New big data firm to pioneer topological data analysis

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Stanford University project goes commercial following groundbreaking research into cancer therapy and counter-terrorism strategy
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A US big data firm is set to establish algebraic topology as the gold standard of data science with the launch of the world's leading topological data analysis (TDA) platform.

Ayasdi, whose co-founders include renowned mathematics professor Gunnar Carlsson, launched today in Palo Alto, California, having secured $10.25m from investors including Khosla Ventures in the first round of funding.

The funds will be used to build on its Insight Discovery platform, the culmination of 12 years of research and development into mathematics, computer science and data visualisation at Stanford.

Ayasdi's work prior to launching as a company has already yielded breakthroughs in the pharmaceuticals industry. In one case it revealed new insights in eight hours – compared to the previous norm of over 100 hours – cutting the turnaround from analysis to clinical trials in the process.

"Ayasdi's platform utilises machine powered intelligence to unearth important – and previously unattainable – answers that will help solve some of the most pressing global, social and economic issues", said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Oracle's 2010 acquisition Sun Microsystems.

Such was the faith in the Stanford project that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into Carlsson's venture while it was still in its early stages.

Modern business intelligence methods allow analysts to drill down into complex databases and find the answers to predetermined questions, but the emergent field of data science is concerned with finding the questions that should be asked of huge and often unstructured data in order to yield otherwise invisible results.

Using topology, data scientists can do exactly this, running algorithms that carry out what is effectively blind analysis of a database to reveal the inherent patterns therein, rather than showing correlations between preselected variables.

"The biggest challenge in big data today is asking the right questions of data. The power of Ayasdi is its unique ability to automatically discover insights without asking questions", said Ayasdi CEO Gurjeet Singh.

This type of analysis is invaluable in a wide range of industries, and Ayasdi's platform has already yielded unprecedented results in fields including cancer therapy, fraud prediction and counterterrorism strategy.

"The technology developed at Ayasdi is one of the top ten innovations developed at DARPA in the last decade and is the key to unlocking some of the biggest national security challenges that we face today", said Tony Tether, former DARPA director.

To date healthcare has been arguably the main beneficiary of TDA, with early results from several fields going beyond what had previously been attainable.

In one 2012 project the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology (IGMB) used Ayasdi's platform to identify genetic susceptibilities to diseases including cancer. IGMB director Eric Schadt said he expects the new insights "will lead to breakthrough drug discoveries."

In another healthcare project Ayasdi made new findings from a breast cancer dataset spanning 11 years, finding previously hidden subpopulations of survivors whose characteristics can now be used to help research and formulate new drugs and treatment regimes.