Listening to the Customer with Text Analytics

Benson Margulies

Chief Technology Officer, Basis Technology

This talk was given on July 17, 2014 at Unlocking Value with Text Analytics, part of Fresh Data Boston.

As the old saying goes, “The customer is always right.” But how do we know what customers are saying when they aren’t talking to us directly and there may be millions of them? And how can we decide when something a single customer is saying has implications for the way we do business with all of our customers?

Extracting value from the content of independent reviews, online discussions, service tickets and transcribed support calls requires a systematic approach based on structuring that text content and extracting the key pieces of information. In this talk, we’ll delve into how to apply text analysis to this problem in order to obtain a clearer picture of the ways in which we should take action.

Watch all the talks from Unlocking Value with Text Analytics:

Abstracts

Public Health Surveillance

John Brownstein

Director Computational Epidemiology Group | Center for Biomedical Informatics, Boston Children’s Hospital

Can we improve the health of our population with text analytics? This seems like a curious proposition, as it obviously avoids the cornerstones of healthy living, i.e. diet and exercise. However, this idea is the cornerstone of our research – can we mine large volumes of text data to observe the current health of our population, discover adverse drug interactions before they have broad health impacts, monitor outbreaks of serious diseases, and even predict the emergence of the next infectious disease in order to prevent it from spreading?

In this talk, I’ll be outlining the work we’ve done with HealthMap.org, a system for monitoring disease outbreak and providing real-time surveillance of emerging public health threats, used by over a million people a year including the CDC, WHO, DHS, DOD, HHS, and EU. And I’ll also discuss MedWatcher.org, a mobile app for tracking and reporting side effects of drugs, vaccines and medical devices.

Unlocking Value with Predictive Analytics: Turning Text into Prediction

Ingo Mierswa

Chief Executive Officer | RapidMiner

Ingo Mierswa will share real world scenarios explaining how businesses unlock hidden patterns from vast amounts of data to and use those to predict the near future. Furthermore, today’s businesses are in unique position to turn those predictive insights into immediate, revenue generating action. Recent technology advances now allow to mesh-up structured with unstructured data so that organizations can read the voice of the customer in addition to the mere analysis of recent transactions. Text analysis became a key technology for reducing churn, improving products and services, and facilitating customer feedback.

Listening to the Customer

Benson Margulies

Chief Technical Officer | Basis Technology

Speakers

Sheamus McGovern, CQF
Chief Technology Officer | Capital Market Exchange

Sheamus McGovern is a leading technologist with many years experience building complex software platforms particularly in quantitative finance and business intelligence. He is one of the founders of Fresh Data Boston and an active entrepreneur involved in a number of startups in the Boston area.

John S. Brownstein, PhD
Director Computational Epidemiology Group | Center for Biomedical Informatics, Boston Children’s Hospital

John Brownstein, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and directs the Computational Epidemiology Group at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program in Boston. He was trained as an epidemiologist at Yale University. Overall, his research agenda aims to have translation impact on the surveillance, control and prevention of disease. He has been at the forefront of the development and application of public health surveillance including HealthMap.org, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system. The system is in use by over a million people a year including the CDC, WHO, DHS, DOD, HHS, and EU, and has been recognized by the National Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Dr. Brownstein has advised the World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance.

Ingo Mierswa, PhD
Chief Executive Officer | RapidMiner

Ingo Mierswa is an industry-veteran data scientist since starting to develop RapidMiner at the Artificial Intelligence Division of the University of Dortmund, Germany. Mierswa, the scientist, has authored numerous award-winning publications about predictive analytics and big data. Mierswa, the entrepreneur, is the founder of RapidMiner. Under his leadership RapidMiner has grown up to 300% per year over the past five years. In 2012, he spearheaded the go-international strategy with the opening of offices in the US.

Benson Margulies
Chief Technical Officer | Basis Technology

Benson provides technological leadership at Basis Technology. With the R&D team, he breaks ground in new technologies for the company’s core products and incubator projects. Prior to Basis Technology, Benson held technical and management positions at Kendall Square Research, Symbolics, Object Design, and Honeywell Information Systems. He is also an active contributor to the open source software community as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a Project Management Committee member of Apache Mahout and Apache CXF. Benson holds a degree in computer science from MIT.

Panelists

Amit Bohensky
Founder and CEO | Zoomd.com

Amit Bohensky is an Israeli business executive and angel investor who works primarily within the software industry. Previously a CEO for companies such as Matrix Global and Consist Systems and Technologies, he has founded technology startups such as Unicoders and Focal-Info, the latter of which was sold to Verint Systems in 2012. He stayed on as Verint’s Vice President of open source web intelligence until leaving recently to found the startup software company Zoomd.com, where he is currently the CEO.

Jeffrey Hill
Director, Language Processing | Humedica

Jeff Hill has been involved in speech and language understanding for over 25 years. At Humedica, Jeff leads the development of a system which applies language understanding techniques to extract structured data from unstructured text. Before joining Humedica, he was Director of Clinical Language Understanding at Nuance’s Dictaphone unit which was focused on automatic EMR data entry from dictated reports. Previously, he was head of engineering at Soliloquy Learning, a pioneer in the application of speech recognition to tutoring systems. He was CTO at Unveil technologies where he created the Conversation Manager, a product that allowed call centers to create automatic “agents” to answer customer service questions. He developed the first continuous speech recognition system for radiology dictation at Articulate Systems, and led engineering at speech recognition pioneer Voice Processing Corporation.

Jeff graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with MSEE and BSEE degrees in Computer Science at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

George Kassabgi
Executive Chairman | Luminoso
and Executive Chairman | ZappRx

A successful entrepreneur and investor, George Kassabgi serves as Executive Chairman at Luminoso, a text analytics technology company, and Executive Chairman at ZappRx, a health care information automation company. George is also a member of the Mendix board of directors, a growth-stage technology company.

In the past, George was CEO and co-founder of Keas.com, a provider of employee health and wellness solutions, and he was formerly CEO of Bit9 Inc., a leader in desktop security. George has held executive-level roles at Progress Software and BEA Systems. He has been actively involved in high-tech start-ups as a board member, angel investor, and advisor with companies, including Stackdriver (acquired by Google), RationalWave Analytics (acquired by BottomLine), DataPower (acquired by IBM), Imprivata, Indigio Group (acquired by BridgeLine Digital), and LeapFILE.

Andrew McKay
CTO, Co-Founder | Kona DataSearch

Andrew is Co-Founder and CTO of Kona DataSearch. He has over 25 years’ experience in executive, marketing, sales, and engineering positions in the software industry. In the last 12 years Andrew has been active in the search industry, as an executive at Fast Search & Transfer, which sold to Microsoft in 2008, and as a Co-Founder of Attivio.

Michael Nelson

Executive Vice President, Managing Director East Coast Region | Advanced Discovery

Mr. Nelson is currently EVP, Managing Director of East Coast Region for Advanced Discovery. Mr. Nelson successfully launched the highest grossing offices in New York and DC for Advanced and he is an adviser for several ventures and private equity groups. Mr. Nelson focuses on staying ahead of emerging data management resources in an ever changing Legal Technology and Global business environment. He possesses a unique blend of technological and business acumen to guide business on a path to success. Mr. Nelson was responsible for rolling out MetLife’s legal custodian database and successfully handling some of the company’s largest global litigation matters.