Thought Leaders in Big Data: Paul Nelson, Chief Architect at Search Technologies (Part 3)

Paul Nelson: GDPR is a privacy and data protection regulation by the European Union. Companies are really scrambling to pull this off. If I were going to start a new company, that’s exactly where I would start. Search Technologies has a bunch of components that help. You have to actually run your fingers through the whole organization to gather all that data together and analyze it to see if it has references to people in it. We have lots of connectors. That’s one of our assets for pulling in data from a variety of systems.

We also have a lot of NLP components for scanning content to identify names and ID numbers, email addresses and things like that. We’re touching on this, but I wouldn’t say that we have a product to do this. Along these same lines, businesses who are starting to do this are starting to pull all that data into a Big Data warehouse. That’s, literally, data from all their systems. They want to start combining that data together because you might have a person who’s referenced by an ID number in one database and that person ID number in another database.

If you want to fully forget them, you have to cross-reference all of those. Another area that would be very interesting is something like an enterprise schema management tool. Let me come up with a system that will register all of the schemas across all of my databases. We’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of databases. Within that, hundreds of tables.

It’s an enormous proposition for these large companies. They’ve been around for a long time. They have lots of old systems and lots of data. I would create an enterprise schema management tool that tries to cross-reference them automatically and has ways for business users and subject matter experts to start understanding data so that I can handle problems like GDPR.

Sramana Mitra: What do you think are the big trends on the horizon?

Paul Nelson: Natural language processing’s time has finally come. I’ve been working on NLP since 1984. It’s always been the next technology. Now, it is THE technology. Chatbots, Alexa, Siri. We’re talking to computers and they’re talking back. Our customers are expecting it from us. NLP is going to be a very big thing over the next five to ten years. It’s interesting because a lot of NLP has been focused on reading newspaper articles which turns out to be the hardest kind of NLP to do.

If you have natural language processing with a person in the loop like a chatbot, the domain of the answer is very narrow. A lot of NLP is focused on finding the problems that can be solved now and then solving them. It’s less about advancing the technology and more about fit for purpose.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for you time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Paul Nelson, Chief Architect at Search Technologies
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