Your corporation is watching you, and it might be using Cataphora’s software, which mines employees emails, IMs and other electronic communications to determine how big of a risk a corporation might face from one bad apple.
EMC Corp. (s EMC), the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage and cloud hardware company has bought Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco-based consulting firms well known for its tool Pivotal Tracker and also for its pioneering work on agile development methodology. I had first reported earlier this week.
We live in a big data world, full of complex algorithms among any type of information one can imagine. Gaining the skills to work with it requires a lot work, however — and the first step in changing that might be realizing that data can be fun.
Legal scholars are always searching for ways to improve the patent system, sometimes via sweeping changes, but big data — especially techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing — could help provide a technological fix to a big part of the problem.
It all seems so easy: You log into Facebook, update your status, tell everyone where you are and — voila! — your Timeline is geospatial. Only, while it’s just one extra step for you to add location, building that capability was a tad more complicated for Facebook.
Data, I believe is like plastic. You can use it to make wonderful things. However, like plastic, it can be a great polluter and create havoc on the environment. Or as I like to say, data without context is dirt.
