The Police Lieutenant's Wife

Dr. Bali and Big Data

San Francisco, and Raleigh, North Carolina, 2010, Winter

Ben was sitting at his desk at his home office. He had a faux fireplace in his cozy office, which offset the chill from outside. He could see the haze from his window, and he was glad to be indoors, where it was warm.

It was late afternoon, and he had been working from home that day to be close to Helen. Betty came in from the East Coast every other week now, which seemed enough. Ben had a half full cup of coffee sitting next to his computer on the leather blotter on top of his desk. His desk was of burrell wood, heavy, solid.

Ben had spent several years with Betty's help stabilizing his home life for Helen. He and Helen had joined a support group for parents of murdered children. They attended every two to three months. It was both a support, and it was draining. Helen liked to keep life "on the surface," and attending brought Helen back to the realities of her grief, of the sordid nature of Alyssa's death, but it did allow her a space in which she could express her deepest sorrows. When she attended she would quietly cry throughout others' times of sharing, then she would share a memory of Alyssa, or say something about her anger over the loss. Afterwards, she would close off and return to living her surface life again. For Ben, in these moments with Helen, he felt he had her back, if only briefly. The rest of the time, in their surface life, it was routine, and she was present physically, but absent emotionally.

Ben also continued his research, and he had been building capital towards solutions. Maury had turned out to be sincere in his offer of support. He set up a 501(c)3 charity, or a tax deductible charity. So far it had offered legal help to families facing similar situations, and it had offered financial help to offset costs of funerals, etc. But, Ben wanted more - he wanted prevention.

Ben looked at the clock, it was just before 4:00 PM. He had a conference call with a scientist from IBM who was the Primary Investigator (PI) on a grant with DARPA. The scientist was developing a technology to very quickly annotate large amounts of textual data, it could go through millions of lines of streaming social media data, which updates quickly and can change rapidly. The man's name was Dr. Arun Bali. Dr. Bali worked at IBM's science facility at Research Triangle Park, outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ben had a cell phone, but for business calls he often preferred his landline. Old habits die hard, he would tell himself. Promptly at 4:00 PM Ben picked up the line and dialed Dr. Bali. After two rings, the line was answered.

"Hello?"

"Dr. Bali?"

"Yes - Mr Rosinger?"

"Yes, please, call me, Ben, if you will."

"Ben, please call me Arun."

"I'm pleased to, Arun. Thank you for your time today. Did you get the article by Dr. Hilliard which I sent to you?"

"Yes, thank you - but psychology is not my forte', as you know. Software, data, are of course."

"Yes." Ben paused, "I'm interested in your work. I read the prospectus on it. Can you tell me a bit more."

"What would you like to know?"

"Perhaps guide me through it a bit more."

"Well, in very large data, text data, that exceeds millions of rows, the goal is to make it searchable, very quickly for whomever is using it. Often times the topics, if the documents, for example are social media, like tweets, change quickly. It could also be emails or posts, or new articles. So, to make certain topics searchable, or even extract certain elements and marry them back to numeric data, so it can be modeled, the data has to be searchable. That is where annotators and machine learning come in. There are patented, special algorithms involved. Does this make sense?" Asked Arun.

Ben paused, then he asked, "What are annotators?"

Arun said, "Simply put, they are custom libraries that are applied to extract terms from the data. So, if you are searching for sentiment, such as someone's feelings, positive or negative, on a topic, the annotators will tag all sorts of sentiment words. If you are searching out pharmaceutical terms, those tags will be applied."

"Hmmmm," Ben said thoughtfully, "But terms can change very quickly."

"Yes," said Arun, and there is a science we can apply to this as well.

Ben and Arun spoke for the alloted hour, discussing how the beta technology could bring to life Dr. Hilliard's theories.

Towards the end of the conversation, Arun said, " I think what you may be asking is to take the type of solution I have built and deploy it with custom annotators - or libraries built around Dr. Hilliard's theories."

Ben replied, "To be honest, I am not sure from a technology perspective what I am asking," and he rubbed his head.

Arun continued, "You know, I know of a man within IBM who works in both commercial and government spaces. I have collaborated with him before. He sometimes takes on projects that require more sympathetic involvement. May I speak to him about your endeavors?"

Ben said, "Yes, you have my permission."

"I'll get back to you then," said Arun.

Ben hung up feeling hopeful, "Big Data," he thought.