Thursday, June 12

Mining for tweets of gold

Dataminr, a New York startup analyses the 500m or so tweets sent out daily.. for important events and news not yet reported by the mainstream media, the firm now has dozens of customers in finance, the news business and the public sector. In January it and Twitter struck a deal to provide alerts to CNN. In April its tracking of tweets was part of a strategy by the authorities in Boston to avoid a repeat of last year’s terrorist attack at the city’s annual marathon.

Dataminr is one of a growing number of firms built on analysing data from Twitter, though most do not have its focus on real-time news alerts.

Read more at The Economist

Three eye-catching big data ventures

1. Open Data Institute

Aim: free data for all

The not-for-profit Open Data Institute has positioned itself as both a catalyst for data innovation and a global hub for data expertise. Based in Shoreditch, east London, the ODI oversees a network of collaborative international "nodes."

2. The Human Brain Project

Aim: to reveal the workings of human consciousness

Flush with €1bn in funding, the Human Brain Project is a 10-year quest to reveal the hidden workings of consciousness.

3. IBM's Computational Creativity

Aim: to make computers 'creative'

Big-data analytics techniques have been deployed by IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center to create new food recipes – what you might call technouvelle cuisine – mined from sources including Wikipedia and Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, then tweaked with an algorithm designed to add creativity to matched ingredients. 

Read more here