Imagine trying to make sense of millions of emails, text messages, slideshows, and company reports. Sound daunting? That’s what Dallas-born and bred entrepreneur Dave Copps thought. His solution was Brainspace, a new software that does the grunt work of sifting through heaps of information.

With a processing and analyzing speed of about 1 million documents in 45 minutes, Brainspace gathers unstructured information like human language and converts it into a visual representation that makes sense for users and helps them identify patterns. It allows companies to better understand the frequently scattered conversations going on within the organization and to protect those conversations from unwanted hackers. It has also proved useful in lengthy legal investigations and counter-terrorism intelligence.  Used by consulting firms, intelligence agencies, and Fortune 500 companies, Brainspace is transforming the way companies share and analyze information.

During its development stages, it was technically challenging to teach the software to understand human language, especially since humans typically use jargon, puns, and speak sarcastically. To bypass this problem which affects other language systems, Brainspace does not isolate words and meanings. Rather, it gathers information on how that word is used in relation to other words and determines meaning from that context. In one instance, many employees had misspelled “manager” as “manger”. Eventually, Brainspace was able to learn that “manger” meant “manager” because of the context surrounding the word’s use. This technique is useful in finding information that some people try to conceal by using code names. Copps said, “If someone is doing something wrong inside a company and trying to get away with something, they never speak explicitly about what they’re doing wrong. They try to use code names. There’s no history. But it doesn’t matter for us. We see that made-up word, that new word, that slang and we start to associate it with all the words around it and all these different instances where it occurred. Then, we can very quickly tell you what it is.”

This ability to extract information behind concealed meaning is a gamechanger in the counterterrorism field. Copps explained, “It’s really the same problem, but a different data set: How do you take information that you collect about bad guys and find out who they are and what you can do about it to thwart it? Of all the things we’re doing, that’s the one that has me most excited: knowing we can help prevent terrorism.”

Brainspace was absorbed into Cyxtera, a cybersecurity, data center company earlier this year. Cyxtera developed a new version of Brainspace software this year, allowing it to learn over 300 languages including Mandarin and Farsi. Innovation for Brainspace doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. Copps said, “Data is really the new oil. If you have information, that’s one thing. But if you have information and can understand it and be able to do things with it, that’s a competitive advantage over anyone else.”

Experimenting with software and codes to make sense of unstructured information like Brainspace? You could be eligible for the R&D Tax Credit and can get up to 14% on your R&D expenses, even if your experiments were not successful. To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today.

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE credits as well as CPE credits for CPA’s.  For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.