Local firm awarded key artificial-intelligence patent

Brentwood's Digital Reasoning says new patent validates technology and methods

Email | Print By Milt Capps

Digital Reasoning Systems has been awarded a U.S. patent covering technology that enables intelligent machines to understand the meaning of terms and symbols found in the context of unstructured data, including natural human language.

"Understanding the subtle meaning of terms in context has been one of the 'Holy Grails' of artificial intelligence," founder and CEO Tim Estes of Brentwood-based DRS said in a release.

Estes described the new patent as "very valuable real estate." He predicted the patented technology will lead to machines that can "learn language much the way that children do... The implications for search engines, machine translation, and most knowledge-centric applications are immense."

He has previously described DRS technology as capable of enabling business and military intelligence experts to discover patterns of meaning in "near-infinite haystacks" of data.

DRS now has a U.S. patent to help support such claims: No. 7,249,117, covering DRS' "Knowledge Discovery Agent System and Method."

Among the services it provides, DRS works with the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center to help get NGIC and DRS technology into the hands of U.S. intelligence professionals.