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AI Assistant Summarizing Email Threads and Complex Documents

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“Give me the 50k foot level on that topic.”
“Just give us the cliff notes.”
“Please give me the bird’s eye view.”

AI Email Thread Abstraction and Summarization

A daunting, and highly public email has landed in your lap..top to respond.  The email thread goes between over a dozen people all across the globe.  All of the people on the TO list, and some on the CC list, have expressed their points about … something.  There are junior technical and very senior business staff on the email.  I’ll need to understand the email thread content from the perspective of each person that replied to the thread.  That may involve sifting through each of the emails on the thread.  Even though the people on the emails are English fluent, their response styles may be different based on culture, or seniority of staff (e.g. abstractly written).  Also, the technical folks might want to keep the conversation of the email granular and succinct.
Let’s throw a bit of [AI] automation at this problem.
Another step in our AI personal assistant evolution, email thread aggregation and summarization utilizing cognitive APIs | tools such as what IBM Watson has implemented with their Language APIs.  Based on the documentation provided by their APIs, the above challenges can be resolved for the reader.   A suggestion to an IBM partner for the Watson Cognitive cloud, build an ’email plugin’ if the email product exposes their solution to customization.
A plugin built on top of an email application, flexible enough to allow customization, may be a candidate for Email Thread aggregation and summarization.  Email clients may include IBM Notes, Gmail, (Apple) Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and OpenText FirstClass.
Add this capability to the job description of AI assistants, such as Cortana, Echo, Siri, and Google Now.   In fact, this plug-in may not need the connectivity and usage of an AI assistant, just the email plug-in interacting with a suite of cognitive cloud API calls.

AI Document Abstraction and Summarization

A plug in may also be created for word processors such as Microsoft Word.   Once activated within a document, a summary page may be created and prefixed to the existing document. There are several use cases, such as a synopsis of the document.
With minimal effort from human input, marking up the content, we would still be able to derive the  contextual metadata, and leverage it to create new sentences, paragraphs of sentences.
Update:
I’ve not seen an AI Outlook integration in the list of MS Outlook Add-ins that would bring this functionality to users.
Business, Mobility, Technology

Consumer Electronics Show Highlight: Ford SYNC AppLink Developer Program Launch

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Today I spoke with a Development System Engineer from the Ford SYNC AppLink Team at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and he was extremely enthusiastic about their launch of their API which enables developers of Android and iOS mobile applications to use the SYNC AppLink SDK APIs so a developer may take advantage of SYNC through your mobile device.  The SYNC AppLink software development kit (SDK) the software engineer admitted that the library was relatively limited to roughly 50 API calls (estimate off the cuff), however, they are constantly looking to expand the SDK.  They are recommending utilizing the Voice Recognition API as an example.

As I explored the conversation with this System Engineer / Developer, I tossed a few ideas, and wanted to see the direction of the team.  I suggested expanding the SYNC technology to link the system to measuring tire air pressure, fuel, oil, and other liquids, as well as ‘by the book’ scheduled maintenance, air filtration quality, and so on.  Then the SYNC AppLink team would expose these functions through the SDK, so that mobile application developers can create applications from dashboards, which sync with the phone through Bluetooth automatically every time the user gets in the car, and has an up to date check of their whole car health and maintenance in or out of the vehicle.   There are endless opportunities, such as mobile notifications on low fuel, maintenance, and even may enter a reminder in a task list named after your car, e.g. need 60 thousand mile maintenance, and oil quality poor, must change oil.

There were some potential limitations such as the display of the SYNC system, the SYNC AppLink Development team try to steer clear from distracting the user by exposing the APIs which may allow the mobile development users to modify the graphical user interface, e.g. flashing menus, which may distract the user, and may cause an accident, which would potentially have liability concerns.  At most, they are looking to allow mobile application developers using the SYNC AppLink SDK to push smartphone pictures to an image frame, so you can see your phone pictures.  However, in my humble opinion, there may be significant opportunities, such as a sexier, and more accurate equalizer controls.  At last, we have the ability for SYNC AppLink SDK developers in the future to access information from your phone, such as calendar, stocks, tasks, and use the car sound system and SYNC microphone to add, hear, delete, and subtract any information from your mobile device.

I walked down the isle to another company, chargepoint, which manufactures charging stations, which are reasonably priced for stations at 5 to 10 thousand USD.  This is a system which is rugged and can endure outdoor conditions.  If we take the SYNC technology and integrate it into a Ford Hybrid & Electric Vehicle to analyze electric usage and be able to maximize your electrical charge.  Chargepoint happens to also have an the ability to have an affinity card.  That is for another post.  There are quite a few stories, and it is still early in the week.  Looking for the diamonds in the rough.

One note, although Ford went after Google Android and iOS first because of market share,  you can be sure, Windows Mobile 8 is not far behind.

Business, Technology

Categorizing and Prioritizing Notifications : Get the Noise Out of Google Plus and Twitter

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I really like the spinning red wheel, especially when it gets to 99+, but when you select ‘View Notifications’, you get this droned list of notifications, there has to be some way, in this case to accentuate some of the notifications, maybe +1, are another color than some you’ve commented on.  There is so much information, that  a classification, or a taxonomy would be helpful.  Even some of the comments I’ve put on someone’s Post, I am not interested in being notified if someone adds additional comments, so maybe, a ‘don’t notify’ on a particular post, does that exist, in truth, haven’t checked.  Anyway, it seems like all tweet notifications, or DMs can be easily differentiated, but all tweet notifications as well as Google Plus, or FB notifications seem to be treated equal, it’s NOISE, and we will drown in notifications and start to ignore them, and let some of the good ones pass us by.  I would say an API that allows you to filter notifications by key words, and then that central program can handle your notifications.  If there is an API for notifications, which we know Twitter has, not sure about Google Plus, but there has got to be a 3rd party tool already out there that does this  Simple rules engine. Get the noise out of your notifications and filter and/or prioritize the tweets and Google Plus notifications to want to see first.  It looks like Google Plus did some color alternations between alternate types of notifications, but its not as intuitive as it could be.

I would also like to see the Android Operating System and the Apple iOS expand out their icons to include variation of the application notification.  I don’t think this is available with the 4.01 Android OS, variants of the tweet icon, e.g., still awaiting my update from Samsung for my S3. 🙁

Business, Technology

WordPress Shortcode API to Cloud Storage to Sell Any Digital Intellectual Property.

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So, I was a browsing, going through bills, and thinking, hey relating to my other article on Google Docs and their new API where you could use them as a data warehouse, it occurred to me.   Why can’t we have a public API for all the Cloud Storage systems like Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 (or Box.com), create a plugin to WordPress, add E-Commerce, and you now have your own place to sell digital music, or any Digital intellectual, property store, or host your own database OLTP or OLAP.

And my bro, Fat Panda, might have been thinking the same thing.  He’s one step behind, but he will catch on.  I will try to update for ‘the cheap seats’ in a bit.

For the cheap seats, even those static files stored up in the cloud, you can use a similar model to Google Docs <-> Google Fusion where you add tabular data to storage, read,over-write, or update using home made table locking mechanism, and essentially use the cloud as a data warehouse, or even a database.  Microsoft seems to have a lead on transitional and analytical storage with Microsoft Azure, relational in nature in the cloud, but it is so much simpler than that with cloud storage, although if not implemented with ‘row’ locking,there is an issue with OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing) row level, high volume, but with OLAP, On Line Analytic Processing, not so much, analyzing the way your business does business, and profit more from your consumer data.  There are easy ways to implement row level locking for row level locking of tabular data stored in cloud storage like AWS or Box.Net,  The methods to implement row level locking for OLTP systems using storage in the cloud are easy to implement, and will remind you of old school type alternatives to supplement the AutoNumber columns in MS Access or Identity columns in SQL Server. At the end of the day to either sell digital intellectual property from a WordPress implementation, or run your entire business with a robust cloud database solution for OLTP or OLAP systems using flat file storage!  Why go through all this when the Amazons AWS and Microsoft Azure have or will yearn to start building these solutions in parallel?  Cost effective solutions, and the entire database arena monopolized by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and MySQL, just got extended to a whole lot of database vendors.  It may take a while, but we already know the big Gorilla in the room Google is the first to strike in this game, as a non-traditional database vendor, cloud storage provider with their updated Google Docs API, and optionally usage of their Fusion application.