FINANCE: Bayes' Bucks

From: Keith Elis (hagbard@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Apr 28 2003 - 20:27:22 MDT

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    I've been watching this company for a couple of months. Their financials
    are weak, but ignoring fiduciary arcana, this is a damn cool idea. I had
    been batting around some ideas (hopelessly primitive) about brute-force
    context-mapping as an approach to langauge translation software, but I
    just never knew enough about Bayesian stats to come up with what these
    guys have apparently been working on since the early 90s. BTW, in the
    interest of full disclosure, I don't own any stock in this company.

    Keith

    -------------------------------------

    Autonomy Corporation plc
    (NasdaqNM:AUTN)
     
    From Yahoo:

    "Autonomy Corporation plc is a provider of infrastructure software. The
    Company's technology powers applications dependent upon unstructured
    information, including e-commerce, customer relationship management
    (CRM), knowledge management, enterprise information portals, enterprise
    resource planning (ERP) and online publishing. . ."

    From the company website: http://www.autonomy.com/

    "Autonomy's strength lies in a unique combination of technologies that
    employs advanced pattern-matching techniques utilizing Bayesian
    Inference and Claude Shannon's principles of information theory. By
    automatically forming an understanding of the concepts within the
    content of a piece of text or voice or by analysing an image or piece of
    video, Autonomy's software is able to perform a limitless combination of
    content-to-content, content-to-people or people-to-people interactions
    and tasks. . ."

    Fun article, nothing deep: http://www.rkdn.org/innovations/bayesian.asp

    "The mathematical processes behind Autonomy's methods are complex, but
    the promise itself is simple: to enable computers to extract meaning
    from text and to use that meaning to better categorize and deliver
    useful information. While computers have long been able to identify
    strings of keywords, anyone who's used a search engine can testify to
    its limits. What makes Autonomy's products different is an underlying
    pattern-recognition algorithm, derived from Bayes' formulations, which
    empowers computers to act as if they possessed abilities we think of as
    subtly and profoundly human: comprehending context, generalizing from
    words to an idea, even understanding the unspoken by grasping the root
    concepts beneath the play of syntax."



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