Posted by
Justin
on
October 21, 2010
We’ll be holding our second user conference of 2010 in Tyson’s Corner next Tuesday, October 26th. We’ll be going over the latest features in Starlight and drop some hints about what’s coming up with the next release early in 2011.
We’ll also be demonstrating Starlight within the cyber security context at SINET on Wednesday, October 27th. We’ll have the presentations from both these events posted as soon as we can after the craziness of public demonstrations is over.
If you think you can make it to the user conference (free! free food!) Tuesday morning, please send us an email to blog@futurepointsystems.com.
Posted by
Mark S.
on
October 20, 2010
A common question from many of our users is the need to process individual fields, either structured or unstructured (like placenames or comments) in a structured data source, like a spreadsheet. Starlight Data Engineer (SDE) comes equipped with a host of data transformation and processing modules that are useful on data from many sources. Using these modules on structured data requires following a common pattern for building out SDE Processors following an iterative process.
Continue reading →
Posted by
Justin
on
October 15, 2010
Thanks to our friends over at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we have a suite of new data manipulation and inspection modules that work with Starlight 4.1.3 (build 3044). You can download them from our forum:
http://www.futurepointsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=121.0
Some of the highlights of this file include:
- Zip Archive Reader and Writer Modules for reading and writing to Zip archives.
- Data Inspector Module for looking at data as it passes through your processor
- Data Merger Module for looking up data in a spreadsheet and injecting it into your XML
- Many more!
To use these modules, just unzip the contents of the archive above into the Future Point/SDE/bin directory and start using them in SDE. Since the nature of these modules is fairly technical and they are somewhat undocumented at this time (full documentation when they’re officially released in version 4.1.4), please contact support@futurepointsystems.com with any questions.
Posted by
Justin
on
October 15, 2010
We recently discovered a bug in Starlight 4.1.3 (build 3044) that doesn’t allow users in the Eastern Hemisphere (timezones with a UTC+ offset) to use the Yahoo! Web and News modules or their associated plugins. You can download an update of the modules on our forum:
http://www.futurepointsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=120.0
Posted by
Justin
on
September 10, 2010
We get questions all the time about how various technologies inside VIS and SDE work, but none more than about the Topic View. Based on a recent response to one of our customers, here it goes:
Internally, we use a library from Boeing called TRUST that does the document text vectorization. The internals of the TRUST engine are proprietary, but is essentially a complex version of TF/IDF. Each document in a set is assigned a vector, which consists of up to 20 dimensions (the actual number of dimensions used varies depending on the documents in the set). We then apply a Growing Neural Gas algorithm to these high-dimension vectors to identify document clusters and finally down-project them into two and three dimensions for display (while trying to minimize the distortion such an operation introduces).
Continue reading →
Posted by
Justin
on
September 10, 2010
We’re excited to announce that the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center (DVIRC) has been awarded a $300,000 grant by the National Science Foundation!
DVIRC was awarded the grant to connect regional assets and spur innovation. The project will explore how visual analytics software, specifically the Starlight software platform, can help to organize and connect STEM assets in the tri-state area of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Ohio.
(http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100903005337/en)
Posted by
Naomi
on
August 26, 2010
Have you ever wanted your very own hard copy of the Starlight VIS and SDE User Guides?
Well, the books are now available for purchase here:
Starlight VIS/VIS LE User Guide: https://www.createspace.com/3471976
Starlight SDE User Guide: https://www.createspace.com/3473337
Posted by
Mark S.
on
August 11, 2010
The results are in. The Noblis team, which included Future Point Systems and teammates from Academia and Industry, has won the prestigious “Outstanding Debrief” award for the IEEE VAST 2010 Challenge!
Competition was fierce this year (probably one of the toughest years yet) with a large number of entries by extremely strong competitors. But in the end I think that we showed that our tightly integrated, multi-disciplinary, team put together the best response to all four of the challenges. The challenges this year spanned from Genomics to Intelligence with FPS participating in the Mini Challenge 1 (Intelligence) and the Grand Challenge (multi-disciplinary). We’re extremely pleased with the outcome, and it really shows that our philosophy of no nonsense, integrative team-work, in any type of environment, can successfully tackle even some of the most complex problems. There’s simply no substitution for real experts.
See the winning entry at Noblis’ website, IEEE VAST 2010 Challenge (Noblis).
Posted by
Justin
on
August 10, 2010
If you’d like to use ECMA script to write your own custom SDE module, now you can! A link to download the module can be found on our support forum here:
http://www.futurepointsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=119.0
(Note: You’ll need to log in to read the post.)
The scripting module is a low-level interface that gives you the ability to write custom modules for processing data in SDE. Due to its highly technical nature, it is not supported through FPS Technical Support. Instead, you’ll need to work with us on a professional services contract or through one of our partners.
If, however, you’re technically inclined, there are a couple sample scripts and some technical documentation included in the download zip file.
Enjoy!
-Justin
Posted in Development
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Tagged scripting, sde
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