Big Data Analytics at Thomson Reuters. Interview with Jochen L. Leidner by Roberto V. Zicari.
In case you don’t know, Jochen L. Leidner has the title: “Lead Scientist, of the London R&D at Thomson Reuters.”
Which goes a long way to explaining the importance of this Q&A exchange:
Q12 What are the main research challenges ahead? And what are the main business challenges ahead?
Jochen L. Leidner: Some of the main business challenges are the cost pressure that some of our customers face, and the increasing availability of low-cost or free-of-charge information sources, i.e. the commoditization of information. I would caution here that whereas the amount of information available for free is large, this in itself does not help you if you have a particular problem and cannot find the information that helps you solve it, either because the solution is not there despite the size, or because it is there but findability is low. Further challenges include information integration, making systems ever more adaptive, but only to the extent it is useful, or supporting better personalization. Having said this sometimes systems need to be run in a non-personalized mode (e.g. in the field of e-discovery, you need to have a certain consistency, namely that the same legal search systems retrieves the same things today and tomorrow, and to different parties.
How are you planning to address:
- The required information is not available in the system. A semantic 404 as it were. To distinguish the case of its there but wrong search terms in use.
- Low findability.
- Information integration (not normalization)
- System adaptability/personalization, but to users and not developers.
- Search consistency, same result tomorrow as today.
?
The rest of the interview is more than worth your time.
I singled out the research/business challenges as a possible map forward.
We all know where we have been.