August 8, 2007

Learning Machines

A Nashville-area tech company has received a patent on software that learns as it works. Digital Reasoning Systems, based in Brentwood, TN, received patent #7,249,117 for its "Knowledge Discovery Agent System and Method," which the company touts as offering "a fundamentally new generation of machine-based natural human language applications." The technology has potential applications in intelligence, web search and much more.

This breakthrough patent grants broad protection for how artificial intelligence, including neural networks, genetic algorithms, and vector space models can be used to learn the meanings of symbols - such as words, categories, or numerical values. Understanding the subtle meaning of terms in context has been one of the "Holy Grails" of artificial intelligence. Not only is Digital Reasoning fully able to accomplish this feat, it is now patented.

"In the landscape of information processing, this patent is very valuable real estate," said Tim Estes, CEO of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. "Pretty much every conceivable approach to the area of 'symbol grounding' - the basic building block of determining what words mean - using unsupervised learning from measurements of contextual invariance of usage is covered under this patent."

"The applications that will arise as a result of our patented technologies will allow machines to learn language much the way that children do and revolutionize the knowledge engineering process that is at the root of the most complicated systems," Estes said. "The implications for search engines, machine translation, and most knowledge-centric applications are immense. Finally, we can have broad machine understanding of what humans mean simply by reading what we say."