History
Cognition's core technology, Cognition's Semantic NLPTM, is the outgrowth of ideas and development work which began over 23 years ago at IBM where Cognition's founder and CTO, Kathleen Dahlgren, Ph.D., led a research team to create the first prototype of a "natural language understanding system." In 1990, Dr. Dahlgren left IBM and formed a new company called Intelligent Text Processing (ITP). ITP applied for and won an innovative research grant with the Small Business Administration. This funding enabled the company to develop of a commercial prototype of what would become Cognition's Semantic NLP. That work won a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award for excellence in 1995. In 1998, ITP was awarded a patent on a component of the technology.
During this development period, ITP assembled a large research group of over 30 people, some of whom were lexicographers dedicated to building the huge computational English dictionary and semantic databases which are the underpinnings of the current technology. In addition, a core team of linguists was brought together to create a powerful research group, including Dr. Karen Wallace and Dr. Daniel Albro, both computational linguists.
Unfortunately, ITP did not survive the dot-com meltdown and closed its doors in 2002. In 2004, a new company, Cognition Technologies, was formed by Dr. Dahlgren and her team which would carry on the legacy (and the technology development)1. Funded by angel investors, including the Southern California Tech Coast Angels, the Company has spent the past four years advancing the technology and launching a suite of commercialized applications and live demonstration sites. In January of 2006, Scott Jarus, former chief executive of j2 Global/eFax (NASDAQ: JCOM], joined the company both as an investor and CEO. His mission is to leverage the technology as the next evolution in Natural Language Processing capability, and to fully develop a successful technology licensing business.
1 Cognition Technologies was originally named MeaningMasterTM, and then Quester, before settling on its current name.
Patented Technology
In 1998, Cognition Technologies (through its predecessor company) was awarded a patent (#5,794,050) entitled, "A Natural Language Understanding System". This seminal patent includes 30 claims. The patent describes a linguistic method for controlling the explosion of potential parses (syntactic structures). Computational parsers slow unacceptably because they pursue all the paths in a maze of potential structures. This patent deploys common sense reasoning and "naive" semantics to avoid fruitless paths and back-tracking in the computational parser. It would prevent, for example, a computational parser from trying to build up a parse of "The woman on the rock cried", in which "the rock cried" is a sentence level part. It prevents this fruitless path by noticing that it is semantically implausible for a rock to cry. This invention cuts parsing time exponentially.
The patent's uniqueness lies in the combination of formal linguistic algorithms with rich semantic representations to achieve a partial understanding of what sentences mean (or can plausibly mean, given the structure of the world a natural language is used to describe).
Management
Scott Jarus
Chief Executive Officer
Scott joined Cognition Technologies in 2006 as an investor and then as its CEO. Mr. Jarus has more than 25 years of management experience in the telecommunications and Internet industries, beginning with a company that built one of the world's first public packet-data switching networks. Prior to joining the Cognition, Scott was President and chief executive of j2 Global Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM), a profitable billion dollar market cap company whose signature product, eFax®, served more than 9.5 million customers with a local presence in more than 1,500 cities in 25 countries on 5 continents. Preceding j2 Global, Mr. Jarus was President and Chief Operating Officer for OnSite Access, the premier building-centric Integrated Communications Provider (voice, data, Internet and enhanced services) serving businesses in 22 markets throughout North America. In addition, he served in various senior management positions at RCN Telecom, Multimedia Medical Systems (which he co-founded) and Metromedia Communications.
Mr. Jarus serves on the Board of Directors of FreeConference.com and Ironclad Performance Wear [ICPW.OB]. In 2005, Mr. Jarus was named the National Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year for Media/Entertainment/Communications (and Los Angeles Entrepreneur Of The Year for Technology in 2004). He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Kansas.
Kathleen Dahlgren, PhD
CTO / Founder
Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cognition Technologies. She began her career as a professor of computational linguistics at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges and then worked for IBM at their Los Angeles Scientific Center, focusing on building a "natural language understanding system." Dr. Dahlgren has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and a post-doctorate in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published a number of scholarly articles on the subjects of linguistics and computer science, and is the author of Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding. She is the co-author of Cognition's seminal patent (1998), and she received the Small Business Innovation Award from the U.S. Army in 1995. Currently, she is also an adjunct professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mike Reid
Vice President Sales / Business Development
Mike joined Cognition Technologies in 2007 after a successful 20-year career in the information industry, holding senior management positions in Sales and Marketing, Business Development, and Product Management. In 1987, he joined what is now Thomson Dialog and built the Health, Sci-Tech, and General Reference CD-ROM businesses. As a member of Engineering Information's (Ei) senior management team, Mike helped transform a 110 year-old publishing company into an industry leading, award winning, Web-based online community for engineers and scientists. He played an essential role in the successful sale of Ei to Reed-Elsevier. Mike has developed information businesses in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, closing agreements with heads of state, academic and major commercial enterprises. Most recently, he was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Infotrieve, the largest commercial document delivery provider in the world. Mike holds a BS degree in Applied Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Daniel Albro, PhD
Chief Scientist
Dr. Daniel Albro is the Chief Scientist of Cognition Technologies. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research outside of Cognition Technologies has involved finite state phonology, efficient chart parsing of n-multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs), the intersection of MCFGs with weighted finite state machines, machine learning of phonological grammars, and implementation of phonological frameworks. The machine learning work involved data compression via the Minimum Description Length framework. Dr. Albro continued his development work on compression techniques at Cognition Technologies, where it has been used to create a massively scalable indexing architecture for the Company's Search engine. Currently, Dr. Albro heads Cognition Technologies' Natural Language Processing group.
Tad Benson
Vice President of Marketing
With over fifteen years of digital and direct marketing experience, Tad is often called on to help develop customer acquisition and retention strategies for both small and large companies. For the past eleven years, Tad has been focused on revenue generation via the Internet.
Cognition Technologies marks Tad's involvement with his fifth Search-related start-up company and sixth start-up all together. One of those companies was GoTo.com (which became Overture and later Yahoo! Search Marketing), where he helped get the word out about the paid Search industry as its 38th employee. He is also a veteran of two larger companies, including an AIG-owned auto insurance company, where he ran the company's Internet channel, and a direct response advertising agency where he worked on advertising strategies and campaigns for national and international nonprofit organizations.
Tad holds a BA in History from Pepperdine University and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from the University of Southern California.
Larry Kutcher
Vice President of Operations
Larry joined Cognition Technologies in 2006 after 25+ years in operations, technology, finance, real estate and business process consulting. He brings his experience as a senior manager in several start-ups, as well as in software implementation, negotiation and complex modeling and transactions, to his role as Vice President of Operations. His responsibilities include building and managing the Company's technology infrastructure, operations, finance, human resources and accounting functions. Prior to joining Cognition Technologies, Larry founded his business consulting firm, theAdvantage, and worked with companies to uncover profit and growth opportunities by leveraging the strategic use of technology. Prior to this, Larry worked at Ahmanson Commercial Development Company, a subsidiary of Home Savings of America and KPMG, LLP. Larry holds a Masters of Business Administration in Finance and Accounting from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Iowa.