Artificial intelligence
Primal makes sense of small data
KITCHENER — A happy angler hefts the rainbow trout into the air, snaps a selfie and posts it on social media with a brief description of the misty waters of the Saugeen River.
While checking her smartphone, she sees ads for bait and tackle shops in nearby towns, and notices about split-cane poles for fly fishing available through special order. Oh, and there is a restaurant along the way home with a special on stuffed and baked trout. And here’s an article on tying flies to match the hatch for this particular river.
The selfie posted by the grinning angler was seen by an artificial intelligence platform created by a Kitchener company Primal. The cloud-based system quickly understood where the photo was posted, and what it was about. It then sent ads and other content to her device.
For 10 years, the software developers at Primal have built an artificial intelligence platform that understands words. It understands the words in a Twitter feed or any other social media channel.
“So we can look at a single tweet, understand what it is talking about, and use that meaning to recommend content, recommend products, recommend advertisements,” said Jeff McDowell, Primal’s chief operating officer.
The company employs about 10 people as it goes to market after a decade of research and development. At one point it had 30 employees, mostly software developers, as it built the technology.
Primal has raised more than $20 million from a local network of angel investors, led by its Yvan Couture, the company’s chief executive officer.
On Wednesday, the Business Development Bank of Canada announced it is loaning Primal $2.36 million.
The bank has a new policy of lending money to fast-growing startups based on intellectual property and patents instead of the physical assets, said Michael Denham, the bank’s president and chief executive officer.
“So why this transaction is so important, it is one of the first transactions of this type that fits within that strategy,” he said.
Primal will use the funds to develop two new applications for its technology — one that helps big companies with internal searches of their networks, and another that helps small and medium-sized businesses make product recommendations in response to online searches.
Primal’s platform is all about small data. It can work with a single word. “Which is the next frontier of artificial intelligence,” said McDowell.
Primal focuses on semantic search. It developed a model called AKRM — Atomic Knowledge Representation Model — that breaks down the English language into its smallest parts, understands what it is reading, and automatically finds related content.
Unlike machine learning platforms that need hundreds or thousands of articles so it can develop context and rank the relative importance of the information, Primal needs just one word or phrase to start working.
This allows Primal to get very specific with the content it sends out. That means a fly fishing shop in Elora will not have its ads posted next to content about deep sea fishing for tuna off the East Coast. The technology constantly scans social media, and pushes out content based on the time, location and meaning of current posts.
The AI platform and its bots do not troll through a decade of stored data. In fact, Primal does not store any data.
“But if you tweet about fly fishing, or taking your son fly fishing, or ‘I just caught this trout in the Saugeen River,’ we can use that information in real time to match content or advertising or products to you based on what you just publicly spoke about,” said McDowell.
Primal has more than 34,000 followers on Twitter. It says its technology is so good at matching ads and content to the interests of recipients, it gets no complaints.
“In fact all we get are people thanking us because it has such a high level of relevancy that it is no longer spam,” said McDowell.
Primal developed a product that was integrated with Hootsuite, a software platform developed in Vancouver that helps businesses push out content over multiple social media channels at the same time. Primal will help social media managers using Hootsuite to automatically curate content for their base of followers.
“We use over 1,500 news sources and then bring you back a bunch of interesting content that is highly aligned with your interests that you want to tweet out or send over Facebook,” said McDowell.