2015 KMWorld Promise and Reality award winners
KM Promise winner: Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning, a privately held company headquartered outside of Nashville, Tenn., delivers cognitive computing. Its machine learning-based analytics platform, Synthesys, understands how humans communicate by analyzing the context, content and relationships within big data while semantically revealing what’s most critical to clients. Digital Reasoning says Synthesys can rapidly read data from any source, resolve what’s valuable and what’s not, and reason using a dynamic knowledge graph, which helps government agencies, financial institutions and healthcare organizations reveal concealed relationships, risks and opportunities.

Synthesys includes the latest advancements in deep learning and cognitive computing. The platform is especially smart at revealing communications that are being intentionally concealed. When, for example, a trader says, “Now we’re cracking,” Synthesys understands that this is an unusual communication, whereas traditional electronic communications monitoring solutions would just ignore the communication because it did not meet a predefined list of words or terms. Digital Reasoning is disrupting the traditional electronic communications surveillance market by making keyword search obsolete and by making it increasingly difficult for financial criminals to go undetected as they communicate and collude with each other.

The company says that Synthesys can be 10 to 15 times more accurate than other solutions that depend on keywords and lexicons or pattern-matching to analyze communications. Built on a scalable platform that can grow with business usage, Synthesys provides precision for electronic communications surveillance. By semantically analyzing all electronic communications, understanding who’s talking to whom and what about, Digital Reasoning is now assisting many leading financial institutions to identify potential collusion and manipulation, helping to avoid the next regulatory and/or reputational crisis.

According to Vincent Tortorella, chief compliance and surveillance officer at Point72, “Using Synthesys gives our team the means to discover potential problems and act on them before they ripen into actual problems. By taking advantage of a system that learns and adapts to changing behaviors, it puts Point72 in a better position to protect against reputational and regulatory risks.”