Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Luca Scagliarini, CEO of Expert System (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve actually covered several companies that do this both from a pure recommendation point of view. There are two very successful companies in content marketing that are using this use case to actually help publishers monetize as well.

Luca Scagliarini: That’s one case. The difference of using semantic versus a deeper understanding of content is that the level of granularity that you can achieve is much higher than what you can do with statistic algorithms. I really suggest people who are familiar with this approach to understand where you can go. If you think about reading all the content and not just thinking about the frequency of keywords, you can get a very granular user experience. That’s where the next step for publishing is.

I always make the case that we are in the first phase where people are taking advantage of that, but it’s not really what people would like to do. I would like to have someone who has all the content available and is providing me what is relevant for me at that moment in time. Only by >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Luca Scagliarini, CEO of Expert System (Part 2)

Luca Scagliarini: With the growth of Internet and the subsequent expansion and explosion of social media, it became more and more important to have understanding, not only of what’s inside your company, but also of what’s happening outside. We expanded to industries like publishing. A few years later, we opened our first office in the US, initially focusing on certain verticals like oil and gas and pharma.

Everybody thought that the Google approach, which was pure statistics and keywords, was enough. We realized that it was not enough. The market has become much more mature. Companies today in many industries require something more than a keyword search engine to analyze their content. We kept our focus on this vertical because when you work on language, there’s not only the actual language in terms of English, German, or Italian, but there is also the language of the industry and the language of the company. You need to understand all these facets to be able to have a deep understanding. We kept focusing on these verticals. We have expanded in the last few years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Luca Scagliarini, CEO of Expert System (Part 1)

Artificial Intelligence is going through a renaissance, and we’re thrilled to cover the space. Here, Luca and I talk about the fusion of semantic and statistical methods in Machine Learning to achieve deeper intelligence with specific vertical workflows, vocabulary, and nuances. Very interesting conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Expert System.

Luca Scagliarini: I’m currently the CEO of Expert System. Before joining Expert System, I worked for many years in Europe and in the United States in big companies and startups. I worked for HP for a few years then I joined a startup in Silicon Valley that was subsequently acquired. I moved back to Europe a few years ago to find some European companies that were ready to expand in the US. I started to work for Expert System, which had been around for a while and was operating mainly in Europe until a few years ago. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 5)

Adam Wray: We’re now moving towards distributed data platforms. This is where clients in the enterprise are going to say, “I want to use many models, but I don’t want to be responsible for figuring out how to keep all that available. I just want the data to be accessible so I can build my applications and go after business value at the top.” Riak Core gives us a distributed systems foundation to layer more and more models on, which is a key architectural approach that’s different form our competitors. It allows us to think broader. We have proven we can provide multi-model because we have already built both Riak KV and Riak S@ on the same foundation. A third Riak product is coming. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How does all this fit in the competitive landscape? Can you help me build an ecosystem map of where you sit?

Adam Wray: I’ll take a high-level map and break it down. It starts with the first two trends. The first trend in unstructured data was Hadoop. That trend was driven by the thought process that commodity hardware is cheap. Data, as a strategic enabler, is becoming critical. Hadoop became wildly popular over the last five years. You might even have heard the term data lake bounced around at times. That’s effectively the thought process of putting all your data in one central place. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about the computer architecture side of what you do.

Adam Wray: Riak Core is focused on distributed systems. All of our algorithms are trying to make sure that we have places in multiple locations so that when you have a knottage within the Internet, which is a common thing, or if your servers fail, there’s always another point at which that data is accessible. That’s one thing. That’s a really tough thing to solve. We use what’s called the ring architecture.

The second aspect is the accuracy of the data. The availability component along at large scale is very tough to do. Most of our competitors come tumbling down when faced with that challenge. We have an operational overhead challenge in trying to manage all of that. That’s one half of it. The other half is keeping everything accurate and available. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 2)

Adam Wray: Let’s talk about healthcare and NHS. NHS is a health services organization in UK. They cover all the profile information for all 80 million citizens. That original project was held within an Oracle database. As they were continuing to expand the amount of data that they would collect and as they were capturing more data that was unanticipated,  they needed to make sure that they were making it available regardless of location. What you could have is literally a life and death situation. If a patient comes in, they need to be prescribed a certain thing based on an emergency scenario or just a daily prescription. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting strategically in how you’ve navigated the story so far? How many customers do you have now?

Vincent Yang: I think we have four or five dozen customers. The growth rate is actually pretty fast.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the pricing model? What’s the business model?

Vincent Yang: The core of EverString is to provide the predictive model. For every client, if they have multiple products, there will be multiple models running at the same time. For every single model, there is a predictive platform fee. It depends on the scale of the business. For some clients, we charge $30,000 to $100,000. >>>