the IP lawsuit sector of the economy and the resulting patent-reform movement can leave you thirsting for reliable data on which to base policy judgments and cocktail-party conversation. Initially, I thought the IEEE Spectrum's annual patent stats roundup, Keeping Score in the IP Game would handily rehydrate my chit-chat cortex. After all, the data contains glittering--although frequently unsurprising--infonuggets like:

Microsoft ranks fifth for total patents awarded in the Computer Systems and Software category (1,469), but first in IEEE's computed measure of the power conferred by those patents. The other four top players in that category … Read more

Did credit card companies collaborate with the FBI's grocery data mining program?

The Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein recently reported that the FBI went trawling through grocery store records in order to track down Iranian terror cells. In his article, he writes, "like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists." The program, however, was short lived and was quickly "torpedoed by the head of the FBI's criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, … Read more

Report: DHS kills data-mining project

Facing criticism over its privacy practices, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has opted to abandon a massive new data-mining project intended to flag patterns and pinpoint relationships that indicate terrorist threats.

According to an Associated Press report, the department "quietly" suspended a program known as ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) after federal government auditors issued a report this spring dogging the agency for failing to assess the privacy risks associated with the scheme. ADVISE was one of a dozen data-mining projects under way at Homeland Security, according to the AP report.

Homeland Security'… Read more

Data miners 'dig' your life story

Information is the new currency. When it comes to social-networking sites and many other online enterprises, your attention is the product that is being sold. So it is not surprising that data mining, particularly efforts to link your online behavior to specific opportunities to market to you, is an exploding trend.

Data mining in itself is not inherently good or bad, but it raises many social issues whose implications we all need to understand and include in our ongoing dialogue. Data mining has benefits, including an opportunity to create a customized online experience that truly serves you better. Misuses can lead to serious breaches of privacy. I encountered several stories on data mining Tuesday that caught my attention.… Read more