The two-year National Science Foundation grant will enable i2k Connect to complete the development and validation of its technology and prepare to enter the file analysis market.

[HOUSTON, TX, October 7, 2015] i2k Connect combines machine learning with subject matter expert knowledge to interpret unstructured data spread across many documents, internal and from the Internet. By delivering focused information to decision-makers, i2k Connect addresses the key commercial bottlenecks of consistency, scalability, performance, and total cost of ownership that have stymied efforts to improve information governance through automation.

“Corporations run on information, much of it in documents which cannot be found easily, making the data in them effectively lost to the organization,” said Reid G. Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Smith continued, “A major cause is that consistently organizing and tagging documents manually is very difficult to sustain.” Bruce G. Buchanan, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, a pioneer in applications of Artificial Intelligence, added, “Managers and workers are also overloaded with data streaming to their desktops and mobile devices—most of it irrelevant for recognizing and solving immediate problems, because they lack effective tools to recognize and focus on the data they need. i2k Connect has solved that problem for information workers, in real time, using a novel combination of machine learning and subject matter expertise.”

During Phase I of its NSF SBIR award for “Translational Information Management for Industry,” i2k Connect developed core software components for its services. The company also developed partnerships with three industry leaders and validated the commercial approach with potential customers, many of them in the energy industry. The Phase II award (National Science Foundation Award ID: 1534798) for early stage commercialization will enable i2k Connect to complete the development and validation of its technology and prepare the company to enter the file analysis market.

About i2k Connect LLC

i2k Connect is an AI technology company that transforms unstructured documents into structured data enriched with subject matter expert knowledge. The i2k Enrichment Suite reads and enriches documents with accurate, useful, and consistent metadata. It delivers the results into a company’s content management and real-time business intelligence systems. The value derives from efficiently extracting essential data from the cluttered Internet stream; discovering new connections from data lost in the corporate cloud; reducing storage cost and managing risk by eliminating redundant or outdated documents; and highlighting potential security and privacy policy violations.

About the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Program

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, currently with a $7 billion budget. Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) is an approximately $170 million program that catalyzes commercialization of high-risk technological innovations via research and development (R&D) grants to startups and other small businesses. The program funds roughly 400 companies each year. More details at https://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/.