Boston—Phillip George is a man on a seemingly impossible mission. His mission is helping engineers overcome information overload.
George is the vice president of Invention Machine, a software company that understands information overload. Its first product, Tech Optimizer, is a database of tens of thousands of scientific and engineering principles arranged by function. Want to know how to improve fuel cell efficiency? Just enter your query into the software and it provides dozens of possibilities from a variety of engineering and scientific disciplines. Narrowing the search for just the right information is achieved with the use of two new software products.
The first, CoBrain, captures and processes information from internal and external sources to create a structured knowledge-based index. The index is arranged in a "problem-solution" format. If the problem is "improve fuel cell efficiency," the software provides solutions such as "increase the efficiency of platinum utilization," "elevate pressure," and "modify membrane properties." Unlike keyword searches, CoBrain "reads" and extracts key concepts, then automatically creates an index of the content.
A second software product called Knowledgist is a semantic desktop reader that reads documents for key concepts at a rate of 1MB per minute. Customized results are user-defined.
George points out that the amount of information from the Internet, intranets, and other sources is skyrocketing. There are approximately six million pages added to the Internet each day. Storage of corporate documents doubles every seven months.
According to a Design News survey, technical professionals spend as much time acquiring information as they do designing. The survey indicates that, on average, technical professionals spend 10% of their time searching for information, 33% reading the information they find, and 43% designing.
CoBrain and Knowledgist automate the aggregation of content, shaving the amount of time engineers spending finding useful information. The software allows engineers to have more time to spend on development of creative innovation of products and processes.
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