London Online 2008

Unlocking Innnovation in a Sea of Information

Joe BuzzangaProduct Manager, Science and TechnologyElsevierj.buzzanga@elsevier.comwww.illumin8.com

Online Information 2008Dec. 3, 2008London, UK

Topics

• R&D Challenges• The “Sea of Information”• Limits of Keyword• Next Generation Search

Investment in R&D

Successful Innovation=Market Success

Business Week Innovation Scorecard

Amazon “Kindle”

Technology Moves Fast

~$200 Laptop (OLPC initiative)

Amazon “Kindle”

Winners? Losers?

Winners

Losers

Supporting R&D and the Innovation Process

– Successful innovation requires superior information retrieval systems

– Delivering critical information on trends, competitors, substitute technologies, experts, etc. ie., “technology intelligence”

•“Technology Intelligence is the activity that enables companies to identify the technological opportunities and threats that could affect the future growth and survival of their business.”•“It aims to capture and disseminate the technological information needed for strategic planning and decision making”

Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge

Critical in industries characterized by technology turbulence and rapid change

“Searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data like images, video clips, documents, and the numbers and characters in databases is the rocket science of the digital universe.” IDC

Source: IDC Whitepaper, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, March 2008

The “Sea” of Information

The “Sea” of Information

Today’s Researcher?

Search for Meaning?

5.5 hours / week *Searching and gathering information

* Source: 2007 survey of 6,300 knowledge workers, Outsell, Inc.

4.7 hours / week *Organizing and analyzing and applying information

Challenge for Information Retrieval?

• Separate the Signal from Noise

• Signal processing

Current Search Has Reached Its Limit

A keyword search for “biodegradable film” will yield over 1,000,000 links to documents.

The “key” in Keyword

• Keyword is a misnomer in context of an index• Keyword is in the mind of the searcher• Every word is indexed, since the computer is not smart enough to know significant words (i.e., the “key” in “keyword”)

– Brute force approach, feasible with compute power

Mystery Equation

mystery clip

Search and Its Discontents

What is illumin8?

Research and discovery tool powered by the world’s largest natural language processing engine:

– Designed for Corporate R&D professionals

– One search across billions of web pages, premium scientific articles & patents

– Find organizations, products, experts, approaches, technical landscapes & more

– Growing customer base across leading Fortune – 500 companies

Natural Language Processing at Internet Scale!

How does illumin8 work?

Full Text

Abstracts

Internet

Patents

illumin8 index1.1 billion semantic extractions

7 Billion web pages, blogs and forums

3 Million full-text scientific and technical articles from 1,800 Elsevier journals

36 Million scientific records from 15,000 peer reviewed journals & more than 4,000 publishers

22 Million patents from 5 world-wide patent offices

Extract and Summarize Results

Search

illumin8 discovers and extracts “Results” rather than bibliographic citations

How does illumin8 work?

Content

• Premium Scientific• Patent• Web

-Crawl-Load

NLP Applied

SemanticIndex

Problems, Solutions, Benefits

Search

NLP Applied

Results

Fuse, Classify, Summarize

NLP Applied

NLP applied throughout the system: index, query, result set

Taking Search Beyond Keyword

Keyword Indexing

• Meaning is lost

Sentence processing

• Meaning is maintained

• Identify & classify problems,

solutions and benefits

Neural Network used in handwriting recognition

Solution Problem

“ We have found illumin8 to be a unique and effective way to mine the internet and premium content for solutions to technical problems and questions. The value for us is the unique search capability with the deep and broad content set. Further, doing the research without illumin8 would have taken weeks and I would have spent countless hours looking at data that was not relevant to my project”

“ The company… has signed up a long list of major innovators, including 3M, Proctor & Gamble, General Mills and a couple of dozen other Fortune 500 companies. By all accounts, Illumin8 is set to become the Google of the innovation space...”

The Economist - March 2008

A Proven Solution