Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs (Part 1)

A terrific conversation about NLP and domain specific taxonomy building within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. 50% of the customers are ISVs building on top of their platform!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and John Snow Labs.

David Talby: I grew up in Israel. I did my undergraduate, Masters, and Ph.D. in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I served at the Jerusalem outpost for seven years. Afterward, I joined Amazon and relocated to the UK. Two years later, I relocated to Seattle with my family.

I was with Amazon for a while helping scale its global financial systems. I then moved to Microsoft where I worked on Bing, the shopping engine. That is where I got into building teams and using software that utilizes machine learning. That was over a decade ago.

After that, I spent five years at a startup that was a B2B analytics platform for the healthcare space. After some consulting and spending two or three years finding my way around, I joined John Snow Labs.

I started working on the stock NLP library. The mission was around providing the global AI community with state-of-the-art natural language processing. 

Sramana Mitra: Where does the name John Snow Labs come from?

David Talby: That is usually the first thing that people ask. It did not come from the Game of Thrones. Dr. John Snow is a real person. He was a physician in Victorian London. He is most well-known for helping stop a Cholera outbreak in London that killed several hundred people.

What is interesting is how he did it. He collected data and built a map called the Ghost map. Every dot on that map is a ghost; it’s someone who died from cholera. After building the map and analyzing the data, he concluded that there was one specific water well that all the people drank from.

The pump was disabled and the cholera outbreak ceased. That is one of the first examples of using data to improve public health. Dr. Snow to this day is considered the father of Epidemiology – the study of public health.

Another cool thing at that time is that people refused to believe that cholera is waterborne. That was the real insight. We talk a lot about uncovering and foreseeing insights.

Before the invention of the microscope, the whole concept of the germ theory was still a controversial thing because it was unprovable. You have lethal bugs in the water that make you sick. It is as good as anything that the church came up with to try to explain those kinds of pandemics.

Sramana Mitra: How does the story of cholera and John Snow tie into what you are doing at John Snow Labs?

David Talby: Our goal two centuries later is to help create as many more John Snows as possible. We provide the data processing, algorithms, and model so that people can go and solve concerns and other adverse events. We are a healthcare and life science company.

Our goal is to enable clinicians working out there to do the job faster. If you are familiar with the John Snow story, he did the math, but a lot of people were going around who were going house to house and collecting the data. That is us. We are the ones in the backend. Our mission is to help thousands of more John Snows come about in the 21st century.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs
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