Archive for July, 2006
Feds Sharpen Secret Tools for Data Mining
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 | , | No Comments
Big brother may be trying to watch you, but it’s unclear how skilled he is at dealing with the petabytes of information being collected.
Data-mining systems used by intelligence agencies include:
• Hardware and software from NCR subsidiary Teradata that is capable of storing and searching databases as large as 4 million gigabytes, or twice as much information as is held in all research libraries in the USA. Teradata executive Bill Cooper won’t say what’s in the Teradata systems that intelligence agencies use, but he says their applications include searching financial transactions for signs of money laundering.
• A program designed to identify members of terrorist networks and determine the most important members of those networks. Cogito Inc., of Draper, Utah, sold the program to the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, company executive William Donahoo says.
• Software from Verity Inc. used by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. A 2004 congressional report says DIA’s Verity system includes personally identifiable information about Americans from other agencies and commercial sources.
The five data-mining programs developed under Total Information Awareness are among at least eight TIA projects that have continued since Congress killed TIA in 2003. They include four efforts to create software that searches through mountains of data for evidence of terrorists and three projects that allow intelligence analysts from many different agencies to collaborate on computer networks. A contract to pull all of the new software together into a working system also remained active until at least last year, government records show.
AI Set to Exceed Human Brain Power
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 | | No Comments
While the pace of advancement in machine intelligence has been slower than most have hoped, progress is being made. New approaches are needed in order to assimilate and understand the petabytes of information being generated by our 21 century society. Existing methods of computing and analysis need to evolve significantly in order to keep up with the rising data tide, else it will be all we can do just to process and store all the information being created let alone gleen useful knowledge from it.
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the UK’s Oxford University, said that AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis. “A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI anymore.”
But Bostrom said that traditional “top-down” approaches to AI, in which programmers coded machined to cope with specific situations, were being supplemented by “bottom-up” systems inspired by enhanced understanding of the neural networks of the brain, leading to more subtle forms of AI.
“The more we discover how the human brain achieves intelligence the more we’ll be able to use the same computational architecture and logarithms in computers,” said Bostrom.