By Alessio Jacona *
“We are an extension of people.
Our technology is like a cognitive exoskeleton that multiplies the capabilities, while the human being remains in command ».
Stefano Spaggiari, co-founder and executive chairman of Expert.ai, describes, almost as if it were a superpower, the AI platform for understanding natural language developed in Italy by his company.
After all, the concept from which it starts is quite simple: today companies and organizations are inundated with billions of data, which however they must be able to analyze and understand in order to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
In fact, a miracle that can only be accomplished if artificial intelligence is used.
But let's go in order: Expert.ai was born thirty years ago, when it was still called Expert System, and for twenty it has been dealing with artificial intelligence applied to Natural language Processing. Listed on the stock exchange since 2014, today it is a company with 350 employees present in France, Germany, Spain and the UK. The headquarters is in Modena, where the company was born and where it maintains research and development, but since November Spaggiari and his team have also landed in Boston.
Starting in a garage, today Expert.ai collaborates with organizations and government agencies in Europe, North and South America and the Middle East. Its "differentiating factor" is the hybrid approach to natural language processing, because it combines semantic analysis and machine learning: the result is a considerably more effective system in categorizing and correlating content, which is also able to recognize and analyze thirty types of emotions different.
Initially developed working on Italian, this technology now works in 12 different languages which include Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. «The system analyzes a text and generates a cognitive map, identifying the links between the various elements which it then breaks down thanks to grammatical, logical and above all semantic analysis» explains Spaggiari. In this way the platform is able to understand the true meaning of the single word within its context, something in which "brutal" machine learning often fails. The result is much more accurate results, which are also verifiable, because the Expert.ai AI is "verifiable" and "robust".
Given this technology, the applications are innumerable: where the ability to “read” a large number of documents is needed, the system is able to extract structured and organized information. «Let's take insurance companies for example - explains Spaggiari - here our software automates the reading, understanding and extraction of significant data contained in documents such as policies or medical reports, very quickly and on a large scale. The information obtained in this way - he continues - makes it possible to reduce the risk, improve the percentages of underwriting contracts and increase the productivity of insurance companies and brokers ».
In newsrooms, technologies like this can serve to reduce the time-consuming activities of editorial teams by simplifying cross-checking of sources and comparing documents. In the field of Defense and Intelligence, to give another example, the platform increases the ability of analysts to identify potential threats, monitoring large volumes of documents in a timely and timely manner (in any digital format, provided they are not handwritten), communications and web content from any accessible source. "Those involved in Defense and Intelligence have witnessed a paradigm shift - observes the co-founder of Expert.ai - because while before they had to struggle to find useful information to understand the world, today, on the contrary, they receive too much information ,and it must be able to filter them to understand what is happening in the world, to grasp the so-called weak signals ».
In short: if it is true that "in a world flooded with irrelevant information, clarity is power", as Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book "21 lessons for the 21st century", then this clarity may perhaps arise from the new alliance between human beings and IA.
* Journalist, innovation expert and curator of the Artificial Intelligence Observatory ANSA.it
