Polecat, a market intelligence provider based in Dublin and in the UK, has signed an exclusive, worldwide licence for advanced software algorithms developed by UCD researchers to enhance its strategic market intelligence platform.

The technology licensed by Polecat arises from a research programme funded by Science Foundation Ireland at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics. The licensing deal was negotiated by NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre and Beauchamps Solicitors, the Dublin-based legal firm.

Polecat’s MeaningMine platform analyses statistical and linguistic trends in publically available digital and broadcast media by mining 300,000 articles and 4 million blog posts daily. Using a combination of data mining and text analytics Polecat can extract dominant themes and emerging trends which enables its clients to be informed, monitor and report on the value of their strategic and communication activities.

Polecat's MeaningMine Platform

Polecat’s MeaningMine platform is part of a new market category of advanced software analytics which, according to Forrester, will fuel year-on-year growth in the business intelligence software market to an estimated $14 billion worldwide by 2014. According to IDC the advanced software analytics market represents approximately 20% of the overall business intelligence tools market and grew by 12% in 2008.

Using its current platform Polecat can provide clients with insight into emerging trends, influencer networks, competitive analysis and dominant discussions empowering senior organisational strategists to keep up-to-date with relevant market intelligence data.

As Polecat’s mining of digital and broadcast media grows and develops the software tools licensed from UCD, combined with its current technology, will enable it to offer faster and more dynamic market intelligence information to worldwide businesses and global organisations.

James Lawn, Polecat's Chief Executive and co-founder said, “We are very pleased to be working with University College Dublin. It is a highly innovative university and, thanks to this partnership, we believe businesses and Government organisations around the world will soon be able to have truly reliable, measurable and live market intelligence available at their finger tips.”

The advanced software algorithms, or machine learning technologies, developed by Professor Pádraig Cunningham and Dr Derek Greene, researchers in UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, are based upon ‘unsupervised learning’ algorithms, which enable smarter and faster ways to collect and analyse vast amounts of online data from which meaningful knowledge can be extracted.

This technology has particular applications where there are enormous amounts of data to be extracted and analysed from “noisy” sources such as the Internet and internal organisation networks.

Professor Pádraig Cunningham, UCD Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering said, “The collaboration with Polecat is very valuable to us as their experience in market intelligence will inform us about the technology requirements and research challenges in this area. Research progress in this area requires collaboration between business experts and technologists in order to direct research to address real business requirements.”

Dr Derek Greene, added, "The partnership with Polecat highlights the important role that machine learning technologies can play in supporting key business tasks such as the provision of market intelligence, when combined with industry expertise and insight."

Dr François Pichot, NovaUCD, technology transfer team, said that the licensing deal was significant for UCD on several levels, “Information overload is now a well-known problem in the current data-rich environment, and is not likely to diminish.  UCD has licensed advanced software tools to Polecat, enabling meaningful knowledge to be extracted from vast amounts of data. This is an exciting space, one which UCD is motivated to see flourish and is all the more relevant in the context of the development of a smart economy.”

Polecat, founded in 2007 by James Lawn and Bronwyn Kunhardt, will continue to work with UCD to further develop this technology.

ENDS

2 December 2009

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, t: +353 1 716 3712 or Jonathan Woods, Polecat, e: jonathan@meaningmine.com, t: +44 207 0601987 or  +353 1 672 5847.

Editor’s Notes

Polecat’s MeaningMine strategic market intelligence platform analyses statistical and linguistic trends in publically available online data by mining 300,000 articles and 4 million blog posts daily. Using a combination of data mining and text analytics Polecat can extract dominant online themes and emerging trends which enable organisations to be informed on, monitor and report on the value of their strategic and communications activities. Polecat was founded in 2007 by James Lawn and Bronwyn Kunhardt.  

Professor Pádraig Cunningham is Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering in UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics. He has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in the general area of applied Artificial Intelligence, focusing on machine learning and knowledge based systems for decision support in engineering, e-commerce, finance and medicine. Professor Cunningham’s key focus, for which he is widely acclaimed, is the development of novel techniques motivated by the peculiarities of real world data.

Dr Derek Greene is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher with the SFI-funded Clique Research Cluster, based in UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics. Dr Greene has published numerous papers and book contributions in the field of machine learning, with a specific focus on social network analysis, bioinformatics and text mining.

NovaUCD is University College Dublin’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre.  NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research and for the development of co-operation with the industry and business communities. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.

Dublin-based Beauchamps Solicitors is one of Ireland's leading full service law firms focused on achieving practical business solutions for clients which include multinational companies, owner managed businesses, government and public bodies and regulatory authorities.