Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Big Data firm nets Big Bucks

Ayasdi, a company that developed a suite of network based analysis and visualization tools, has netted a big investment, writes Guardian:
A US big data firm is set to establish algebraic topology as the gold standard of data science with the launch of the world's leading topological data analysis (TDA) platform.
Ayasdi, whose co-founders include renowned mathematics professor Gunnar Carlsson, launched today in Palo Alto, California, having secured $10.25m from investors including Khosla Ventures in the first round of funding.
The article cites health care, and specifically cancer research, as the primary beneficiary of topological data analysis, otherwise commonly known as network analysis in biological circles.  Plenty of resources like Reactome, Cytoscape, GeneMANIA are well known to researchers interested in biological networks.

Among other things, network based approaches have also been used to redefine basketball player positions and move the number of player types from five to thirteen.  There's a good video from the Sloan Sports Conference on the approach here.