Northern Light is Awarded U.S. Patent for AI-Generated Company Performance Index

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Aug 09, 2022, 08:41 ET

New patent is the fifth in the "machine learning" domain for provider of knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights

BOSTON, Aug. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com), a provider of knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights, today announced it has been awarded a U.S. patent for automated generation of a company performance index created by automated analysis of publicly available information. For example, a bank's digital readiness could be assessed by analyzing publicly available websites and documents such as news stories about the bank. Other applications beyond banking include automated analysis of supplier risk, competitive performance, business strategy, and more.

This patent is Northern Light's fifth; it joins a portfolio of patents* the company holds in automated business analysis, text analytics, AI, and machine learning.

"Throughout its 25-year history, Northern Light has been a technology innovator," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "Initially, our focus was on internet search technology. In recent years, because Northern Light works with clients to aggregate content from hundreds of research firms, we have focused on using the techniques of cognitive computing to automate content analysis of complex documents, such as research and news reports. The extension of this capability to include automatically generating a performance index was a natural evolution for our company."

Northern Light's new patent is entitled "Systems and Methods for Automatically Determining a Performance Index" (U.S. Patent No. 11,226,946); it was awarded to Northern Light by the U.S. Patent Office on Jan. 18, 2022.

Northern Light's innovation

Conventional computerized tools for semantic analysis process large bodies of documents to identify topics discussed in those documents. Yet currently available tools are unable to draw useful conclusions from the semantic analyses they perform. One field in which such conclusions are useful is the strategic and competitive analysis of companies, whether competitors, acquisition targets, or otherwise. Such analyses are currently performed manually by analysts who research and review publicly available information about companies of interest and make determinations based on that information. The analysis is time- and labor-intensive, inconsistent between analysts and over time, prone to human error, and ultimately subjective, being greatly affected by the individual analyst's own perceptions and abilities. The resulting study is often costly and may overlook evidence that is available but not responsive to the analyst's manual processes.

Northern Light's patented innovation eliminates the human subjectivity that often clouds such analyses. Once set up, it can be performed instantly for one subject company or hundreds of subject companies, thus saving organizations performing such work considerable time and money. For example, in one test with a client, Northern Light's method saved 99% of the professional labor required to determine a set of banks' digital readiness and produced more comprehensive and consistent results compared to the prior manual methods employed.

Northern Light delivers its automatic company performance index generation capability commercially through its SinglePoint™ offering. SinglePoint is a SaaS-based enterprise knowledge management platform that seamlessly integrates and enables full-text search of an organization's complete research resources to create an invaluable market and competitive intelligence portal.

About Northern Light

Northern Light has been providing knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996. Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Northern Light has over 250,000 users of its strategic research portals. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light repeatedly has been recognized as one of KMWorld's "AI 50" – the companies empowering intelligent knowledge management – and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

* Northern Light's previous patents include:

Method and systems for automatically generating reports from search results
System and methods for analyzing document coverage
System and method for quote-based search summaries
Method and apparatus for extracting meaning from documents using a meaning taxonomy comprising syntactic structures

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SOURCE Northern Light