Today, we are going through an “AI Renaissance.” Previously unsolved problems are starting to fall and some types of machine learning are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life through SaaS companies and Mobile Apps. Recent advances (published at ICML 2015) have broken new ground on the quality of sentiment analysis and semantic similarity from text. These breakthroughs from Deep Learning will be discussed in the larger context of new solutions they enable.

We are very much at the beginning of this new wave. The innovations have been more at the low-implementation level through new learning techniques (such as Deep Learning) and less in integrated systems of machine learning that can provide human-augmenting intelligence on abstract tasks and problems. We have a ways to go to build true Reasoning from human language data.

It is this “assembly of algorithms” that will productize these advances and create the equivalent of the “integrated circuit for machine cognition.” The companies that deliver these productized Machine Learning systems are a new class of software company- called Cognitive Computing companies. Given the enormous expansion of capabilities these algorithms bring to software, most current software companies today will become “Cognitive” at some level or likely be obsolete. Moreover, the most competitive businesses and demanding government missions are aggressively adopting this technology to compensate for information overload in a “post search” world.

We will explore some of the most compelling applications that are emerging in the area of Risk, Market Intelligence, and Investigations based on Cognitive Computing at Digital Reasoning.