Waikato University’s “amazing” reputation for AI research has helped a graduate found a company with some of the world’s big names among its clients.
Thematic founder Alyona Medelyan told the audience at the launch of the university’s AI Institute that when she attends conferences around the world, people already know about Waikato University.
“Studying at Waikato University didn’t just teach me valuable skills in natural language processing and machine learning. I also benefited from Waikato University’s amazing reputation worldwide,” she said at the April 27 launch of Te Ipu o te Mahara, which translates as ‘A Receptacle of Consciousness’.
“In my opinion, it all comes from the fact that you’re amazing sharing your research and putting yourself out there.”
She said while studying for a PhD at Waikato she learned about the importance of open source computation as well as writing about research in an accessible way.
“When I started Thematic, one of the first things we did was to start writing about the things that we do, and explaining the problem that we’re trying to solve. And this is how we found our first international customer.”
Thematic uses AI to analyse customer feedback to help companies improve their products and services, and counts LinkedIn, Vodafone and Jetstar among its international clients. Having a PhD from the university also helped Medelyan gain a spot at prestigious US-based startup accelerator Y Combinator, which she says was transformative in the early stages for the budding company that now has 15 staff.
“I did an experiment and I added up all of the customers of our customers, and I ended up at hundreds of millions of people,” she said. “LinkedIn alone has 700 million users, and we help them to improve their customer experience. So that’s an estimate of an impact a tiny team of just 15 people can make.”
Te Ipu o te Mahara is focused on translating New Zealand’s world-leading expertise in AI, real time analytics of big data and machine learning, into commercial businesses and applications.
Institute director Professor Albert Bifet says the purpose is to link Waikato’s world-class training and education with leading research and ultimately boost New Zealand’s growing tech industry.
“Artificial intelligence and Māori tech have been identified as enabling growth engines for New Zealand and the purpose of Te Ipu o te Mahara is to leverage our world-leading expertise to benefit New Zealand,” he says.
Professor Albert Bifet at the launch.
Waikato is responsible for applications like WEKA, the world’s first open source machine learning library that has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Its researchers have also written books on machine learning and data mining used by Google employees and computer science departments in universities around the world. The university has also recently invested in New Zealand’s most powerful computer for AI. The NVIDIA DGX A100 is the world’s most advanced system for powering universal AI workloads, enabling machine learning and artificial intelligence that can solve problems from addressing climate change to managing biodiversity.
One of the first projects the computer is being used for is to train models that can learn and classify New Zealand’s plants and animals, based on a publicly available database of more than one million photos.
Professor Bifet says AI will transform research and business in New Zealand, with technology currently New Zealand’s third largest export sector. New Zealand’s top 200 tech companies brought in revenue of $12.7 billion in 2020.
“Our focus is on building collaborative relationships between the Institute, the wider AI research community and the business community, both in New Zealand and internationally, and then using that research to support entrepreneurship and the commercialisation of AI technology.”
Associate director for the Institute, Jannat Maqbool, will be responsible for fostering these relationships.
“Alongside the work of experts and researchers a big focus of the Institute will be getting young people excited about STEM subjects and AI, so New Zealand can benefit from a local talent pool with diverse perspectives in leveraging this technology into the future,” she says.
The Institute will offer programmes in schools, deliver professional programmes for industry and help people connect and invent new ways to address the challenges of today, using AI.
Professor Bernhard Pfahringer, Professor Eibe Frank and Associate Professor Te Taka Keegan are co-directors of the Institute. Te Ipu o te Mahara will sit within the Division of Health, Engineering, Computing and Science at the University of Waikato.
