TECHNOLOGY TOOLS of theTRADE

multilayer enclosures, compres- Samsung 9 sion seals, and a patented Series bumper protection system on all The Samsung 9 Series laptops three sides, corners, and edges. are lightweight, premium, ultra- The tablets are IP65 certified— thin 13.3-inch laptops that protected from dust and low- combine performance and BlackBerry pressure jets of water from all extreme styling. The case is Bridge™. In addi- directions. Weighing 5.2 brushed Duralumin, which is tion, there’s corporate intranet pounds, the 104C is 11.2" ✕ twice as strong as conventional browsing; Docs ToGo from 8.25" ✕ 1.6" with a 10.4-inch aluminum. The laptop weighs BlackBerry DataViz with Word, Excel, and XGA (1,024 x 768) screen with only 2.89 pounds and is only PlayBook PowerPoint compatibility; Adobe options for a Resistive Touch .64 inches thick. The LED- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet reader; and enterprise VPN. Digitizer (Dual Mode) or an backlit screen features Super- is finally available from There’s a three-megapixel AllVue™ Xtreme LCD for Bright Plus with a 160-degree Research in Motion (RIM). The forward-facing camera and a enhanced indoor/outdoor view- viewing angle. Resolution is 5.1" ✕ 7.6" computer weighs five-megapixel rear camera, ing. The CPU is an 1.2GHz 1,366 x 768. There’s a built-in less than a pound and has a stereo speakers, and stereo Dual Core, 160GB hard drive, ambient light sensor to adjust high-resolution (1,024 x 600), microphones. The full-feature 1GB RAM, with an eight-cell the screen’s brightness based seven-inch, multitouch WSVGA Web browser is Flash enabled, removable Lithium ION on ambient lighting conditions. capacitive screen. The operating and there’s built-in support Prismatic battery with up to The processor is a second- system, the QNX BlackBerry for HTML 5. 4.5 hours on a charge. Operat- generation Intel Core i5 com- Tablet OS, provides very fast http://us.blackberry.com ing system can be Windows 7 or bining with the Intel HD GT2 multitasking via symmetric Windows XP Tablet PC edition. integrated graphics to provide multiprocessing. The hardware Xploretech www.xploretech.com high-definition video and features a 1GHz dual-core Tablet processor, 1GB RAM, a micro- The Xploretech iX104 tablets USB port, accelerometer, digital are designed to work in the compass, and GPS. Connectivity most demanding environments, is Wi-Fi 802.11, and the tablet whether on the assembly line or supports Bluetooth 2.1. An outdoors in extreme tempera- amplified BlackBerry experience tures, exposed to vibration, dust, is accomplished through a wire- water, or other destructive ele- less connection to your Black- ments. Designed and tested to Berry phone for real-time access U.S. military standards (MIL-STD to e-mail, calendar, address 810F), the tablets have a high- book, and task list using density magnesium chassis with

66 STRATEGIC FINANCE I May 2011

TECH FORUM

The Enron Corpus By Michael Castelluccio, Editor

Some corporate disasters end with a blizzard of desperate shredding; others end with a whimper, with servers and file banks still intact. So it was at the end for Enron. And as sound. The on-board memory is QuickOffice provides a single the Houston-based energy corporation came to a disinte- 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) three-column file management grating halt, one roadkill left behind was to become a sig- with 4GB DDR3 RAM. The Lithi- window with the storage areas nificant gift to the science of . um Polymer battery provides up on the left, files and folders While the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to 6.5 hours on a charge. Con- from the different storage areas (FERC) was conducting its investigation of Enron, the nectivity includes USB 3.0, showing in the center, and open agency accessed a large collection of company e-mails, Bluetooth 3.0, and wireless folders on the right. Drag-and- which were made public during the proceedings. Conse- 802.11b/g/n and WiMaxi. The drop functions allow you to quently, Andrew McCallum, an enterprising University of operating system is Windows 7 save, print, and send files. New Massachusetts researcher in machine learning and natur- Home Premium or Windows 7 in version 2.1 is extended cloud al language processing, purchased a copy of the dataset Professional (64 bit). connectivity with direct save to for $10,000 to use in his own research. McCallum saw the www.samsung.com/us DropBox, Google Docs, collection as an invaluable, real-world set of lab materials MobileMe, Box.net, Huddle, and that could be used over and over in any number of QuickOffice for SugarSync. From the cloud loca- research projects and tests. What McCallum purchased Tablets tions, QuickOffice Connect came to be known as the Enron Corpus. There are QuickOffice productiv- allows access, viewing, editing, At Carnegie Mellon University, Bryan Klimt and Yim- ity suites now for Android and and sharing. A feature called ing Yang of the Language Technologies Institute took the iPad tablets. We looked at the Quickword opens a spread view raw Enron Corpus, which consists of 619,446 messages QuickOffice Connect Mobile of individual pages in a Word from 158 users, and cleaned it of redundant and useless Suite for iPad that allows you to doc by just touching the side of information in order to better “analyze the suitability of create, edit, and share Microsoft the page. Once it’s open, you the corpus for exploring how to classify messages as orga- Office files, Word, Excel, and can scroll through the entire nized by a human.” In their final, cleaned version, there PowerPoint. You can save files in document, flipping through a are 200,399 messages belonging to 158 users, with an PDF format as well and e-mail fan of thumbnail images of the average of 757 messages per user. or print using iOS AirPrint. pages. www.quickoffice.com The Carnegie researchers spent a lot of time examin- ing the human effort expended on organizing, which was visible in the user threads and folders throughout the col- lection. Klimt and Yang also tested some of their older algorithms on this massive sample of communication. Other universities got copies and offered their own contributions to the knowledge base. At the University of , Berkeley, two researchers developed a search interface for the collection, and another created the Enronic Email Visualization and Clustering Tool that can continued on next page

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TECHNOLOGY TECH FORUM

provide “graph-based visualizations of social networks with- good stead when we were founded nine years ago, and has in Enron, based on e-mail interaction between users.”At the never been truer than today, when such applications as University of Southern California two researchers used the instant messaging, social media websites like Facebook, and e-mail database to test Link Discovery techniques that are microblogging service Twitter are in the ascendant.” used to ferret out fraud and terrorist activities. And three Cataphora founder Elizabeth Charnock told The New York researchers at Columbia University focused on e-mail thread Times reporter John Markoff that the software looks for digi- summarization techniques. tal anomalies where vocabulary or tone changes. “It doesn’t It has become an unending academic autopsy courtesy of use keywords at all. But it’s a means of showing who leaked one of the most spectacular corporate deaths in modern times. information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an SEC filing is being edited an A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways.” As the Enron Corpus provided a wonderful lab in which As you might expect, you won’t find a list of specific computers can be taught about human communication and Cataphora customers on the website. The company, how- social organization, coverage in the press brought attention ever, claims to serve Fortune 50 corporations, 100 law firms, to a number of companies that provide analytical software and major federal government agencies—all anonymous. that’s useful to legal firms as well as those conducting foren- So as researchers at Carnegie Mellon have their com- sic investigations—companies that have taught computers puters tease apart the Enron Corpus, discovering 101,786 to scour files and corporate e-mail for evidence and insights threads in the total 200,399 messages in an effort to improve into company behavior. the computer’s e-mail classification skills, machines are The Mountain View, Calif., software company Clearwell incrementally becoming better at “reading” and assessing offers an eDiscovery™ Software Solution that will search human communication. And companies like Clearwell are and analyze a terabyte of data per day. The company claims, hired by law firms to search large collections of e-mail and “eDiscovery software forensically collects electronic files files, looking for useful evidence—information that used to from across the organization, automatically analyzes the be pored over by professional legal staff, which worked data, and enables investigators to rapidly identify all evi- much more slowly, at far greater cost. dence and suspects involved in a corporate or government All of which brings us to the disturbing question, “Should investigation” (www.clearwell.com). we really be doing this?” Should we continue to expose our Another company, Cataphora, describes computers to written and spoken information, teaching itself as “The world’s authority on the implications of per- them to interpret, evaluate, and intelligently re-sort the sonal and organizational behavior as evidenced by the use of information for new uses? John Markoff’s piece in The New electronic media.” The company has an interesting demo York Times about the companies like Clearwell was titled application called the Digital Mirror (www.cataphora.com). “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Soft- The Mirror purportedly provides a reflection of your digital ware.” In the article, Markoff mentions MIT economist universe and your role within it (the “You-niverse”) by David Autor’s thesis that the American economy is being analyzing your relationships online. “hollowed out” due to jobs in the middle sector being lost to On a more commercial plane, the Cataphora software automation and outsourcing. Autor suggests that as com- goes beyond the textual in documents to layers where rela- puters get to better understand the language and its organiz- tionships take on significance. The company claims its soft- ing structures, more jobs will be lost at the top. ware can detect and comment on sentiment expressed in A dramatic demonstration of a computer that processes messages. The corporate philosophy summarized on the language and information really well recently showed up on website explains the value of this kind of information. “The the Jeopardy game show. In February, several banks of com- principal insight on which the company (Cataphora) was puters, bearing the single name Watson, beat the two best founded is that it is not possible to truly understand what human players in the history of the game. It would be inter- has happened or is happening in an organization just by esting to have Watson commit to memory the Enron Cor- searching through some number of e-mail messages or elec- pus, teach it the e-mail classification skills, and then sit tronic documents. The insight that communications are down to have a conversation about Watson’s conclusions fragmented and cover a wide spectrum of media stood us in about the cratering of the energy giant back in 2001. SF

68 STRATEGIC FINANCE I May 2011