Commercialising Grids, an academics view

Jim Austin

CARMEN

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Overview• My position• Cybula – who are we?• Development of our Grid solution

DAMEBROADENCARMEN

• Lessons learned

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Academic or industrialist

• I am…

• CEO of Cybula and Head of Research group

• Gives a unique view from both sides

• Slightly unusual – York allows this

• In my view its ideal

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• Founded 2000• Spin-out of University of York, Computer Science• Privately funded and owned company• Based in IT centre at York Science Park• Draws on 35 staff

Cybula

Cybula

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Cybula

• Subcontracts between the University and the company – both ways

• Very flexible for resources, skills• University offers

– Skilled people, access to technology, access to government funding

• Cybula offers– Product development, market view, support services,

development, commercial funds

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Company Aim

• Sells high performance pattern matching software, hardware and skills

• Provides R&D to support customers needs

• Works with end users in vertical market segments

• Started with project focus – now adding products as they mature in the projects

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Markets

• Any market where managing large complex unstructured data is a problem– Legal– Biometrics– Pharmaceuticals– Engineering

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Technology

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• AURA – Advanced Uncertain Reasoning Architecture

• Set of neural network based methods for dealing with complex data

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Advantages

• Depend on application area– Fast and scalable for complex data– Other methods built on conventional database

methods – slow for this type of data

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Products

• Main products– Signal Data Explorer – Grid based signal

search and analysis tool– FaceEnforce – 3D Facial Biometric system

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Grids

• Cybula developed an understanding of Grids in partner ship with University– Initially – just watching– Then – involved in trials– Now – develop products

• Careful, relatively low risk, approach

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What did it offer?

• Cybula had a local search engine, but not an enterprise solution

• Grids offered the possibility of – Distributed search and analysis of data– Allowing users access to data any where,

without knowledge of location

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Grids

• Cybula involved in a number of EPSRC and DTI Grid projects since 2000– DAME 2000-2003 – associated partner– BROADEN 2004-2007 – full partner– CARMEN 2007-2010 – exploitation partner

• All used AURA search technology within the application

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Development

• DAME– This allowed University of York to test the

ideas – learn the technology – painful!• Technology developing• No one really understood it• Partners were try to develop a good business case

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Data focus

• Aimed at the search and analysis of signal data

• Very large amounts of complex data

• Find-one-like-it approach

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Development• At the end of DAME all was clear we had:

– A good piece of technology – Signal Data Explorer – a GUI for Vibration data search and analysis

– A distributed search engine• G-AURA – pattern match module

– Grid technology for managing distributed search

• Pattern Match Control (PMC)

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PMC

SDE GUI

Pattern Match Controller Pattern Match

Node

Pattern Match Node

Pattern Match Controller

ReturnResults()

Pattern Matching Service

ReturnResults()Search()

GetResults()

Pattern Matching Service

Search()

Pattern Matching Service

Pattern Matching Service

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SDE GUILocation of master node

Spectral data

Search results

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Evaluation

• Cybula then took the plunge

• Involved in BROADEN, DTI funded

• Also with Rolls-Royce

• As the exploitation partner

• Helped define the ‘product’

• Looked at possible markets

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CARMEN

• A new project CARMEN allowed us to define a good target market

• Neuroscience

• Simple choice – ready and willing collaborative team

• Area we knew well

CARMEN

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Some Customers

• Bombardier – use SDE for improving train diagnostics and prognostics (made Virgin trains, under ground trains etc.)

• Vodafone/Sun – use PMC to manage image search match problems – banned images

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Lessons

• It takes time

• Building a relationship with a company is essential

• Trust and understanding on both sides is essential

• Easy with Cybula, and independent company could be more difficult

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Lessons

• General Grid capability is very valuable

• Implementation and experience of large grid systems will take you further than others

• This comes off the back of UK eScience initiative

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Lessons

• We did not commercialise early enough

• I was waiting for Roll-Royce validation of the technology– They are a great early adopter

• Big companies take ages (years) to do this

• Can tackle other markets in the mean time

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Lessons

• Grids on there own don’t hack it (for us)

Grids enabling/enhancing an existing technology do

• Technology is always changing – a pain, but also an opportunity

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Lessons• You don’t introduce more than one new

innovation at a time, i.e.• We had AURA – introduced Grids for distributed

search• We would not introduce AURA and Grids

together – too much risk for a customer – two untried technologies.

• Leverage is weaker, can manage the market better in a stepwise approach

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Lessons

• Collaboration with Universities is essential in a new market– Too risky otherwise– Good access to early adopters– Access to skills– Access to expensive - new – technology– (that would be my view!)

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Thanks!

www.cybula.com

(+44)1904 56 76 86