ThoughtRiver Bags £400K From Gov For ‘Thinking AI’ Project

ThoughtRiver, the Cambridge-based legal AI pioneer focused on contract pre-screening, is to be part of a £400,000 funding package from the Government’s Innovate UK agency for a project to develop a ‘thinking AI’.

The company explained that the ‘radical research concept’, which they have codenamed DBA, represents a ‘significant advance in the ability of computers to rationalise complex problems in novel scenarios based on self-taught logic‘.

The resulting technology will enable increasingly sophisticated and higher-level questions about previously unseen contracts to be automatically answered, they said.

This, they hope, ‘will make cutting edge AI technology available to a broader audience by enabling lay users to get answers to powerful questions without significant training or configuration effort‘.

The project will be run in collaboration with NLP consultancy iLexIR and its founder Professor Ted Briscoe of Cambridge University.

The company will also support initiatives such as the All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence in the UK.

Co-chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, Lord Tim Clement-Jones, said: ‘I am a strong advocate of world-leading AI R&D taking place in the UK – especially in the context of key export industries such as legal services – and thrilled that…. the ThoughtRiver team have been awarded this project.’

Tim Pullan, CEO of ThoughtRiver, said of the project: ‘We have invested heavily in ground breaking digitisation technology to bring contracting into the 21st century. This project represents a further significant step forward and we are honoured to be recognised by Innovate UK and to be working on another project with Ted and his team.’

Professor Ted Briscoe, added: ‘This is a technically exciting and challenging project and we are looking forward to working with the ThoughtRiver team in 2019.’

Also, if you’d like to learn more about ThoughtRiver, check out this interview with CEO, Tim Pullan, here.

[Plus: tomorrow Artificial Lawyer explores what this ‘thinking AI’ will do.]

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ThoughtRiver is listed in the AL 100 Legal Tech Directory.