Big Data Digest: Rise of the think-bots

It turns out that a vital missing ingredient in the long-sought after goal of getting machines to think like humans--artificial intelligence--has been lots and lots of data. Last week, at the O'Reilly Strata Hadoop World Conference in New York, Salesforce.com's head of artificial intelligence, Beau Cronin, asserted that AI has gotten a shot in the arm from the big data movement. "Deep learning on its own, done in academia, doesn't have the [same] impact as when it is brought into Google, scaled and built into a new product," Cronin said. In the week since Cronin's talk, we saw a whole slew of companies--startups mostly--come out of stealth mode to offer new ways of analyzing big data, using machine learning, natural language recognition and other AI techniques that those researchers have been developing for decades. One such startup, Cognitive Scale, applies IBM Watson-like learning capabilities to draw insights from vast amount of what it calls "dark data," buried either in the Web--Yelp reviews, online photos, discussion forums--or on the company network, such as employee and payroll files, noted KM World.