In July, we soft launched the Blavatnik Prize for Innovation to support founders in the South West to commercialise their technology. The goal of the prize fund is to help bridge the gap between a conceptually proven technology and equity investment, by providing funds and guidance through this challenging part of the journey.
We are delighted to announce the first winner of a prize, Dr William Short to support the launch of SensefulAI.
Most search engines are designed for literal keyword matching. However, people think in terms of concepts, not keywords. This places the burden on users to guess the correct words, leading to frustration, lost productivity, incomplete or incorrect information, and missed opportunities. This is known as the ‘keyword selection problem’.
Dr Short, a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, focusses his research on cognitive semantics, computational text analysis, and natural language understanding. As part of his research, he developed a tool to scan ancient texts to better understand context around ancient cultures. He soon realised that the tool could be applied to revolutionise search engines by applying conceptual, semantic approaches rather than keywords.
“I believe that people’s search experiences — at work, at school, at home, and everywhere in-between — should be empowering, and that the tools they use should help rather than hinder them in finding what’s relevant to them… That’s what we are trying to achieve here – creating a search engine that opens up possibilities, rather than excluding them.”
Dr William Short, founder of SensefulAI
The £25,000 prize will be used to turn the prototyped tool into an initial market ready product and de-risk customer trials in the medical research sector where it is estimated that failed searches could be costing businesses up to $25,000 per knowledge worker per year in lost productivity.
“The Blavatnik Prize for Innovation is an award that recognises outstanding original thinking that can make a difference to the way world works. Senseful AI has the potential to reimagine the way we search for information and brings an intriguing interdisciplinary approach to the challenge. The understanding of the way language works would appear to be light years away from modern cutting edge AI technology, but the two disciplines are being combined in an intriguing way by Dr William Short. Bill is a worthy recipient of the prize”
Richard Haycock, CEO QantX
The Blavatnik Prize for Innovation has been generously supported by a donation from Access Industries, founded by Sir Leonard Blavatnik and seeks to enable projects that unlock the commercialisation of scientific and technologic advances.
Interested? We’re accepting applications, get in touch to discuss.