University of Oxford research projects & spin-outs partner with Meltwater to power data science research

Advancements in data science rely on easy access to large-scale data, but collecting and processing a large volume of unstructured data frequently requires a cost-prohibitive investment in engineering. That’s why a number of University of Oxford research projects have entered into a new partnership with Meltwater to give researchers access to the company’s data science platform, Fairhair.ai.

Fairhair.ai is the underlying technology beneath Meltwater’s media, social and competitive intelligence products and services. The platform offers developers the tools to build AI models and advanced analytics, fueled by Meltwater’s diverse corpus of of open and licensed global data. Through Fairhair.ai, students and researchers of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford gain access to millions of online data sources and billions of documents with sophisticated filters and enrichments, such as sentiment or named-entity disambiguation.

Fairhair.ai’s data and AI enrichments will support research toward four major projects:

Value Added Data Systems (VADA): This five-year research initiative seeks to scale data science with solutions and tools to automate and reduce the cost of data-wrangling. Meltwater is a key technology collaborator of the VADA project, and the company’s data scientists are actively employing VADA technologies and provide new research challenges to the VADA team.

FakeNewsRank: This project aims to create a fake news rank that identifies news articles by how likely they are fake or not. The ranking is determined by a combination of deep learning and probabilistic reasoning. The Fairhair.ai platform will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed scoring mechanism on real-world data.

Realistic Data Models and Query Compilation for Large-Scale Probabilistic Databases: This initiative focuses on scaling querying and reasoning on realistic data with probabilities as introduced by truth-finding approaches when estimating the probability that a certain fact, document, or source is accurate. The Fairhair.ai knowledge graph provides a large scale, realistic testbed for this research: it provides probabilities for each of the facts extracted from the millions of pre-fused outside data sources, as well as for facts extracted from news using Fairhair.ai’s entity and relation extraction in real time.  

DeepReason.ai: This University of Oxford spinout leverages recent university breakthroughs in logical reasoning and database theory to offer a knowledge graph management system that can seamlessly integrate various data sources to perform fast and intelligent reasoning. Those reasoning capabilities will be integrated with Fairhair.ai’s knowledge graph to enhance the existing analytical capabilities of Fairhair.ai with strong symbolic graph reasoning, as needed in many use cases from ownership analysis, over fraud detection, to the analysis of the spread of fake news in social networks.  

“These research projects are collectively focused on pushing the boundaries of knowledge graphs, from populating and scaling to processing and reasoning. Meltwater is already leveraging these techniques, together with recent advancements in machine learning, to further strengthen its Fairhair.ai platform,” said Georg Gottlob, professor of informatics, fellow at St. John’s College and member of Meltwater’s Scientific Advisory Board. “Together, we have a shared interest to explore what we believe is the future of AI – the combination of machine learning and logical reasoning – and significantly advance the greater data science ecosystem.”

Meltwater has strong ties with the University of Oxford – three of the company’s data science teams are led by Oxford alumni. Meltwater’s London AI teams have been built around a recently acquired university spin-out, Wrapidity, and more than half of the team are Oxford DPhils.

“Our team is all too familiar with the challenges researchers face to access real-world data and the tools to process large volumes of it – we’re delighted Fairhair.ai will help researchers to focus on advancing science over the collection and organisation of data,” said Tim Furche, lecturer for databases at the Department of Computer Science and Meltwater’s director of data science. “Fairhair.ai not only represents the culmination of Meltwater’s decades of research and development in AI and data science, but also our close collaboration with the Department of Computer Science which has been critical to that process.”

Learn more about Fairhair.ai at http://fairhair.ai.

About Meltwater

Meltwater, a pioneer of media intelligence and now Outside Insight, gives businesses the information advantage they need to stay ahead. More than 30,000 companies have used Meltwater’s media intelligence to stay on top of billions of online conversations and extract relevant insights to strategically manage their brands. With nearly 20 years of experience analyzing data, Meltwater is dedicated to personal, global service built on the local expertise of 55 offices across six continents. Meltwater is also committed to fostering the data science ecosystem through MEST, a pan-African entrepreneurial program and incubator, and Shack15, a global data science community. Learn more at Meltwater.com.