Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Technology Review: Q&A: Peter Norvig

Q&A: Peter Norvig: We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing 'What is the capital of France?' won't get you better results than typing 'capital of France.' But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, 'New York' is different from 'York,' but 'Vegas' is the same as 'Las Vegas,' and 'Jersey' may or may not be the same as 'New Jersey.' That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface.


[comments at slashdot]

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Document & Media Exploitation

Document & Media Exploitation

From Going Multimedia Vol. 5, No. 7 - November/December 2007 by Simson L. Garfinkel, Ph.D.
The DOMEX challenge is to turn digital bits into actionable intelligence.

A computer used by Al Qaeda ends up in the hands of a Wall Street Journal reporter. A laptop from Iran is discovered that contains details of that country's nuclear weapons program. Photographs and videos are downloaded from terrorist Web sites.

As evidenced by these and countless other cases, digital documents and storage devices hold the key to many ongoing military and criminal investigations. The most straightforward approach to using these media and documents is to explore them with ordinary tools - open the word files with Microsoft Word, view the Web pages with Internet Explorer, and so on.

Although this straightforward approach is easy to understand, it can miss a lot. Deleted and invisible files can be made visible using basic forensic tools. Programs called carvers can locate information that isn't even a complete file and turn it into a form that can be readily processed. Detailed examination of e-mail headers and log files can reveal where a computer was used and other computers with which it came into contact. Linguistic tools can discover multiple documents that refer to the same individuals, even though names in the different documents have different spellings and are in different human languages. Data-mining techniques such as cross-drive analysis can reconstruct social networks - automatically determining, for example, if the computer's previous user was in contact with known terrorists. This sort of advanced analysis is the stuff of DOMEX, the little-known intelligence practice of document and media exploitation.

The U.S. intelligence community defines DOMEX as "the processing, translation, analysis, and dissemination of collected hard-copy documents and electronic media, which are under the U.S. government's physical control and are not publicly available."1 That definition goes on to exclude "the handling of documents and media during the collection, initial review, and inventory process." DOMEX is not about being a digital librarian; it's about being a digital detective.

Although very little has been disclosed about the government's DOMEX activities, in recent years academic researchers - particularly those concerned with electronic privacy - have learned a great deal about the general process of electronic document and media exploitation. My interest in DOMEX started while studying data left on hard drives and memory sticks after files had been deleted or the media had been "formatted." I built a system to automatically copy the data off the hard drives, store it on a server, and search for confidential information. In the process I built a rudimentary DOMEX system. Other recent academic research in the fields of computer forensics, data recovery, machine translation, and data mining is also directly applicable to DOMEX.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Google and Its Enemies

Google and Its Enemies

The much-hyped project to digitize 32 million books sounds like a good idea. Why are so many people taking shots at it?

Nice article by Jonathan V. Last at Weekly Standard