Learning Startup to Watch: Declara’s Vision of a Cognitive Graph

Declara is one of the most unique startups in the world of enterprise-scale learning platforms.  The company has built an intelligent social learning system that is often referred to in the media as a combination of Google’s Knowledge Graph and Facebook’s Social Graph.

Declara’s vision is to create and leverage a Cognitive Graph that delivers neuroscience-inspired personalized learning based on the context of real-world experiences, intent, outcomes and social relationships.

The system aims to deliver content recommendations and facilitate the most appropriate social connections between learners across large organizations and social communities. The platform integrates the latest capabilities of artificial intelligence subdomains – machine-learning and  deep-learning to scale-up predictive analytics and prescriptive learning experiences based on an individual’s intentions, capabilities and needs.

The company sees a very rich and untapped landscape of learning analytics that will benefit from neuroscience-based insights on learning experiences.  The ‘adaptive’ and ‘intelligent’ labels simply mean that Declara’s infrastructure learns over time based on real-world interactions and outcomes.

Declara’s CEO Ramona  Pierson (Twitter) has an amazing comeback life story and a brilliant mind that sees the convergence of neuro-cognitive science, intelligent social systems, semantic search, graph databases, et al. Co-Founder Nelson Gonzalez (LinkedIn; Twitter) brings a pragmatic and optimistic lens to learning analytics and the intersection of local cultural elements and semantic search.

Declara has a very clear scale-out oriented business model that targets large customers such as national government associations (e.g. Mexico’s SNTE, Australia’s CSE) and enterprises like Genetech. They picked a wonderful problem to solve. Declara is a startup to watch…!!

Learn More: 

 

Interesting links on cognitive graph:

Videos

Ramona Pierson

Interview at 2014 Gigaom event 

 

 

Ramona Pierson speaking

 

Nelson Gonzalez – 2010 brief interview – hopefully more Youtube clips will appear soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmjDVrz5X5g

From Apple’s Knowledge Navigator to Mindmeld: The Evolution of Personal Assistant

Expect Lab‘s Marsal Gavalda walks us through 26 minute video of techno-optimistic geek goodness by looking at present day enthusasiam for personal assistant technologies and some of the historical milestones that brought us here.

Why the enthusiasm in 2014?  The Spike Jonze’s movie Her gets credit for popularizing the idea of a likeable and lovable personal assistant but the real source of optimism is just old fashion innovation from our learning curve.  Artificial intelligence sub-domains of machine-learning and deep-learning (used for real-time understanding of natural language) are making steady progress. The past few years have given the world very positive advances around knowledge graphs for natural language, sentiment analysis of unstructured data, and anticipation oriented recommendation systems.

The next five years will bring hype and real hope for functional contextual search and conversation-based experiences that make personal assistant beyond 2020 likely and doable.  I have waxed poetic about Expected Labs MindmeldAPI and have the same respect for companies like NextIt and Artificial Solutions (Indigo) who are creating the early market demand.

My highlights from his talk: min 2:20 Github workflow and productivity visualization]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKen7IkdAm0

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Marsal mentioned the Apple 1987 video of the Knowledge Navigator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRH8eimU_20

 

 

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Garry’s Tags: Personal Assistant;

 

 

 

Garry delivers keynotes, workshops and consultation for organizations around the world! Lets talk about how he can help yours.