Interview with George Roth, AI Based Data Extraction, Recognos Inc. - Speaker at Global Artificial Intelligence Conference - Jan Posted on : Dec 26 - 2016

We feature speakers at Global Artificial Intelligence Conference Jan 19 - 21, 2017 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to George Roth, AI Based Data Extraction, Recognos Inc.

Interview with George Roth

1.      Tell us about yourself and your background.
George was born in Cluj, Romania. He graduated with an MS in Mathematics and Computer Science from the “Babes Bolyai” University in Cluj in 1980. His career started at the Cluj Territorial Center for Computation (CTCE) where he worked in Computer Assisted Design until 1991, when he emigrated to the U.S.
During his early years in the U.S., he worked as a Software Architect on numerous projects for large financial institutions and was the Lead Architect of SUMS (Security Universe Management System), a comprehensive financial data cleansing tool implemented at very large financial institutions in the US and Europe.
In 1999, together with Ken Rogers, he started Recognos Inc. (www.recognos.com ). One year later, George, and other two partners established Recognos Romania SRL in Cluj. Recognos has 85 employees and develops systems and products for the US Investment Industry.  Recognos is known as one of the leaders in unstructured documents preparation for cognitive computing. Recognos’ flagship software product is ETI that is used to process unstructured documents using artificial intelligence, natural language processing and semantic technologies.
In 1998 George became involved in promoting the Romanian IT industry in the Bay Area. He is one of the founding members of the Romanian American Business Network in Silicon Valley (www.meetup.com/rabn-sv). This organization’s mission is to bring together people and businesses with an interest in the US – Romania bilateral cooperation.
From 2007, George is the Honorary Consul of Romania at the Honorary Consulate of Romania in San Francisco. (www.romanianconsulate.org )
George is a Honorary Senator of the University Babes Bolyai in Cluj, Romania.
From November 2016 George is an appointed member of the Romanian Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CNIA) and advisory board that was created by the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research of Romania.

2.      What have you been working on recently?
From 2008, I am involved in R&D in Semantic Technology. Recognos is developing a platform used to extract data from unstructured documents, creating the first marketplace for data extractors. The platform uses complex NLP, neural networks and machine learning techniques to extract data from a variety of document types.

 3.      Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
We used our Smart Data Platform to extract data from a very large international foundation’s archives that were digitized. We had to adjust our solution to the budget and specific requirements of a global NGO which was challenging.

4.      Where are we now today in terms of the state of artificial intelligence, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?
The AI finally became a mainstream technology after being an elite one for years. Due to the advancements of Data Analytics, and the development of the cloud infrastructure more and more domains are using the AI technology on a daily basis.

 5.      There is a negative perception around AI and even some leading technology folks have come out against it or saying that it’s actually potentially harmful to society. Where are you coming down on those discussions? How do you explain this in a way that maybe has a more positive beneficial impact for society?
Well, it is a very exciting theme to say that something is harmful to the society. No matter what disruptive technology appears, the reaction will be the same. I believe that the future of AI is “human in the loop cognitive computing” so that the humans will be there to solve certain problems when the system will not be able todo it. A similar example is the ordering of food  in a restaurant. There are some restaurants that offer you a tablet to order food instead of a waiter.  Still most of the people prefer to talk to a waiter instead of entering something in a tablet. This pattern will persist and the humans will always be involved in every process.  Maybe that the work time will be reduced but this will be good, because the people will be able to allocate more time to themselves.

 6.      When you’re hiring, what types of people are you hiring? The job market for traditional programmers, engineers is  very difficult to get into AI space. Are you hiring from that talent pool or is that a different talent pool? In terms of talent, how do you go about ensuring you get the best AI people at your company?
We are growing the people ourselves. We start with internships and we maintain the relationships with the good interns during their studies at Universities. And most of them will join our firm when they graduate. Up to now we never needed to hire outside AI people. Another thing that we do is to work with AI consultants who are also professors at Universities or belong to private research centers. And these become mentors for our employees who just switched to this new domain.

7.      What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your "AI Based Data Extraction" talk?
My presentation will highlight the complexities of the data extraction parts the essential step in order to be able to integrate unstructured content in the ML and AI processes. Also without this, the data analytics will not be able to include the archives of documents in their analysis. It will take time until the AI based data extraction will provide a commodity solution to this problem.