AI Developer Touts ‘Artificial Precognition’

A U.K. analytics startup developing a proprietary application it calls “artificial precognition” said this week it has released the platform for testing.

London-based Massive Analytic said its Oscar AP artificial intelligence platform was being made available for beta testing so partners can use the tool to analyze business moves and predict the outcomes of those decisions.

Oscar AP, which runs on native Hadoop, is billed as a kind of artificial intelligence “trusted advisor” capable of analyzing a company’s business operations to study the possible outcomes of decisions before they are implemented. The goal is to produce outcomes that boost revenues, reduce operating costs and identify “previous undetected revenue opportunities,” according to George Frangou founder, president and executive chairman of Massive Analytic.

Oscar AP is based on patented artificial precognition technology the company describes as providing knowledge of possible events and outcomes before they occur for different types of data, including structured, text, image, video and audio. The platform runs on Spark, enabling it to crunch real-time or batch data.

Massive Analytic further claims its platform is the first to incorporate artificial intelligence “alongside big data access” to overcome the limitations of internal corporate data. That functionality, it asserts, “transcends current analytics applications by combining the AI precognitive processes within a browser-based dashboard that can be configured by decision-makers without the need to learn SQL.”

The startup said its platform can be deployed on-premise or as a single client or multi-tenant private cloud. A “Data Scientist Edition” is aimed at professionals building tailored analytical workflows for business users. A “Studio Edition” allows users to build “Story” dashboards displaying critical information in real-time and in a desired format. A “Viewer Edition” targets executive-level access to the dashboards to provide a job-specific view of company operations along with drill-down access to underlying trends and specific information.

The browser-based Story dashboard is the main interface between users and all three versions of Oscar AP.

Moreover, the artificial precognition technology is said to help the analytics platform “learn and accumulate the skills of the people it works with and the AI works to discover new insights and ideas that adapt to the changes experienced as an enterprise develops,” Massive Analytic said in a statement.

The company said an early adopter of the closed beta version of Oscar AP is the Association of Train Operating Companies, which represents 23 U.K. train operators and coordinates passenger services on the privatized British railway system. The group said it is testing the AI platform to help determine the root causes of train service disruptions.

The big data software-as-a-service startup was founded in 2010 and is funded privately via what the web site CrunchBase calls “equity crowd-funding.” Massive Analytic’s AI technology also has been accepted by defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Virtual Technology Cluster.

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