I am inaugurating this year’s blogging with some very exciting news.
I am starting a startup called Polytopix. I will be finishing my spring semester teaching responsibilities at Princeton and moving to Bay Area this summer to work full-time on Polytopix.
Meanwhile, I am actively designing, coding and deploying new algorithms, hiring R&D engineers, working on legal aspects and many more related action items. For the first time, I am using a book (instead of post-it’s) to keep track of my to-do list.
I can hear the clock ticking louder and faster than usual, perhaps because I am behind my schedule. According to my original plan (enthusiastically devised during my final semester of PhD), this blog post was supposed to appear in January 2013 !! A bunch of interesting (to say the least) events contributed generously to this delay.
Polytopix is aimed at adding context to news articles by analyzing the semantics of the news events. Polytopix’s algorithms retrieve news articles, categorize them, analyze their semantics and augment them with contextual explanatory articles.
The main idea of ‘semantic analysis of news’ is in my mind since my undergraduate senior thesis defense in 1999. Back then, I developed a summarization engine using lexical cohesion and information retrieval algorithms. See my very first publication
here. Starting from the final semester of my PhD (Spring 2011), I started developing a semantic engine to understand and analyze news, especially financial news. I used it as a stock picker to invest my savings. It performed much better than my mutual funds. This is my first realization of the potential of ‘semantic analysis’. Polytopix applies semantic analysis to daily news articles. I am planning to “spin-off” the ‘
financial news analysis’ as a separate startup. More on this, in a later blog post.
You probably heard the advice “Do not do a PhD just for the sake of doing it”. The same advice applies (with much more emphasis) to starting a startup. You should only start a startup if you are really passionate to solve a particular problem and you are strongly convinced that starting a company is the best way to solve it. I have all the right reasons to start Polytopix.
How do I feel now ?
Well, I am feeling very excited and energetic. The roadmap looks very challenging.
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