Published: 8 August 2019

Reading time: About 3 minutes

With a growing emphasis on Artificial Intelligence technology, Automated Intelligence is strategically focusing on further developing the machine learning capability of our powerful data management platform, AI.DATALIFT.

A Data Science student at Queen’s University Belfast, has joined our growing team of data analytics experts as part of her Master’s degree dissertation.
Aoife Sheehan will spend the next three months with our R&D unit in the field of machine learning, honing our technology to quickly find specific information within terabytes and even petabytes of data.

Aoife said, “I am currently working on a project within the area of Artificial Intelligence which will enable technology to find personal and sensitive data within millions and millions of documents and returning those results within just minutes. This is particularly important and relevant for GDPR.
“Currently AI.DATALIFT technology can do this based on keywords- so for example, searching for words such as ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’. What a machine learning algorithm can further do is determine if the information is sensitive by the context. So, for example, ensuring the technology knows that a document actually contains personal information about race, perhaps without explicitly stating what the race is.”

Three weeks into her 3-month project, Aoife is now working with the team to compare different data sets to train the technology further.
“I’m working with documents classed as sensitive and those which aren’t. We want the technology to understand what the similarities are in the sensitive documents, so it knows why they are classed as such.

“A good example of machine learning technology looking at the context is email providers knowing what a ‘spam email’ is and what isn’t. That’s something the computer has learnt- and that’s the type of model we’re working towards.
“It’s a really exciting time to be at Automated Intelligence and I can’t wait to see the outcome in the next few months.”

Last year Queen’s University Master’s Student Edele Copeland worked on an audio and video reading feature during her placement which is now part of AI.DATALIFT.
Aoife’s mentor at Automated Intelligence, Technical Director Jon Loomie, said, “It is fantastic that once again we are hosting a student from Queen’s University with skills which will benefit the team. Aoife’s work will expand our existing data science machine learning capability to add more functionality to the product around the capture of information and identification of risk.

“Factors like religion and political opinion are typically very difficult to identify- there are some terms you can look for, but within the context of the content, one word could have a religious connotation in one document but a completely different meaning in another. Machine learning allows us to take advantage of the context in which these words occur to better understand their real meaning. We are delighted to be able to add another layer of data science to our existing AI functionality in the months ahead.”

Find more information on AI.DATALIFT here.