meeting of possible interest-datamining the net for threats

Mon Jul 10 20:28:52 PDT 2006

SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG

Business Environment Monitoring: Exploiting the Net to
Help Management Systematically Identify External
Threats and Opportunities

Presented by Alex Kass, Senior Research Manager,
Accenture Labs

Date:                Wednesday, 12 July 2006, 6:30 PM

Location:          SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview
Avenue, Palo
Alto, CA

Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but
membership is only
$10/year.

Topic

Enterprise business intelligence systems are providing
decision-makers
with increasingly rich dashboards to help them
understand what is going
on inside their organization, but many executives wish
that they had a
more systematic means of using technology to help them
identify, as
early as possible, the external events that represent
potential threats
or opportunities to their companies. The vast streams
of data 
constantly
being broadcast in various forms on the Internet
contain many weak
signals that could provide this type of insight.
However, the potential
of the Internet as a source for outward-looking BI, or
corporate radar,
is still largely untapped, because executives do not
yet have the kinds
of tools they need to systematically exploit it.

In this presentation I'll present a prototype we've
developed to fill
this need. The system is called the Business Event
Advisor. It includes
tools to allow business analysts to create models of
the entities,
relationships and event types comprising a particular
organization's
competitive ecosystem, and a run-time processing
engine that uses those
models to drive the automatic detection and
interpretation of events
relevant to that organization's business. By combining
various
text-processing technologies with model-driven
inference, the system
mines the Net to detect business-relevant events and
provide the early
warning that can help act quickly to seize an
opportunity or defend
against an emerging threat.

About the Speaker

Alex Kass, is a Senior Research Manager at Accenture
Technology Labs in
Palo Alto, where he works to help the company
anticipate technologies
that will be important to the future of Accenture and
its clients, and
to invent prototypes that integrate these emerging
technologies in new
ways. Dr. Kass received his Ph.D. in computer science,
with an emphasis
on artificial intelligence, in 1990. Before joining
Accenture in 2004 
he
held a number of positions in both academia and
industry: Research
Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for
the Learning
Sciences at Northwestern University; Executive Vice
President of
Cognitive Arts Corporation; and Senior Systems
Scientist at Carnegie
Mellon University. At Accenture Technology Labs, his
work has included 
a
project aimed at extending business intelligence
capabilities; a 
project
that explores new applications for PDA's as mobile
sensor platforms; 
and
new approaches to simulation-based training of
business skills.

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