Polecat Developing New Kinds of BI Tools

Irish Market Intelligence Firm to Use MeaningMine Machine Learning Algorithms  to Build New Kinds of Business Intelligence Tools

Polecat, a  market intelligence company based in Dublin and the UK, has signed an exclusive worldwide licence to use advanced software algorithms developed by UCD researchers to enhance its strategic market intelligence offering MeaningMine.

Polecat's MeaningMIne provides clients with insights into emerging trends, influencer networks, competitive analysis and dominant discussions, helping organisational strategists keep up-to-date with relevant market intelligence. It has particular applications where there are enormous amounts of data to be extracted and analysed from "noisy" sources such as the Internet and internal organisation networks.

It's part of a new market category of advanced software analytics which, according to Forrester, will fuel year-on-year growth in the business intelligence software market to an estimated $14 billion worldwide by 2014. According to IDC, the advanced software analytics market represents approximately 20% of the overall business intelligence tools market and grew by 12% in 2008. 

MeaningMine is based upon ‘unsupervised learning' algorithms, which enable smarter and faster ways to collect and analyse vast amounts of online data so meaningful knowledge can be extracted. It analyses statistical and linguistic trends in publically available digital and broadcast media, sifting through 300,000 articles and 4 million blog posts daily, using a combination of data mining and text analytics, to extract dominant themes and emerging trends.

The advanced software algorithms, or machine learning technologies,  were developed by Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering, Pádraig Cunningham who has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers on applied Artificial Intelligence, and Dr Derek Greene, both of whom are researchers in a Science Foundation Ireland funded programme at UCD's School of Computer Science and Informatics.

Professor Cunningham's key focus, for which he is widely acclaimed, is the development of novel techniques motivated by the peculiarities of real world data.  He said: "The collaboration with Polecat is very valuable to us, as their experience in market intelligence will inform us about the technology requirements and research challenges in this area. Research progress in this area requires collaboration between business experts and technologists in order to direct research to address real business requirements."

Dr Derek Greene added, "The partnership with Polecat highlights the important role that machine learning technologies can play in supporting key business tasks such as the provision of market intelligence, when combined with industry expertise and insight."

As Polecat's mining of digital and broadcast media grows, it  plans to develop the software tools licensed from UCD by combining them with its current market intelligence technology.  It hopes the result will be  faster and more dynamic market intelligence  for  its client organisations worldwide.  

Polecat was founded in 2007 by James Lawn and Bronwyn Kunhardt.   Lawn said, "We are very pleased to be working with University College Dublin. It is a highly innovative university and, thanks to this partnership, we believe businesses and Government organisations around the world will soon be able to have truly reliable, measurable and live market intelligence available at their finger tips."

The licensing deal was negotiated by NovaUCD and Dublin-based legal firm Beauchamps Solicitors. Dr François Pichot of the NovaUCD technology transfer team, said that the licensing deal was significant for UCD on several levels. "Information overload is now a well-known problem in the current data-rich environment, and is not likely to diminish. UCD has licensed advanced software tools to Polecat, enabling meaningful knowledge to be extracted from vast amounts of data. This is an exciting space, one which UCD is motivated to see flourish and is all the more relevant in the context of the development of a smart economy."

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