UPDATED 14:50 EDT / JUNE 04 2012

NEWS

Vodafone Xone Hackathon Brings Expertmaker AI Insights to Mobile

The information ecology is a wild one, a jungle mired with millions of information sources bombarding people from every direction, each one vying for their attention. Storage and networking are no longer the bottlenecks to getting the information now we’ve even got a term for it: “information overload.” News sites, blogs, social media—Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr—all of them contain a vast continuum of newsworthy and interesting information and now filtering that molten miasma of informatics at the personal level is becoming a problem.

Enter the Vodafone AI Hackathon happening the weekend of June 8to 10 in Redwood City, CA to bring together the best and brightest minds to tackle this subject with regards to the mobile industry and its collision with artificial intelligence. The Hackathon is sponsored by California and Sweden-based company Expertmaker; a premier technology company who produce an AI platform for developing intelligent applications to parse information, analyze big data sets, and collimate machine learning with user expectations. Taking place at the Vodafone xone, Silicon Valley-based incubation center for one of the largest global mobile operators Vodafone themselves.

In the parlance of science fiction authors an AI that does what the Vodafone Hackathon is seeking would be an “expert agent” or essentially an application that helps filter numerous information sources according to the whim and expectations of an individual to provide them the “most relevant” or “most interesting” items in a given continuum. It’s the golden egg that search giants such as Google have been seeking for some time.

Lars Hård, CTO and founder of Expertmaker

“Today’s average mobile consumer has 41 apps on their mobile device,” says Lars Hard, CTO and founder of Expertmaker. “This is a 28% increase from last year’s number of apps and it’s also a very clear sign that consumers are looking for ways in which they can access information, manage information or perform tasks on a device as easily as possible. Therefore, apps are already moving us toward expecting our machines to perform more simplistic–yet also more specific and personal–tasks on command.”

As the Internet proliferates all levels of our lives, people like to take their lives on-the-go, and that means mobile devices. In fact, a mobile device is the perfect place to open a window for an expert agent where it can constantly learn from the preferences and behavior of the person its secretary to.

Hard adds, “Our AI Hackathon is built on the premise that using AI we can do a better job and build smarter apps that address the information overload we as consumers face today. I look forward to seeing the next generation apps that emerge from this event that do just that.”

Numerous people from the DevOps field and developers are being invited out to Redwood City to participate in this event and there’s some lucrative reasons to do so. “All participants will receive a free one-year Expertmaker license to power the Hackathon app and any other AI powered apps they choose to create. In addition, cash prizes will be awarded: 1st Place:  $10,000; 2nd Place:  $7,000; 3rd Place:  $4,000.”

The competition will be judged by Expertmaker, Vodafone, and the additional partner of Verizon Wireless.

Depending on the fuel and the fire at the Vodafone AI Hackathon we might just see the mobile version of IBM’s Watson make it’s debut—which, for the forward-looking, is an excellent example of where expert systems and agents may go in the future.

The information revolution will be driven by the engine of AI

Big data is a big deal when it comes to enterprise strategy and looking from the top-down; but when it comes to mobile handheld devices, it’s preeminently the domain of personal preference and looking from the individual-out. Artificial intelligence research provides solutions for both, and in many ways, having something that thinks a lot like the customer accessible via their mobile device gives them better insight without having to sift through gigabytes of data.

“Today we are both generating and accessing more information than ever before –about 90 percent of the data that exists today was created in the past two years,” said Hard on the subject of information overload. “We are in need of tools that help us process and analyze this data to provide key solutions to living and managing our daily lives.”

He adds, “The mobile platform, cloud computing, big data analysis and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are converging to help us take the next significant step in machine intelligence which will do just that.”

With companies like Expertmaker at the helm, seeking better implantations of AI products for individual-based mobile aps we can probably expect that everything Hard lists will confluence nicely. Through the window of a mobile device an expert agent could save a lot of time and energy in the personal sphere.

No doubt, it will help combat the overwhelming sense of “information overload” that our wired society is inexorably sailing towards.


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