Narus Develops Social Media Sleuth 96
maximus1 writes "Narus is developing a new technology code-named Hone that can be used to identify anonymous users of social networks and Internet services. Hone can do some pretty 'scary' things, says Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. Hone uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. 'It's going to go through a set of documents and automatically it's going to organize them in topics — I'm not talking about keywords as is done today, I'm talking about topics,' he said. That can't be done with today's technology, he said. 'If you search for fertilizers on Google ... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.' Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday."
Semantic web (Score:2, Informative)
It sounds like what he's talking about is semantic parsing of data. If his system is predicated on automated semantic data parsing, that seems like a pretty big step in the project. It's a problem that CS has been working on for decades. It's not exactly a minor thing that they'll get out of the way early on.
Latent Semantic Indexing (Score:2, Informative)
The automated categorization of text by topic is not new. Latent Semantic Indexing [wikipedia.org] has been in use for just this purpose since 1992. Perhaps Narus is taking a new approach, but the concept itself is far from the revolutionary breakthrough they would have you believe.
Re:But does it know me? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ummmm.... (Score:4, Informative)
Narus' entire customer base is pretty much government & law enforcement. Narus Insight is the toy used by the NSA to sniff Internet traffic.
Re:Sounds like Semantic Web to me. (Score:3, Informative)