Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

The Cognitive Content Crisis

As many folks in my community may already be aware, I’ve been building chatbots with my team, using the Microsoft Bot Framework, a lot lately. In doing so, we’ve encountered a common issue across multiple clients.

Cognitive Content Crisis

While many peolpe are worrying about lofty issues around artificial intelligence like security, privacy, and ethics (all worthy to be sure), I’m considering something more pragmatic here. Folks go into a cognitive agent build without considering content, how it relates to AI and AI development, and how to manage it. While some of my clients with more mature projects have taken a crack at resolving this issue with custom solutions, these custom solutions are often resource intensive, fail to consider all the business requriements, and end up becoming an unnecessary bottleneck to further development. Worse, waiting till a project phase-2 or phase-3 to address it compounds the trouble.

Sadly, there’s often an enterprise content management system (ECMS) in place that could be used, instead, right from pre phase-1. With a reasonable effort, a well-featured existing ECMS can be customized along side your build out, saving a massive effort later.

The Backstory

If you check out that Microsoft Bot Framework website, one of the first things you’ll notice is that building conversational agents is a process that cuts across a number of development disciplines… and the first one that typically gets highlighted is Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence around conversational agents could include anything from visual identification & classification to moderation, sentiment analysis, and advanced search, but it predominantly revolves around language tools… especially LUIS, QnA Maker, Azure Search, and others.

At this point, it helps to think about what Artificial Intelligence is. Artificial Intelligince is about experience. In a conversational artificial intelligence, that content is human readable, social, and web like. Experience is content…. Conversational content.

In fact, it’s almost web like. A user typically opens a chat window (which correlates a bit to a browser) and types an utterance (query). The bot catches such utterances, and depending on a number of factors of origination, data state / context, identity, and authorizations, generally produces a text based response.

Getting More Specific

In the case of a bot designed to coach folks with a chronic disease, for example, a user might ask a bot “Can I eat chocolate cake?”. The bot gets this query, and parses it into language elements… which looks something like “can I eat” as an ‘intent’, and “chocolate cake” as an entity. The bot then brings in a rules-set described by conditions it knows about the user (what disease(s) are being managed), and what the bot knows about the users current state (perhaps the blood glucose level if they’re diabetic). Based on the conditions against the rules, the response must be produced. If you have a sophistocated bot, you might have a per-entity response… Take a response like “OH, chocolate cake is wonderful, but your blood sugar level is a bit high right now. Unless you can find something in a low-carb, sugar free variety, I wouldn’t recommend it, but here’s a recipe you might try instead.” That content (including the suggested recipe) must be authored by subject matter experts, moderated by peers, approved (potentially by regulatory and maybe even legal teams), tagged to match the rules engine expectations… much like web content.

Also note, the rules engine itself is also content in a sense. In order to let subject matter experts have a say in tweaking and tuning responses, (what’s a high blood glucose level? What’s too much sugar for a high blood glucose level, et al.) These rules should be expressed as content a subject matter expert could understand and update.

Another common scenario we’re seeing is HR content. Imagine you’ve got a company that produced an HR handbook every year. Well, actually, you’re a conglomerate that has a couple dozen handbooks, and each employee needs answers specific to the one for their division… Not only do you have to tag the contet by year, but by division, and even problem domain. (Imagine trying to answer the question “what is my deductible?” It’s easy enough for a bot to understand that this relates to insurance provided through benefits. The answer might be different depending on whether you mean the PPO or the PMO medical plan… or is that a dental plan question? What about vision? They probably mean this year. Depending on the division they’re a part of (probably indicated by a claim in their authorization token), they might have different providers, as well.

Back to Development

In the development world, not only do you have the problem domain complexities present, but you also have different environments to push content to… the Dev environment is the sandbox a coder works in actively, and it’s only as stable as the developer’s last compile. Then there might be environments named things like DIT, SIT, UAT, QA, and PROD. To do things right, you should update content in each of these environments discretely… updating content in QA should not affect content in SIT, UAT, or PROD.

Information Architecture


Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape.[1] Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.

Wikipedia, Information Architecture

We’ll add artificial intelligence cognitive models and knowledge bases, especially for conversational AI, to that definition. Note that some AI applications need big data solutions. Most ECMS products are not big data solutions.

Enterprise Content Management Systems

There’s a lot of Enterprise Content Management Systems out there, many of which would be suitable for the task of handling the needs of most conversational AI content management systems.

My career path and community involvement causes me to lean toward SharePoint. If you break down the feature set, it makes sense.

  • Ability for SMEs to manage experience data easily without lots of training to understand create/read/update/delete (CRUD) operations
  • Ability to customize content type structures
  • Ability to concurrently manage individual experience data items
  • Ability to globalize the content (to support multiple languages)
  • Ability to customize workflows (think SME review approval, regulatory, even legal approval) on a per-experience item basis
  • Ability to mark up each experience item with additional metadata both for cognitive processing purposes and for deployment purposes
  • All of this content is then exposed to REST services, so you get the ability to integrate automation to bridge the content into the cognitive models

It’s often said that if you design your data structures properly, the rest of your application will practically build itself. This is no exception. While you will have to build your own automation to bridge the gap between your CMS and your cognitive model environments, you’ll be able to do this easily using REST services.

While you may need to come up with your own granularity, you’ll probably find some clear hits, especially in the area of QnA Maker… every Question / Answer experience pair probably fits nicely as a single content entity. You’ll probably have to add metadata to support QnA maker’s filtering, and the like.

Likewise with LUIS, you may find that each Intent and the related utterances is a single content entity. LUIS, being more sophistocated, will also need related entities and synonyms modeled in content data.

I’ve seen other CMS system used. Most notably CosmosDB and Contentful. Another choice might be some kind of data mart. All of these cases require a heavy investment in building out a UI layer for your SMEs. SharePoint takes care of the bulk of that part for you.

Got a project you want to start working on? Don’t forget to account for content management early on. As always, reach out to me if you need advice on this or any other aspect of building out a solution involving technologies like these… Connect on Twitter, Linkedin or the like…

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=90A564D76FC99F8F&resid=90A564D76FC99F8F%211333283&authkey=AE7AR-g9axFJm-4&em=2″ width=”402″ height=”327″]

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 – Manchester, NH, United States

THANK YOU!

Global Azure Bootcamp 2018, held at over 280 locations around the world on Saturday, April 21st, 2018 is in the books.

These are exciting times.  When Microsoft airs commercials that point out that “there is more computing power at your fingertips than in past generations”, I think that’s a severe understatement.  There’s more computing power at your fingertips today than there has ever been, over the cumulative course of human history.

Further, Microsoft has never been more clear about their commitment to Azure, to the point of burying Windows within their own organization.  It’s not that Windows is gone, it’s that Windows is merely a client to Azure, and their new organization structure reflects this.

I was mostly focused on the Granite State event location, and had my hands full with that… though I did assist the Burlington / Boston event as well, especially getting local sponsorship in the form of custom t-shirts from Insight/BlueMetal.

Thanks so much to all the folks who contributed to make it happen… Peter Lamonica of Manchester Community College for making the facilities available to us…   Carl Barton, Xamarin MVP, Roman Jaquez, Patty Tompkins, Marie Patrick in the Granite State (New Hampshire) community for presenting, and Patrick El-Azem, Dave Stampfli, Bret Swedeen, and Gino Filicetti from Microsoft itself, for presenting, and taking the content up a notch.  All helped organize the event.

The event really was perfect for the Granite State Users Groups, LLC, an organization I created several years ago specifically to enable users groups to plan events and manage their own resources in the process.

We shared a lot of learning!

Topics included

  • Azure 101
  • Azure Functions
  • Lift & Shift
  • App Services
  • Azure Resource Management
  • Azure Networking
  • Bot Framework
  • Cognitive Services
  • Azure DevTest Labs
  • SQL on Azure
  • Azure IoT Hub
All of the support from Global Azure Bootcamp central made some of the harder parts easy… in particular setting up lunch, and providing sponsorship for things like $300 Azure passes and the like.
In retrospect, we had a few minor misses:
  • We didn’t print up schedules for everyone, which was a mistake.  We had enough to effectively share, but should have just printed out a copy for everyone.
  • We had coffee, but it didn’t arrive till near end of day.
  • We didn’t take enough photos. 🙂

Azure Passes!

Manchester Community College floor plan

Jetbrains stickers

The “Go-kit” turned into a stack of boxes.

Custom event tshirts from BlueMetal/Insight

Our schedule, with some marked up for specific rooms

Locked & loaded early, ready to roll.

Schedule on display

Our 3rd classroom was a bit remote from the rest of the event.

Carl Barton presenting Azure Functions in session 1.

Panorama of Carl’s session

The school MPR in panorama, rolling with Patrick El-Azeem’s Azure 101, just one of several sessions rolling at the time.
Patrick El-Azeem presenting Azure 101
Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Intro to Natural Language Processing with LUIS

Here’s the slides for the presentation I’m doing 11/16/2017 at the Granite State Windows Platform Developers (@WPDevNH) meeting in Salem, NH (at the Microsoft Store)

The group is primarily about Windows 10 app development (implying Universal Windows Platform, UWP).  That said, the group’s been begging for sessions on AI and related services for some time.

Since I’ve been helping a client navigate LUIS lately, I figured an into to the LUIS service would be a nice way to break into this very useful service.

I reserve the right to tweak these slides up until I present them on Thursday, November 16th, 2017.

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=90A564D76FC99F8F&resid=90A564D76FC99F8F%211282855&authkey=APp8wuFX2hkqevw&em=2″ width=”402″ height=”327″]Please Join Us! RSVP HERE:
https://www.meetup.com/Granite-State-NH-WPDev/events/243099117/