From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 01:09:33 MDT
From: Keith Elis [mailto:hagbard@ix.netcom.com]
>
> 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.
>
>
> Autonomy Corporation plc
> (NasdaqNM:AUTN)
Just FYI, the use of Bayesian techniques in automatic text
classifiers, search tools, and other knowledge management software is
actually fairly common. For example, Microsoft SharePoint Portal
Server uses Bayesian techniques to automatically classify documents.
So I wouldn't get too hung up on this as a competitive advantage of
this particular corporation.
Nor does the application of Bayesian techniques guarantee good
results. As another example, the Microsoft Office Answer Wizard uses
Bayesian techniques to help locate the right help topic in response to
a user query, but it still gets it wrong all too often.
mez
Disclaimer: I worked for MSFT for several years. The above
information is all public at this time.
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