Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

It’s official! Exalead’s Voxalead News video search has been named “Most Practical” Innovation in ACM’s Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009.

An innovation produced by Exalead’s Exalabs research laboratory, Voxalead News lets you search for keywords inside videos, rather than simply searching limited external information like titles or descriptions. A tremendous timesaver, Voxalead further lets you jump right to the point in the video in which your search term is used! The Voxalead demonstration currently offers search in four languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic) across a select set of news sources.

In addition to captivating news aficionados, this ‘most practical’ innovation is capturing the attention of business professionals in sectors such as Media, Publishing, eDiscovery, Competitive Intelligence, and Social Networking and Content Sharing.

For more information, visit the Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009 Web page. You can also test drive Voxalead News and other Exalead innovations at the Exalabs site.

Many of you have already tested Chromatik, the color-based image search demo from our research laboratory, Exalabs. In line with our commitment to incorporate the best of Exalabs technology into our public search engine, we have now integrated Chromatik functionality into the Exalead Image Search. See the new color palette options on menu of the Image Search results page:

The tool features a palette of 8 colors. Simply click on a color to filter results according to your color of choice:

You can refine your selections even further by selecting additional colors from the palette, helping you locate images with just the right mix of colors:

There’s no limit to the colors you can mix and match!

The last option on the color palette menu lets you narrow your results to black and white images only, a feature available on the prior version of our Image Search:

This is only the beginning! We’ve already begun work on incorporating other Chromatik features into our Exalead Image Search. So be sure to check back soon, and in the meantime, we’d love to receive your feedback on feedback.exalead.com.

More Mappable Data, and Map-Hungry Users
More and more information on the Internet is ‘mappable’:

• The physical addresses of offices or stores

• Wikipedia articles (country/city info, geo-science articles, etc.)

• Photos and videos with content of local interest on “Web 2.0” content-sharing sites

• POI (Point Of Interest) services like tourism portals (attractions, hotels, etc.)

Naturally enough, numerous services have recently appeared allowing Net surfers to view search results on a map, bridging the gap between the ‘real world’ and Web content. No longer satisfied with viewing mappable information presented in an old-fashioned laundry list of search results, users today are hungry to search for information within and through a map. And Exalead is eager to join users in exploring the boundaries of map-based search. We’ve therefore added a new geo-spatial search demo, Sourcier, to our Exalabs site.

Map-Based Search with Exalead
Sourcier was produced in collaboration with France’s leading public earth science institution, BRGM (Bureau of Geological and Mining Research). It provides map-centered search for metropolitan France groundwater resources using publicly available data from the ADES site.

Sourcier enables users to search water resources and water-related points of interest (along with associated scientific data) according to:

• A chemical component, environmental factor, or micro-biological element

• A concentration range

• A time period

• A geographical area, by navigating the map using drawing tools, or specifying an administrative area (region, county or municipality)

Results are displayed directly on the map along with markers for exploring related data in a graphical form.

To Come…
Forthcoming indexation and geo-search experiments using Exalead technology will involve support for more complex geometric objects and distance calculations to support extrapolation to different geometric shapes (for example, using a specified radius to manipulate maximum distance).

The indexation of geometric objects  such as polygons would permit one, for example, to search London parks and reuse their geo-spatial ‘fingerprints’ on the map as search criteria, and to retrieve related Web data like geo-tagged photos or videos.

Sourcier is available at: http://sourcier.labs.exalead.com/

(Note: the service is presently available in French.)

It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I for one would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that are taking place about their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation, negative sentiment and bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more use cases of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related web sites or people.  The experiment is built upon our web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.

Windows 7, the newest version of Microsoft Windows, is scheduled to hit the shelves October 22. Worried about how your favorite desktop search application will function if you upgrade? No need to panic! Exalead Desktop is already functional with Windows 7!

Exalead is proud to announce that its ExaLabs web application Voxalead News has been chosen as a finalist for this year’s Multimedia Grand Challenge in the category of Video Segmentation. This challenge is part of ACM Multimedia Conference, the biggest scientific conference on multimedia applications and will take place in Beijing between October 19th and 24th.

Voxalead News, previously known as Voxalead, is a web application that enables you to search for text within videos so you can gain a wide panorama of what is said about a topic in the news. It uses a Speech-to-Text transcription module from LIMSI (IT Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, an entity of CNRS) to transcribe speeches.

As usual in this type of competition, there are many challengers. All categories included, there are 14 of finalists this year that will promote their application with a 3min-speech a the conference. Let’s encourage and wish good luck to Julien who will champion Voxalead News in Beijing!

Click here for the details of Yahoo’s Challenge on Video Segmentation and consult the complete list of finalists.

By the way, do not forget to test Voxalead News at voxalead.labs.exalead.com !

Stay tuned…

So far, the only solution proposed by database vendors to provide acceptable performance on a large volume of information is to improve the performance of the underlying hardware. In-memory databases like Oracle TimesTen or DB2 SolidDB require huge amounts of physical memory. Datawarehouse appliances like TeraData or Netezza rely on specialised hardware coprocessors. And most recently, as Steve Arnolds points out in his blog, Oracle itself admits that the acquisition of Sun will allow them to build more powerful “systems” by combining Sun’s high-end hardware with Oracle’s database platform.

At Exalead, we believe that Search-Based Applications, or SBAs, are another (I could say more “sustainable”) solution to this problem. The key to efficiently handling large amounts of data is to make sure that data access has a strong “Spatial Locality“. Quoting Wikipedia, achieving spatial locality means that “if a particular memory location is referenced at a particular time, then it is likely that nearby memory locations will be referenced in the near future.”  The main problem with relational databases is that they have very poor spatial locality, because the objects they store are spread across a large number of different tables. High-end CRM or ERP solutions typically store their data on as many as 65,000 different tables, each table being stored at a different disk location. Imagine how many different disk locations the system needs to touch just to display information about a customer or a product on a call center agent’s screen, or to produce a complex BI report. Poor spatial locality leads to huge requirements for disk access, which is the main performance bottleneck for databases today.

SBAs are built on a very different data model, centered around the notion of a “business item”. A “business item” is a self-contained object corresponding to a “real-life” entity that is manipulated by the application and understood by the end-users. For example, in a CRM application, business items would be the Contacts, Opportunities and Leads that are viewed by the business users. Unlike applications built using a relational data model, a business item-centric storage strategy allows for great data spatial locality, since the pieces of information required to answer complex, multi-criteria search queries are all part of a single business item type, and hence stored close to each other on a disk. The performance gap between this local approach and the spread-out relational data model grows exponentially wider as the amout of information applications need to store increases.