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.

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.)

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…

In his latest blog post (European Search Vendor Round Up, September 16, 2009), search expert Stephen Arnold names Exalead as one of the search industry’s most dynamic companies in Europe. It is a welcome recognition from a veteran search analyst who consistently provides technical and financial analysis of actual customer implementations in his research.

Steve makes a very good point, too, concerning the importance of product testing. While expensive to do, we appreciate Steve’s approach of hands-on work with the software products he advocates. There’s nothing like real data to prove a point. Thanks, Steve.

In September, Exalead will be present at no less than 3 European events. Whether you are in Berlin, London or Paris, come and meet our team!

• SuMa-eV Forum, Berlin, September 10th

The German “Association for the Promotion of Search Engine Technology and Free Access to Knowledge” holds its 6th meeting on the topic  “Information and Knowledge – The Driving Force of the 21st Century?” on September 10th. Exalead will be participating, and François Bourdoncle, Exalead co-founder, will lead a workshop on innovative and alternative new search engine technologies.
Learn More (in German)

• Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2009, London, September 16th and 17th

Exalead is both an exhibitor and sponsor of this summit held by Gartner, one of the most well-known analyst companies in Information Technologies. Do not miss the presentation by Jean-François Gaucheron from AFP (Agence France Presse), an Exalead customer, on Thursday 17th.
Learn More | Subscribe

• Conference Décisionnel CIO – LeMonde Informatique, Paris,
  September 22nd

This free meeting is for CIOs and Project Managers only. It will be held on the morning of September 22nd at Hôtel Prince de Galles.
Learn More | Subscribe (in French)
Discover more events in which Exalead will be participating

After being nominated for the past four consecutive years as one of KMWorld’s Trend Setting Products, Exalead Cloudview™ has made the final list yet again.

The judging panel was composed of editorial members at KMWorld, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users. They assessed more than 800 products and selected those demonstrating visible technology breakthroughs that fulfill the challenges and needs of both vendors and customers.

The complete list of award winners will be featured in the KMWorld’s September 2009 issue and then in its online version.

About KMWorld
KMWorld is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market. The publication covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management by informing its more than 50,000 subscribers about the components and processes, and subsequent success stories that together offer solutions to improve business performance.  KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

Last April, Exalead paved the road towards innovation by becoming the Entrepreneurial partner of the Erasmus Mundus European project, a co-operation and mobility program which promotes Research and Development in the European Union.

Exalead has backed the creation of a new Master’s Program in “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” (EMM-DMKM).  According to MIT’s analysts, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery have been recognized as emerging technologies that will change the world.

Students from all over the world who have a Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics or Statistics could be enrolled in the Master’s Program from September 2010, in 6 different universities located in 4 countries: France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Lyon 2, Polytech’Nantes graduate school of engineering), Italy (the University of West Piedmont, Turin), Romania (The Polytehnica University of Bucharest), and Spain (the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona).

The Master’s program is very unique because the courses are both devoted to Marketing and also to Development with courses like Human/Computer Interfaces or Web/Social Networks/Association/Text/Multimedia Mining.

The program has been selected and awarded by the European Committee, and it’s recognized and certified EMM-DMKM as a Master of Excellence at the European level.  It will remain a unique Erasmus Mundus program in Europe focused on the topic of “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” and specific funding and scholarships will be assigned to the best “non-European” students who apply to the Master’s Program.

For those who want more information about the Master’s Program in  Data Mining and Knowledge Management, it’s here.

The O’Reilly Team’s Velocity ‘09 conference was held June 22-24 in San Jose, California.

Several ‘Web celebrities’ spoke about Cloud Computing, a theme picked up by some lesser-known gurus as well.

That is the case of Jeremie, an R&D Engineer at Exalead, who was chosen as a speaker for an Ignite session.

What is an Ignite session? It’s a session in which each speaker has 5 minutes to talk about a technical Web-related issue, with 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds -  before an audience composed of fellow “geeks,” of course.

Jeremie thus spoke for 5 minutes on a trendy topic in data storage solutions: “key value stores”. This data storage system appears to be more efficient than traditional relational database management systems, but it is also more simplistic. According to Jeremie’s point of view, one should be vigilant regarding the immaturity of some of these solutions. Moreover, they make data cross-referencing more complicated, and they cannot be used for every type of application. These simple tools have been created for very specific needs (e.g., there are key value stores in Exalead’s low index layers).

Here is Jeremie’s session at Ignite Velocity 09:

Why is choosing a company name with care so important?

Because choosing a company name with care means going beyond simple marketing concerns…

To age well, a name should speak to a company’s unique DNA and not today’s hot trend.

To stand out within the frenzied mass of today’s Internet, a name must also be both distinct and instantly recognizable. Confusion is the enemy of a strong brand.

We strove to ensure Exalead would reflect us uniquely and accurately: both what we were yesterday, and what we will be tomorrow.

Thank you, Steve Arnold, for a helpful reminder to us all of the importance of choosing a name with care…

Read Steve Arnold’s blog entry on ArnoldIT