Will Facebook be sitting on the dock ?

Is it illegal for Facebook to use of facial recognition software that collects biometric data without user consent?? ( cf. July post by Prasad, "Facebook Tag Suggestions: A Value-Add or a Trepass??"). 

Facebook might be facing a legal action as it seems to not be complying with EU privacy laws according to the office of the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

The law prescribe that a company has to ask a user if they want their information stored or not, and then they are not allowed to store it if the person says no. Facebook does not search for approval, but goes ahead and stores the information.

Facebook’s defence is that users are allowed to change their settings to opt-out. However, Facebook state that “During our contentious dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.” Therefore, Facebook is currently working with the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to create a way to properly alert users to Facebook’s features and gaining their approval.

What is your opinion : Shall Facebook be oblige to ask for the prior approval of its users or a posterior notification shall be sufficient ?

ARE YOU READY???

In a recent commercial from a very well-known brand, the NBA star Kevin Durant becomes the Head of a recruiting agency where with the help of other NBA stars like Dirk Nowitzki and Marco Belinelli, they scout for young talents using the latest visual analytic's tools available in the market!

Visual Analytics: Challenges that lie ahead

It all started in 2005, when an international team of inter-disciplinary panelists from IEEE CG&A coined the definition of term visual analytics as, "Science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces". Visual Analytics and its applications in various fields of research, security and business have come a long way since then.

Today in 2013, as we take a look at various aspects of visual analytics through our blog, an obvious question that comes to our minds is, what are the potential challenges that lie ahead for this promising sector? Can these challenges be overcome?

Lets take a brief overview of all this and more in my current post.

First and the foremost of the challenges for visual analytics going forward is to develop in-situ analysis capabilities. With the volumes of data to be processed increasing by minute, the traditional approach of storing this data into conventional database and then processing it may be a major bottleneck. High Performance Computing of data, even while it is in the memory in the need of this day and visual analytics platforms need to incorporate this requirement while coming up with new upgrades.

Another major challenge comes in terms of limitations in terms of human interaction and user interfacing of visual analytics systems. The challenges in this regards are multiple, ranging from handling heterogeneous inputs to scalability to accurate representation of all data uncertainties and evidences, all the way up to limitations of human cognitive abilities to process the visual analytics data for accurate interpretations.

Speaking of human and system performance limitations, another major challenge is also of storage of huge data that visual analytics takes in. With all companies preferring cloud based storage, data required to be processed by visual analytics tools that are deployed by say Facebook is huge and requires not only huge cloud based storage, but also a capability to maintain this storage online at all times. Various algorithms which process this data in cloud, are also many a times based in the cloud and updating and maintaining these algorithms is another challenge that comes along with this.

With these huge scales of data that we are now talking about, when it comes to future and current challenges, there is also a regulatory aspect involved with various governments restricting the flow and access of data between countries and regions. These government regulations impose new constraints on efficient processing logic needed.

Well, well, well .. so much to talk about when it comes to challenges that lie ahead. So, can these be overcome?

Why not? With efficient combination of High Performance Computing [HPC] and parallel/multi-thread processing, many of the computing issues can atleast be nailed down. Government regulations cannot be helped and processing logic and storage and data retrieval mechanisms will have to find the most efficient way around.

When it comes to human cognitive skills though, who knows we may soon have to defrost the Super-Human "Kahn" and his crew that the Star Trek folks has recently succeeded to freeze into state of coma :-D

Shopping for Visual Analytics Platform??

Well, all this talk about how Visual Analytics is good or bad; and our readers must now be wondering - does this visual analytics make any business sense? is there any commercial application, or a platform, which businesses can deploy to use visual analytics for making their life better?

Answer is a big YES.
And, while there are a number of vendors currently providing Visual Analytics packages - both server based and cloud based, I found one vendor particularly interesting. Name of vendor is SAS.

In March 2012, SAS introduced its Big Data Visual Analytics Platform. This is how "Information Week" describes the SAS platform,
"It promises the speed-of-thought data-analysis capabilities of SAP Hana, the scalability of Hadoop, and the intuitive visual-analysis capabilities of Tableau. But what makes SAS Visual Analytics, a platform announced Thursday, truly stand out is the tie to the Cary, N.C.-based vendor's extensive predictive analytics portfolio.
SAS Visual Analytics is not an in-memory database. In fact, it liberates customers (and SAS) from dependence on an expensive third-party database because it holds data in memory on a rack of blades running the Hadoop Distributed File System. Customers won't have to know anything about configuring or running Hadoop, said SAS, because all the deployment, provisioning, and administration will be handled by the platform's SAS LASR Analytic Server. The platform has been tested with more than 20,000 columns and 1 billion rows of data, according to SAS, and to scale out, customers simply add more nodes."

Jim Davis, SAS' senior VP and chief marketing officer, elaborated further, "If you look at what SAS is doing versus others, we're not just exploring past activity, we're supporting analyses that are predictive, so people can see into the future of their business performance"

As an example, Davis said that predictive marketing campaign optimization efforts that now take eight to 10 hours in a conventional SAS environment can be completed in less than three minutes on the platform, and bank-risk calculations that formerly took 18 hours now take 15 minutes.

Moving a step ahead with current trends, on 1st May 2013, SAS took its visual analytics paltform to the cloud.
"Every IT organization is either building their own private cloud of virtualized systems on commodity hardware or looking to third-party providers," said SAS CTO Keith Collins, in a statement. "These enhancements will make it easier for users to access new SAS high-performance analytics capabilities in our current analytic product portfolio. Our goal is to decrease the time-to-value for SAS users while reducing the total cost of ownership for IT."

With these features and developments, SAS currently offers Business Analytics solutions for variety of industries as Banking, Communications, Education, Government, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Utilities, etc.

To discuss the example of its application in banking, it is interesting to know that SAS Visual Analytics can be used to visually explore data sets of any size to spot trends, patterns and hidden insights that you can use to design a strategy, confirm a hypothesis or identify a new idea. For example, you can:
- Create more personalized customer interactions and an improved customer experience based on a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.
- Quickly and accurately perform interactive regulatory data analysis to spot patterns and trends, answer regulatory questions and deliver the exact information requested during inquiries.

More information about business application of SAS Visual Analytics can be explored at their website:
http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/overview.html

This post may sound like a promo for SAS, but based on my lookout, this seems to be one of the best ways to implement Visual Analytics for any business, no matter how small or big it is; and it is this practical utility of our discussed topic 'Visual Analytics' that makes all this information even more appealing to our group.

I am sure our readers will also enjoy reading this post and knowing more about a prominent Visual Analytics vendor.

Demographics & Video Analytics

Companies often segment their customers based on the information they gather through surveys, customer feedback forms, and information requests. Some grocery stores gather information through loyalty reward programs in which customers get special offers or discounts for being club members. In order to gain these benefits supermarkets require that the customers provide some basic demographic information to the grocery retailers that later gets uploaded to a data base and tracks their individual purchases. The demographic information is valuable because it gives the entire supply chain information as the grocery stores share the data with their suppliers and food manufacturers. This has been a great resource for larger companies but there are even more tools available made possible by Video Analytics that all retail stores can benefit from. Video Analytics is popularly known for its use as a security tool but it can be used for other capacities like marketing. 

Video Analytics provides an additional source of information that can help retailers gain more knowledge about their customer base. For example it can help businesses count how much foot traffic comes into its buildings and identify what kind of people are walking in. If you have 300 potential customers walk in to your store every day the video analytics program can help detect how many are male and how many are female. It can help distinguish what kinds of things they look at, where they spend their time and whether or not they purchase something. Even more, it can give an approximation of their age. The accuracy is high and reliable which makes the tool valuable because it can provide additional information about potential customers. Video Analytics can help businesses improve their marketing efforts as they learn more about the people who walk through their stores. With its use, we can expect that retailers will have a better idea of what to stock on the shelves not just based on what people have previously purchased but also based on what draws people in. 

See more here: 

http://www.3vr.com/products/videoanalytics/demographics

If you too forget people's names, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel...

As the battle between privacy protection and tech advancement continues, apparently Google has lost a battle. Intensified arguments and concerns towards access to personal information about people and other objects viewed by the Google Glass device forced the company to ban facial recognition and voice-print apps for the device. 

This means a halt on the stalkers and creeps, but also in the advancement of the ability to identify someone and bring up allergies, for example, in the case of a doctor, or prevention of people like me facing the embarrassment of not remembering a person's name. However, we all know that new things take time to sink in, so hopefully, our name-forgetting days are counted. And if this day should come sooner than later, and you still feel unsafe, rest assured that there will always be "rebel" technologies to protect you, such as the "Glasses to stop Google Glass from recognizing your face". Now isn't that something - Japan researchers already created the antimatter of the Google Glass even before it exists...

More info: 

http://bgr.com/2013/06/20/google-glass-facial-recognition-blocking/

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226906