Briefs

IEEE Spectrum, "A Fountain of Knowledge: 2004 will be the year of the analysis engine"

By Stephen Cass, Jan 4, 2004

The great strength of computers is that they can reliably manipulate vast amounts of data very quickly. Their great weakness is that they don�t have a clue as to what any of that data actually means.

Computer scientists have been laboring for decades to eliminate that weakness, with some limited successes in some limited domains. Now, IBM Corp. appears to have made a major breakthrough in the field of machine understanding. The results could spell big business not just for IBM but for data miners, content providers, retailers, political consultants, market analysts, and any other group that relies on information as part of its stock in trade.

IBM�s breakthrough is called WebFountain�half a football field�s worth of rack-mounted processors, routers, and disk drives running a huge menagerie of programs. All this hardware and software is dedicated to one purpose: making sense of the churning ocean of information, opinion, and falsehood that roils the Internet every second of every day.

Here is the rest of the story.