Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 1)

Knowledge management has been around. What has changed? Read on for more discussion on the subject.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Brainspace.

Dave Copps: I’m the CEO of Brainspace. We’re a software company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We built a large-scale machine learning platform that is reinventing the way that companies are learning through their Big Data.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What kind of customers are you trying to cater to? When you say learning, what use cases are we talking about?

Dave Copps: Most of our customers are companies that have large amounts of knowledge workers. The industries we are primarily focused on would be consulting, biotech, technology, oil and gas, and places where there’s a lot of research and knowledge workers. The reason being that our technology has a very unique capability of being able to capture the concepts, thoughts, and ideas and connect the concepts inside of a company’s data. Whether it’s Word, email, blogs, Brainspace has the ability to read that information to connect the concepts inside of all of it, and form that into an asset or a brain that everyone can use to connect to each other or connect to knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say we are talking about a pharma R&D environment. How does your technology work? How does the use case flow?

Dave Copps: Inside of organizations that have large research departments, one of the greatest assets is their knowledge. The problem is with the way people have been handling it. It’s time for a big change. Applying incrementally better technology at infinitely more data is just not working anymore. I’ve read statistics where I think 50% of searches are unsuccessful, and that 35% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent searching for information. You start multiplying 35% of a $100,000 salary, and multiply that by thousands, we’re talking of tens of millions of dollars that’s being wasted every year.

We’ve got to find a better way to connect people with the information that matters. We’ve taken a very unique approach. Before anyone pushes a search button, our software read unstructured information and connect the concepts of those documents. When you are looking at a paragraph, Brainspace can read that paragraph in sub-seconds and start connecting your with other research or other people who might know about that.

Sramana Mitra: How does that work? When you say connect you with people, who’s initiating the connection? Is the software then recommending that you should connect with a certain person working on specific research area, or is the person who’s researching somehow pulling it? What is the work flow?

Dave Copps: Inside of our system, the idea of curation is very important. The document that a person is touching, writing, collecting, and collaborating on, all the concepts and ideas in those documents can be intimately associated with that person’s name. The next time I’m highlighting a paragraph on, say, the Internet of Things, Brainspace will not only point me to other documents that contain that concept and other similar concepts, it may also point me to collections of documents that people have curated.

There might be a person inside my company who’s curated a lot of documents. That collection might be followed by hundreds of people. That’s a social validation that that person might be an expert. We’re trying to get away from this idea that searching for experts is not like searching for documents. You just don’t search a profile to find somebody. What’s really important is who they are interacting with, what are the documents they are touching, and how can we associate those people with the concepts and thoughts inside the document.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace
1 2 3 4 5