See below for article on Autonomy [http://www.autonomy.com] getting picked up by the US govt. Met a salesbod from Autonomy a few months ago, who gave an impressively scary demo of the stuff they were doing with uber-pattern-matching. Another article at http://www.vnunet.com/News/1136175 quotes: "The software searches names and words with variable spellings and retrieves information based on patterns that are related but may not match exactly." Most of it was tailored towards searching for related subjects and topics within text (BBC news use Autonomy to link stories) using "Information Theory" and Bayesian Inference, but they're also doing stuff with image-matching (such as studying landscapes to find different films from the same place), voice-matching (to find different audio samples by the same person), and audio-to-text conversion (which can then be subjected to all the usual matching). It's also designed to take information from anywhere, all ready to link into whatever Echelons and Black Lanterns and Netbuses governments are running these days. Surprised this didn't happen months ago. http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=344482 Autonomy scoops American anti-terror deal By Susie Mesure 21 October 2002 Autonomy, the once-fjted information sorting software group, has scooped a multimillion-dollar deal with the US government that could be crucial in preventing terrorist attacks such as the recent bombing in Bali, Indonesia. Its software, which will form a key element of George Bush's war on terror, will be used by 21 US government agencies under the aegis of the Office of Homeland Security. "After 11 September, the US President realised one of the big problems was the very large number of government agencies [meant] they couldn't work together as one," Mike Lynch, Autonomy's chief executive, said. The new software package will help the plethora of security agencies pool any tip-offs they receive about possible terrorist attacks by working as a "backbone" to connect all of the pieces of information. Mr Lynch added: "The whole idea is to try and stop something like the Bali bomb happening." The contract win comes at a critical time for Autonomy, which has seen its shares collapse over the past four months amid a fresh downturn in spending on technology. Explaining how the US agencies would use the software, Mr Lynch said: "The whole problem is that you don't know exactly what you're looking for. This technology can read things. It has the ability to take something like an e-mail or a report and rather than just see individual words like a search engine, understand the ideas behind it."