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July 1, 2020

Informatica, The ADAPT Research Centre Collaborate to Accelerate AI Research, Development

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and Dublin, Ireland, July 1, 2020 – Informatica, the enterprise cloud data management provider, announced that it has launched a collaborative technology initiative with The ADAPT Centre, a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre for Digital Media Technology.

The ADAPT Centre, funded by SFI, focuses on developing next-generation digital technologies that transform how people communicate by helping to analyze, personalize and deliver digital data more effectively for businesses and individuals. Informatica’s R&D team collaborate with ADAPT to leverage its leading-edge applied research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to further accelerate the application of AI and Machine Learning (ML) to automate Informatica’s portfolio of enterprise cloud data management offerings.

Organisations are increasingly leveraging extremely large data sets to inform business decisions but have a range of obligations under regulations like The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the more recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), making data management even more complex. Informatica’s engineers have already developed many AI and ML capabilities as part of the Informatica CLAIRE engine to help customers use data effectively for their analytics, data governance and privacy, and customer experience (CX) needs. By leveraging ADAPT’s experience in AI and NLP, Informatica will continue to innovate across its entire product portfolio. For example, consumer comments and product ratings can be mined to understand consumer sentiment and intent to enrich a company’s 360 view of their customers, thereby improving customer engagement. New and revised regulations can be parsed to automatically create and update data governance policies. Classifying and cataloging more data ranging from doctors’ notes in healthcare to product defect images in manufacturing will give data scientists and analysts access to massively more data for analytics projects related to improving patient outcomes and product quality.

With the overall volume of data center traffic expected to reach 20.6 zettabytes in 2021, and the number of connected devices and connections projected to reach more than 25 billion by 2022*, the challenge for businesses is to process larger amounts of data, while ensuring that it is usable and adheres to governance policies. Most of the world’s data is stored in the form of text, images and video. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2025, the amount of digital data created worldwide will rise to 163 zettabytes, as a result of the growing number of devices and sensors. Applying AI and NLP techniques to this treasure trove of data can extract rich semantic meaning to establish context, improve relevance and increase the power of analytics and AI projects. AI is key to this by speeding up tasks through automation, freeing developers and users to work on high-value, innovative projects. AI applications that solve business problems have accelerated in recent years but given current uncertainties due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the need to utilize intelligent automation systems at scale is now more critical than ever.

“Post GDPR, data governance has come of age. Government has to be visibly demonstrating good practice around data so we don’t lose our citizens’ trust,” stated Neil McIvor, Chief Data Officer, UK Department for Education. “At the same time, Government Departments have a rich and varied data landscape, ever evolving in response to ministerial and service delivery priorities. Without proactive automated data mapping, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain the level of oversight of our data that the public rightly expect of us.”

This relationship builds on Informatica’s investment in Ireland, which has seen the company grow its local headcount to 175 and take on 18,000 sq. ft of office space at 1 Windmill Lane in recent years. The initiative will build on the talent of the team that Informatica has already established in Dublin by strengthening its ties to the Irish research community.

“Data is the oil of the digital economy, but it needs to be filtered to ensure that companies can find the nuggets that will drive their business forward,” stated Keith Lyons, Managing Director of Informatica Ireland. “ADAPT is renowned for its expertise in AI and Natural Language Processing, which are key to achieving this. As a result, this is a unique opportunity for us to match their expertise with our industry experience to put our talent together and innovate in areas of mutual interest.”

John Kelleher, ADAPT’s Principle Investigator, added, “We are delighted to be collaborating with Informatica and putting our NLP expertise to work on a project which will help in transforming the area of regulatory compliance. Our operating model allows businesses to accelerate their AI digital innovation through rapid prototyping of our research delivering intelligent automation at scale. For ADAPT, a key focus is enabling businesses to leverage our multidisciplinary research team to meet business challenges.”

Declan McKibben, ADAPT Commercial Director, added, “This demonstrates the unique impact of Industry and academic collaboration that will be the foundational layer of a collaborative roadmap between ADAPT and Informatica to reinforce leadership and innovation in the regulatory and compliance space.”

About Informatica

Informatica, the Enterprise Cloud Data Management leader, accelerates data-driven digital transformation. Informatica enables companies to fuel innovation, become more agile, and realize new growth opportunities, resulting in intelligent market disruptions. Over the last 25 years, Informatica has helped more than 9,000 customers unleash the power of data. For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com. Connect with Informatica on LinkedInTwitter, and Facebook.

About ADAPT

ADAPT is a world-leading Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre hosted by Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT’s partner Institutions include Dublin City University, University College Dublin, TU Dublin, Athlone Institute of Technology, Maynooth University and Cork Institute of Technology. ADAPT focuses on how to get the most from Digital Content streams, personalizing content delivery and improving user interaction with data. ADAPTs Research encompasses text, speech and video processing. It is empowering collaborators in academia and industry to lead on groundbreaking innovations and access vital tools, standards and expertise across the lifecycle of digital content.


Source: Informatica

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