Award Recognizes Innovations in Technology

Jim Hendler has been honored with an inaugural Strata Data Innovation Award. The honoree is the head of the Department of Computer Science and senior constellation professor in the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The award is given to individuals who have made significant innovations in the data field.

This exciting news was found in the press release, “World Wide Web Expert Jim Hendler Receives Inaugural Strata “Big Data” Award.” It is important to recognize contributions in the world of semantic technology, artificial intelligence, and management of data. These forms of technology will be with us for a long time and take us into a future that will be much different from where we are or have been.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

The Shift in Reading Behavior

Members of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) may be interested in a report stemming from a survey of 19,000 individuals conducted by Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger. The report came from a 6-month research project and has the backing of leading publishers within the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM). It examines changing reader behavior between 2005 and 2012 and looks at the resulting impact on publisher and library web site design and function.

Frankly, more than NFAIS members should be interested in this information, since this shift has an impact on every field and industry. The full report can be purchased, but check out the summary here for free.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Merging Art and Data

Harnessing the power of art, the Public Art Program of Albuquerque, New Mexico has been funding city-wide art on fire stations, libraries, and parks, with more than 650 pieces scattered across the city. Dynamic sculptures and murals on city buildings may please the eye, but they can also motivate the community.

This interesting and local, at least for us, news was brought to our attention by Government Technology in their article, “Albuquerque Shares Public Art Digitally with Residents.” The leadership of the program manage and promote the public art program with basic technology. They track artwork locations in a FileMaker Pro database, and marketing efforts include posting images and videos to Flickr and Vimeo, as well as displaying art locations on an interactive map.

Technology and public art continue together in the Public Art Archive, a searchable database of descriptive art media in the United States and Canada, which couldn’t exist unless jurisdictions like Albuquerque offered their information electronically.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Hot Career Choices for IT

Ramon Baez, CIO at Kimberly-Clark, recently discussed the skill sets and roles that he predicts will be in demand in the near future.

This interesting discussion was brought to our attention by Computer World in their article, “CIO: Hottest IT roles in information architecture, SaaS integration.” According to Baez, information management people are becoming information architects. Integrating with SaaS providers is a significant skill, and this is even more so we move into analytics and business intelligence.

Baez said, “A few years ago, people had to be really good with middleware. Now they have to be great with middleware, with SOA.” Another attribute he mentioned was bilingualism. Technologists need to be able to communicate with the business and the users.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

The Growth of Technology

The folks at LearnStuff have prepared a fascinating infographic on the growth of technology (especially information technology) in education. They summarized it best:

Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives: we use it to learn, to shop, to pay bills, and to entertain ourselves. Not surprisingly, younger generations are heavily influenced by computers in a way that changes the way they retain information and the ways they develop opinions about culture. Today 70% of children between the ages of 2-5 can operate a computer mouse, but only 11% of them can tie their own shoes. At the start of the 21st century only half of all school classrooms had Internet access, compared to 98% today. The proliferation and sheer breadth of accessibility that the Internet offers has in many ways redefined the process of “growing up” — this graphic explores this redefinition and provides insight into not just how we learn stuff, but also what we learn from a young age now that we have computers.

Take a look at the website and see how the visuals really drive home the points. We urge readers to comment on this infographic, and start a dialog.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Improving the Resourcefulness of Technology

The fastest supercomputers on the planet have multi-megawatt appetites, which makes some green HPC companies, such as IBM, very happy. The IBM Blue Gene/Q machine is currently number one in energy-efficient flops, but a new FPGA-like technology brought to market by semiconductor start-up eASIC is providing an even greener computing solution. And one HPC project in Japan, known as GRAPE, is using the chips to power its newest supercomputer.

HPC Wire brought this to our attention in their article, “Novel Chip Technology to Power GRAPE-8 Supercomputer.” With all the energy-sucking technology that continues to multiply at an exponential rate, it seems that this green technology will continue to grow in popularity, or at least it should.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Thoughts on the Mobile Transition

Recently, Jenn Webb interviewed Josh Marinacci, an expert on user interfaces and on Java development. The interview, “Josh Marinacci: 90% will rely on mobile, but 10% will still need desktops”, focused on the nature of the transition from reliance on full-size desktop and laptop devices to use of smaller devices for some of the same purposes.

Marinacci made the following comments:

“I think that in less than a decade, 90% of people will use a smartphone or tablet as their primary computing interface. They might have some shared computer with a keyboard for when they need to type in a long essay, but almost all of their time will be spent on these smaller devices. It will simply meet their needs better than a traditional PC. … However, the remaining 10% need something more. These are the people whose jobs are to create and process significant amounts of information. … These people need the physical assets of a traditional computer: high-speed input and output through a large monitor and physical keyboard. They also need the processing power and UI flexibility provided by a traditional desktop OS. It would seem like a lot of people should fall into this category, but I really think it’s only about 10%.”

These are some interesting thoughts. My own take on them is that there is indeed a transition happening, but the 80/20 rule applies, and the cloud will play an important part.

20% of our time we will need the 80% machine, and 80% of our time we will need the 20% machine. Just about every office worker or knowledge worker will need a big machine for 20% of their work and will need the smaller devices for 80% their work. The challenge then becomes the coordination and synchronization of the various devices. This is where cloud-based services will come in handy. For example, creating a mammoth PowerPoint slide set for an all-day workshop should be done on the “big” machine. You should be able to run it off the “small” machine at the workshop by accessing from the cloud (with a thumb drive backup, of course).

This means that while not everyone will have both a big machine and a small machine, companies will need more than 10% use of the big machines. They might need more like 50%. That is, for a knowledge workforce of 1,000, they’d need 1,000 small devices and 500 big devices. This could require some sort of sharing arrangement, but this becomes easier with data in the cloud. I also think the 10% number is too small in general. Anyone who works all day on a computer needs a big monitor along with a regular sized keyboard. Perhaps the small device will connect to these via cable or Bluetooth, but this adds additional complications that could be harder for IT to support (or maybe not).

Another complication is the type of work. At an accounting firm, everyone needs the big machines at the same time, such as audit season or tax season.

Outside of the office world, there will be much less demand for the big machines, that’s for sure. As Marinacci points out, most of what many people do now with computers could be done with an iPad. For example, when you create a PowerPoint presentation for a talk at your garden club, using a wireless keyboard is adequate, but as a knowledge worker you need more resources at your command. There is no question that use of smaller devices relative to larger ones will increase rapidly in the near future. We already have the technology; it’s largely a matter of how we adapt it.

Jay Ven Eman
CEO, Access Innovations, Inc.

Artificial Intelligence Not Quite There Yet

Technology continues to amaze us. Remember when a fax machine impressed us? Now they are teaching computers to analyze and understand the real world, or at least they are trying.

Artificial intelligence attempts to understand how our brain accomplishes what seem to us as menial tasks. There have been a few highlights of success, but in very limited and controlled settings. Nothing that promises to become part of the consumer demand process, except maybe for Hollywood purposes.

Business 2 Community brought this news to our attention in their article, “Artificial Intelligence: The Next Big Thing.” Harnessing this technology could change the landscape of computers forever.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Innovation Awards Announced

Pipeline Publishing has announced the winners of its prestigious 2012 Innovation Awards. These awards are considered some of the most credible and objective endorsements of innovation and thought leadership in the communications technology industry.

MarketWatch brought this news to our attention in their article, “Winners Announced for Pipeline’s 2012 Innovation Awards.” Over 70 companies were nominated this year, narrowed down to a select group of less than 20 finalists.

There were ten 2012 Innovation Award winners. Ontology Systems won in the Technical Innovation category, which recognizes those who develop and leverage emerging technologies. Other notable winners were Microsoft for Best Ecosystem (recognizing partnerships, ecosystems, and programs that drive and promote innovation), and Tekelec, who won in the Most Innovative Company category (recognizing companies that embrace innovation throughout their organization).

Congratulations to all the winners.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Technology and Its Impact On Our Lives

Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former financial analyst, describes what she calls “the re-imagination of nearly everything” powered by mobile and social. Speaking to what she considers the biggest weakness in today’s Internet industry, she gives some context to the state of the global economy.

This interesting topic was found on All Things D in their post, “Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends, Live at D10 (Slides),” where a slide show is provided.

It is no secret that the Internet has changed so many parts of our personal and professional lives. And the mobile technology, I believe, has just begun to make an impact that will grow beyond our wildest imaginations. But that is just my humble opinion.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

« Previous Page — Next Page »