Dell Research, University of Toronto Collaborate on Data Mining Tool

It’s been apparent for many years that the way we interact with data — be that big data, granular, or any buzzword in between — is forever changing the business world and society at large. It’s been equally clear that our relationship with this data is going to progress over time as technology evolves. The first phase was the development of technologies that could be used to effectively store these giant pools of data. The next phase is about the development of tools to gain valuable insights from the collected data through predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Today, Dell Research is announcing our first partnership with a Canadian University on a project to help organizations sift through company databases and social networks to identify subject matter experts. The technology resulting from this partnership will pinpoint sources of knowledge within the enterprise, helping companies better leverage employee expertise and training. To develop this technology, Dell Research and Dell Canada are collaborating with Dr. Kelly Lyons in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, with funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through an Engage Grant.

We are excited to be working with Dr. Lyons and the University of Toronto, to leverage their experience with large scale knowledge base curation, Resource Description Framework (RDF) data models, ontology engineering, system design and development and user testing. One of our mutual goals is to empower organizations across industries to bring new products and services to market more easily. Not only can employees best discover and develop new ideas by collaborating with peers who have relevant expertise, but by identifying the right technical domain experts in-house, they can also achieve significant time and cost savings on projects such as customer issue resolution, product innovation and patent reviews.

We anticipate the tools and methodology will have broad applicability in a myriad of use cases. For instance, non-profit organizations might be able to use it to identify people who are well suited for a particular community program, while advertisers and product developers might leverage it in putting together focus groups. Dell will investigate integrating the tool with current software offerings, such as our Unified Communications Command Suite (UCCS). This will provide value to our customers who will be able to use the tool to qualify and quantify their own customers’ feedback and better collaborate inside and outside their own organizations.

As we step further into the age of advanced data analytics Dell will continue to develop tools that create new efficiencies for ourselves and our customers. Our hope is that our customers will use them in ways we haven’t even imagined yet. We’re excited for this opportunity to continue building the future we want to be part of, with the help of collaborators like Dr. Lyons, our trusted partners and distributors, and of course, our customers, who are always the compass that sets our course. 

About the Author: Jai Menon