Presentation by Steffan Truvé (Recorded Future) from the 'Prefect Swell' workshop on text and data mining on the 27th of September 2013.

1. Robots’ Rights and the
Future of
Web Intelligence
Staffan Truvé, Ph.D.
CTO, Recorded Future
truve@recordedfuture.com

2. Who are we?
• Founded in 2009
• US-Swedish startup
• 40 persons, 50/50 US/SE
• Boston (HQ), DC, Göteborg,
• and a few more places around the globe
• Focus on web intelligence,
for governments and industry
• Backed by Google Ventures, Atlas Venture,
Balderton, IA Ventures, and I-Q-T
2

3. Cost to acquire
and analyze
data
Amount of
data

4. Cost to acquire
and analyze
data
Amount of
data

6. Today’s Discussion, Tomorrow’s News
6
Silicon Valley executives head to
Vail, Colo. next week for the
annual Pacific Crest Technology
Leadership Forum
The carrier may select partners to set
up a new carrier as early as next month
“2010 is the year when Iran will kick out
Islam. Ya Ahura we will.”
“... Dr Sarkar says the new facility will
be operational by March 2014...”
Unilever will hold their UK launch event
early next week in Manchester
“...opposition organizers
plan to meet on Thursday
to protest...”
“Excited to see Morsi
speak this weekend...”
“According to TechCrunch
China’s new 4G network will
be deployed by mid-2010”
“Strange new Russian
worm set to unleash
botnet on 4/1/2013...”
Estimated study completion date:
November 2014
…new facility will be operational by
March 2013…
...the transaction is
expected close in late
2013…

8. Organizing the Web for Analysis
8

9. 250,000 Real-time Sources
10 Billion Time-tagged Facts
“Kuo expects that Apple will introduce
an iPhone 5S around June or July of
this year”
“...opposition organizers
plan to meet on Thursday
to protest...”
Drought and malnutrition hinder next
spring’s expansion plans in Kabul...
A few
minutes
from
publishing
to analysis
Inside the Web
Intelligence Machine

10. Web Intelligence – at Web Scale
• Processing 100s of millions of
documents
• Sources from all over the world, in
8 languages – English, Arabic,
Chinese x 2, Russian, Spanish,
French, Farsi
• From government sites and big
media to blogs and social media
• 10B “facts” - growing fast
• 25+ entity types
• 100+ event types
• Metrics, signals, alerts
10

11. 11

12. Evolution,
Opportunities,
and Threats
12

13. Without text mining, the web is useless!
• No way to find stuff without search engines –
which all rely on text mining
• And all publishers realize this
• Search à Analysis
• A necessary evolution as
the web grows
• Creating new value
• Aggregation, analysis
• Enabling media criticism
13

14. Drivers / Opportunities
• Moore’s Law!
• Advances in linguistics,
algorithms, math
• Exponential growth of
content
• The volume of information on
the web is making traditional
search worthless
14

15. Threats
• Appification /
closed vertical silos
• Deep Web (& darkweb)
• IP protectionism / legislation 15

16. Restricting the right to analyze is absurd
• What is the borderline between reading and
analyzing?
• Impossible to differentiate humans from ‘robots’
• Robots must have the same rights as
human readers
16

17. Turing would
have laughed!
17

18. 18
Staffan Truvé
truve@recordedfuture.com
The best way to predict the
future is to invent it!
(Alan Kay)
Dynabook,
1968