Last Friday, Mohammad AlTantawy, the CTO and Co-founder of Agolo, came to show our CDS students what career opportunities are available at the world’s most advanced summarization software company.
According to a recent study, the internet contains over 4.8 billion webpages. As corporations, organizations, and publications continue to shift onto online platforms, we risk losing ourselves in the vast sea of digital information.
Humans typically process information in four steps: searching, selecting, organizing, and then assessing. We begin by using search engines or other tools to locate information about our topic. Then, we select and organize relevant texts from the information pool. Afterwards, we assess and analyze the information.
But, with the advent of the internet, massive troves of information like articles, tweets, pictures, and posts are now released every second. How can our slow processing speeds keep up with the rapid rate of information being released?
This is where Agolo comes in. Using sophisticated web crawlers and machine algorithms to ‘read’ thousands of online documents within seconds, Agolo locates, organizes, and then summarizes the information for the user. As AlTantawy explained, their software scans large data sets related to the user’s chosen topic, and then organizes the information into clusters, which are displayed as a handy ‘knowledge graph’. Crucially, the algorithm also generates a five bullet-point summary of each cluster’s contents for the user—all within the time it takes to blink your eyes. This enormously valuable process can help us avoid ‘information overload’, and shortens the time it takes to perform research.
Partnered with Columbia University, Microsoft, and Thomson Reuters, Agolo began as a small startup three years ago. Today, they have seven full time staff, and a handful of part-time researchers—and they are looking to expand their team by recruiting those who, like our CDS students, have developed advanced interdisciplinary data science skills.
by Cherrie Kwok