Date: Wednesday, 12 July 2006, 6:30 PM
Location: SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue,
Palo Alto, CA (Google
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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.