Vyasa, an analytics company with a staff of 13 employees based in Newburyport, is getting out of stealth mode on Monday with the launch of a deep learning software platform that's meant primarily for life sciences and healthcare organizations.
The name of the company gives an unexpected insight into the company's mission. One of the most revered figures in Hinduism, Vyasa was a compiler of information and a storyteller — considered to be the author of the epic poem Mahabharata.
"I loved this idea of... thinking back to Vyasa as this compiler of information and then relating it to how I believed that this novel A.I. system can help us also compile information and derive better information," founder and CEO Dr. Christopher Bouton said in an interview.
Dr. Bouton, a life scientist and neurobiologist who lived in India for four years as a boy, was founder and CEO of Entagen, another big data company acquired by Thomson Reuters in October 2013. His new venture Vyasa, which received $300,000 from private investors (Bouton declined to disclose any names), has been in stealth mode a little over a year before launching its flagship product.
The product, Cortex, is a deep learning platform for enterprise data, Dr. Bouton explained. What makes Cortex different from its competitors is a combination of two features: its ability to recognize patterns of intangible things - such as concepts and ideas - with no need for companies to store all the data in a database.
"The traditional example of deep learning now is the ability to recognize an object in an image, like a cat or a dog," Dr. Bouton explained. "And the idea was: Why can't we do it with concepts and data?"
By bringing into light how the same concept is used in a variety of digital information, Cortex should enable companies to see unexpected connections and, therefore, make informed decisions. End users are data scientists or project leads working on new therapies, drugs or clinical trials.
Here's a video showing how Cortex works:
Although Cortex's current main focus is the life sciences and healthcare industry, Dr. Bouton said the system could be trained to work with "the kind of content you're interested in," allowing applications in the legal space, fintech, business intelligence and retail.
