Stevens Institute held its Research and Entrepreneurship Day conference this past Friday.
It was a chance for this engineering school to give the public a peek at tech projects that have been incubated by professors and students with the goal to commercialize the university’s IP.
Project such as CADEyes (dimensional maps from lasers and cameras), Attila (broadband technology that grabs simultaneous bandwidth from multiple networks), and other efforts were presented during the afternoon’s Venture Forum.
I wasn’t able to make it.
However, one of the spin-off companies, called Instream Media, which developed algorithms to detect deception in text communication, has software that can be tested by anyone.
I decided to give it a try.
No, there weren’t any revelations with Instreams’ text analysis app. I gave it spam already detected by my MacBook’s email client , and InStream was spot-on in declaring the text deceptive.
And I’m not sure how much help my own algorithms need when faced with an email whose opening sentence reads “I am a finance manager of a leading bank in Spain seek partnerships.”
What was interesting about InStream’s approach is that it pointed out the clues that tipped off its software—reporting “too many prepositions” and excessive use of “you” in the samples I gave it. Their techniques seem to depend on a syntactic analysis of the text rather than the usual “bag of words” approach often used in span software
With last month’s VerifEyed, which detects manipulated photos used in insurance claims, and now Instream, I’m beginning to see the outlines of an evolving “trust” analysis market.
It’s not that there’s anything truly new here. However, the cloud’s enormous computing power can now inexpensively brings these complicated algorithms to lots of businesses. That is certainly new and disruptive.
Too bad that racks of servers running these algorithms couldn’t have been used to analyze zillions of fraudulent mortgage applications during the real-estate frenzy.
Next time!
FYI: And I also missed Hoboken Tech Meetup’s Aaron Price dispensing judgments during the Student Elevator Pitch Competition.
Related articles
- Stevens’ Research and Entrepreneurship Day Conference (stevens.edu)
- InStream Deception Analysis software (stevens.edu)
- NYC Next Idea (technoverseblog.com)
