CEO and co-founder Sagie Davidovich discusses future implications of his company’s problem-solving platform.
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What if there was a way to automate the creation of ideas? What if you could search the web for disparate data and combine all this to provide previously unseen connections and hypotheses? This is where SparkBeyond enters.
More about artificial intelligence
“We see SparkBeyond as a platform to make a global impact on the planet. It’s not a search engine. It’s a search engine,” said CEO and co-founder Sagie Davidovich.
“Can AI be applied in a very different way to how it is applied today? Can it invent? Can it ask questions? Can it conduct research? This is the question we started six years ago when we started this journey.”
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The AI company has been making waves since it was founded in Israel by Davidovich and Ron Karidi in 2013. After nearly six years of refinement, the SparkBeyond platform has generated more than seven billion hypotheses and has an impact of $ 1 billion on the companies it has been working with, said Davidovich.
According to Davidovich, the SparkBeyond AI platform cost “six to seven digits” to use and dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including MetLife and Anheuser-Busch, started with them. McKinsey & Company consultancy has quoted the company to help customers use the SparkBeyond AI tool.
“This is not a theoretical exercise. Together we have generated more than 150 meaningful customer engagements and more than $ 1 billion in impact on customer results,” said McKinsey’s chief of analytical companies Erez Raanan in July at the Innovate’19 Summit in London.
During a medical conference in Oxford, SparkBeyond presented the results of his work with a large healthcare organization to help doctors increase their ability to detect colon cancer early on the basis of historical medical data, laboratory tests, prescriptions, doctor visits and other data.
“The machine actually found very complex patterns regarding changes in your hemoglobin level over time and other factors that you might generally have a vague idea that” yes, they are related, “but understand how to combines exactly and how you can abstract them something that you would not necessarily have tried. The machine examined tens of millions of hypotheses and ideas. ”
How it works
Davidovich showed how grainy the AI technology is. When you ask the machine what influences house prices in Brooklyn, a list of nearby sights that increase house value, such as a bay, a pier, health care facilities, or even diesel stations, is quickly displayed.
In SparkBeyond’s work with a Japanese retailer to optimize store location decisions, the system discovered that the best places to open new stores were next to laundries, he said. It makes perfect sense when you think about it – people have time to kill while waiting for their clothes – but such insights may have been overlooked by decision makers who rely on traditional processes.
Data only tells part of the story, Davidovich said. By taking data and contextualizing it with external data sources, one can connect the dots to find patterns that would otherwise look like a number of deviations.
The project originated from the idea that Davidovich and Karidi had to create a platform that could search the internet for all the code that was available on the internet. They create one of the world’s largest libraries with open source algorithms and SparkBeyond can now generate four million hypotheses per minute – a performance that allows the platform to process hundreds of good and bad ideas every second.
The two founders now believe that challenges such as climate change, sustainability, cancer and other persistent problems can be solved through their platform. Davidovich said so far, AI has been used to replicate people’s cognitive functions, but was never built to come up with creative ideas.
“You start with a problem, you identify underlying causes, you investigate existing solutions, you investigate deficiencies in those solutions, you identify opportunities for innovation. This is what the world says about your problem and this is what the data says. It is interesting to see where they overlap, “said Davidovich.
It requires a bit of a learning curve to use because it provides users with results that are not websites, but actual answers related to research chains.
The SparkBeyond platform is multilevel and shows you the distribution of sources from which information is extracted – a kind of visual representation of its thinking process.
The results are ranked based on the number of sources that agree and there is a credibility score for each source that is also taken into account. You can blacklist or exclude certain sources and overlay different data streams to find new correlations.
The platform
The platform is linked to a repository of 1.2 million data sets and can quantify the strength of the relationship between two information points based on how much evidence there is on the internet.
The company retrieves the data on its platform from a network of data partners, proprietary sources and publicly available information sources on the internet. But Davidovich emphasized that the platform goes far beyond predictions or data to generate insights and models.
Davidovich and his team designed the platform to perform as evolution, to split disparate data and merge to create new solutions.
“These are two paradigms, one is inductive and the other is deductive. One is quantitative and the other is qualitative. These two worlds have never been bridged before. Part is data, part is knowledge,” said Davidovich
The SparkBeyond platform is now used in more than 23 industries and has a powerful partner in Microsoft, which has repeatedly praised the innovative nature of the AI system.
“In essence, the hypothesis engine we have built takes knowledge from data,” said Davidovich.
“If you can figure out the cause, reverse engineer the system and discover mechanisms of action, you can recommend actions that solve the problem, instead of just saying,” OK, let’s build a predictive model. “This complementary approach has enabled us to grow rapidly because it is very synergistic with existing AI approaches.”
The company has grown rapidly in recent years and has opened or expanded offices in London, New York, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Melbourne, and external staff now work in Poland and Tokyo.
“SparkBeyond allows you to ask many questions, to get insights on a daily basis as explainable as possible,” Raanan said. “If you are a smart company, you will use it to stimulate collaboration between the business side and the data side and the analytical side. Some insights are irrelevant and some impactful. Some are useful problems that you can do something about. ”
Expanding footprint
SparkBeyond’s hypothesis engine has been active since 2014, but the web knowledge aspect of the work began in 2018. The company now wants to expand its footprint and create even more partners to validate ideas, increase their domain knowledge and share some of the insights generated by the SparkBeyond platform.
The company is now working with some of the best insurance companies and banks on everything from insurance to customer turnover, employee retention, fraud and creditworthiness, said Davidovich. It has helped retailers with location optimization and even range prices.
“We hope that SparkBeyond can move the needle on some of the meaningful problems that affect billions of people. But we don’t want to make any illusions. We know that none of these problems can only be solved. We need all the help we can to make this possible and this is our call for action. We want partners to join us and we want to create a community of data partnerships. ”
“There is not enough time to wait for centuries for someone to come up with the right ideas. We should not leave these things to luck. This is about research, problem solving, optimization and generally beyond the cognitive bottleneck.”
For the future, Davidovich said the company is imagining a time when it can take the last hundred years of inventions and extract universal principles that can be used to solve modern problems.
He demonstrated a tool that could extract the insights from the hypothesis engine and come up with new inventions. Although many of the ideas generated are half-baked and nonsense, they offer useful starting points for human innovators to jump from.
Davidovich, for example, listed some of the United Nations sustainable development goals and asked if they could use the invention to create millions of ideas or solutions that experts could sort and improve.
“We want to extract the knowledge of human intelligence,” said Davidovich.
“We use the collective intelligence of humanity to solve the current challenges of the world using different sources of intelligence.”
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