Cognitive Computing Specialist Expands U.S. R&D

Multilingual cognitive computing technologist Expert Systems said this week it is expanding its U.S. research and development operations with the opening of new labs in Silicon Valley and the Washington, DC, area.

The new labs in Palo Alto, Calif., and Rockville, Md., will focus on expanding the company’s Cogito cognitive computing software, the Italian company (EXSY.MI) said Tuesday (March 15). The U.S. locations expand the network of Cogito Labs that includes three in Italy along with facilities in Grenoble, France, and Madrid.

The new U.S. labs will specifically focus on ways of extending its cognitive computing approach through new tools designed to more accurately represent knowledge by combining machine learning algorithms with “supervised enrichment and validation by human experts,” the company said.

The new Maryland lab also provides the cognitive computing developer better access to government agencies and federal contractors attempting to implement big data strategies. “Our newest Cogito Lab[s] will be dedicated to further expanding the core functionalities of our technology and take new steps towards bringing to market software that really reads like humans and learns from humans,” Expert Systems CTO Marco Varone noted in a statement.

The company already works with several federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Department of Agriculture. Executives noted in a blog post this week that its semantic technology extends beyond traditional cognitive computing systems by providing the ability to understand text the way humans can. That, it said, could help users make sense of “open source” intelligence via semantic approaches that glean intelligence from multiple streams of unstructured data.

“Cognitive systems based on semantic intelligence mimic the human approach in order to collect all the elements useful for building ‘the larger picture'” by answering questions such as

“Who did what?” and “Who did what AND to whom, when and where?” the company said.

The company’s semantic network includes language concepts and the relationships that exist between these concepts in a given language. For example, the semantic network has more than 400,000 concepts and several million links, or relationships, for the English language alone. The concepts and the corresponding relationships are optimized to speed analysis and improve accuracy in disambiguation, the company said.

Current Expert Systems customers include Shell, Chevron, Eli Lilly, Biogen, and the International Monetary Fund along with media and publishing companies such as Bloomberg, Elsevier, Gannett, McGraw-Hill, Thomson Reuters, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer.

The Italian company’s expansion reflects broader industry efforts to connect data and make it more accessible and useful via cognitive computing and multilingual semantic approaches such as Cogito and emerging technologies such as semantic graphs. The new Expert Systems’ labs also would focus on developing new tools that would make its semantics approach more widely available.

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