A Naturally Intelligent Web: Unified Semantics and Statistics

Join us on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 6:30 PM at Carrboro Creative Coworking for the March meeting of the RTP Semantic Web Meetup. Manny Aparicio of Saffron Technology (https://www.saffrontec... (https://www.saffrontech.com/)) will be our featured speaker.

Title
A Naturally Intelligent Web: Unified Semantics and Statistics through
a Massive Scale of Associative Memories

Presentation
The evolution of the Web will continue as an ever increasing growth of
data and users. New representations are emerging toward an
intelligent Web, defined as a "connection engine" of data to data,
data to users, and users to users. Berners-Lee called for a Semantic
Web as a schema-free graph of such connections (a "simple AI") to
better address scale and complexity, but logical connections do not
fully represent intelligence. The simple AI of graph semantics moves
closer to associative connectionism, and Semantic Web triple stores
are described as "synapses" for an Internet brain. But as the study
of neuroscience has been suggested to make the Web "wired for
thought", natural brains represent and reason by connections and their
frequencies, semantics and statistics. The speaker will describe
memory-based representation and reasoning to unify both. This
approach is more "natural" to how we think and to what neurons
compute. It is also the way to make more intelligent machines.
Semantic technology is already being applied to national security and
commercial business intelligence, where traditional databases and
statistics are failing to support analysis. However, the grab-bag of
analytic methods remains fractured and limited. Whether Internet or
intranet, the same problems of scale and complexity require a new
unified approach. Saffron Technology's applications to national,
business, and consumer intelligence will be described, ranging from
sense-making entity analytics to decision-making predictive analytics.
The understanding and adoption of such a new technology is hard, even
if the idea is simple, and the speaker will describe his own business
experience with this disruptive technology. Making sense of massive
"tweets" will provide a fun demonstration of the underlying memory
methods and how service-oriented architectures, Web-oriented REST
interfaces, and cloud deployments public and private are changing the
game. You will leave with a new perspective on how markets are moving
toward associative representation and reasoning, including Saffron's
business model for engagement and adoption.

Speaker
Manuel Aparicio is the CEO and co-founder of Saffron Technology, a
next generation business intelligence company. Prior to Saffron, he
was Chief Scientist of the IBM Intelligent Agent Center in RTP. While
at IBM he served on the boards of The Agent Society, an international
consortium, and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, and
international standards body. At Saffron Technology, his business
focus is on national security (an early leader of semantic
technologies), although several commercial interests from
manufacturing to healthcare also keep him busy. He holds several
patents and has published numerous papers and journal articles with 30
years of experience in machine learning and 20 years in intelligent
agents. Aparicio is an alumnus of the University of South Florida with
a PhD in Experimental Psychology. His dissertation focused on
biologically-realistic neurocomputing.