This article first appeared in the February Orange Rag
At Inspire Legal in New York at the end of January we met the co-founder of Agnes Intelligence, which recently came in fourth place in IBM’s North America Watson Build Championship.
Agnes Legal is the result of a partnership between John Snyder, a top New York City litigator, and John Macartney, a data scientist and pioneer in the field of concept clustering. Together they are turning their large brains to the problem of eDiscovery.
Agnes (named after Snyder’s daughter, or perhaps it was the other way round…) extracts key words and related concepts from across multiple channels including text, audio and video.
In the demo that Snyder gave us, the search was against hours and hours of wide-ranging radio chatter in The Joe Rogan Experience show. The show was transcribed by Agnes and we searched for the word “hunting”, which was instantly highlighted in the text. Click on that word in the text, and you get taken straight to the part where they talk about hunting in the radio show.
Each action is recorded and factored into Agnes’ algorithm, so that the technology learns iteratively as the user evaluates more and more documents.
Based in Brooklyn, Agnes, which Snyder says is “a mix of IBM Watson, opensource and stuff we’ve developed,” launched at the beginning of 2018 and has been in development since then. It’s just about to come to market.
What we like about Snyder? He says: “My philosophy on AI is that you shouldn’t notice it. If you have an app and it says, ‘here is the AI’, it’s probably a gimmick. We use AI in circumstances where the AI does something that the human brain can’t do. But the first thing about AI is to get the fact that it’s AI out of your head.”
But now all we can think about is AI.
To find out more you can watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvOOcAJpMUQ
Or see this deck: file:///C:/Users/CarolineHill/Downloads/12.15.18%20Deck.pdf