You may be familiar with the stats about our individual and household carbon footprints in the US. In 2020, America’s CO2 emissions per capita came in at 13.8 tonnes, down significantly from our peak of more than 23 in the early 70s, but nowhere near the 4 tonnes or less per person we need to achieve by 2050 to prevent catastrophic and irreversible damage to the planet. Businesses play an even bigger role in contributing CO2 to the environment, with oil, coal and gas companies being the worst offenders.
While the tech sector is less carbon-producing than other industries, commercial…
Kensho announced this week the launch of its latest product, Kensho NERD, a cutting-edge machine learning system that unlocks the full potential of textual data by finding entities mentioned in documents, newsfeeds, or other text and linking each to a corresponding record in a database.
NERD, short for Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation, was developed by the company’s Natural Language Processing team, which specializes in machine learning research and engineering related to analyzing and understanding human language. …
Kensho announced this week that CEO Adam Broun will be retiring at the end of April, and COO Bhavesh Dayalji will be moving into the CEO role effective immediately.
Adam has been with Kensho for over seven years, including more than two as CEO, capping a career in financial services, professional services and entrepreneurship. In his time as CEO, Kensho joined S&P Global to become its AI Innovation Hub, and Adam led the team in delivering projects that provided significant value to the organization. Prior to that, Adam was with Kensho since its beginning, helping grow the company from its…
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Kensho Technologies, the AI Innovation hub for S&P Global, announced today that its machine transcription service, Scribe, will now be publicly available for commercial use. Scribe’s machine learning models were trained on a corpus of over 100,000 hours of financial audio, making it significantly more accurate for business and industry-specific jargon, product and company names, numbers and currencies, and heavily accented speech.
“Our engineering team built Scribe with messy, real-world financial and business audio in mind, the kind of audio that traditional machine transcription services often struggle with,” said Keenan Freyberg, Product Owner for Kensho Scribe.
Scribe…
People across the US are having the same frustrating experience — you or a loved one meets the qualifications in your state to receive the Covid 19 Vaccine, but you can’t get an appointment. Slots open up on your local pharmacy’s website, then fill up so quickly that you miss the opportunity. You’re stuck wasting hours hitting refresh, waiting for the moment.
Last week, a couple of Kensho employees saw an opportunity to help solve this problem and built Covid Vaccine Texts, a site that monitors open appointments at CVS, Walmart and Rite Aid stores across the country and notifies…
Giving back to the community through skills-based projects in data journalism, environmental impact and educational equity.
Kensho’s Team Impact was started in 2019 as a way for Kensho employees to volunteer their unique talents in software development, data science, machine learning and more to give back to our communities in significant ways. The team is made up of three working groups, Data Journalism, Climate Impact and Education Equity. Each working group has a small core team that coordinates volunteer efforts and partnerships, and all Kenshins are invited to engage in hackathon-style events or as ad-hoc team members.
In July, we hosted our second Kensho Impactathon, a one-day event with a collection of volunteer opportunities for Kensho…
In August, Kensho announced that Melissa Whitehead is taking on the role of Kensho’s Chief Technology Officer. We’re excited to have her in this role and wanted to share more details about her background, her time with Kensho, and her plans for the engineering organization.
Melissa started her career in technology earning a computer science degree from the University of Michigan. After graduating, she worked for 7 years at Connecticut-based fintech company, FactSet, where she started as a back-end developer and later moved into a role leading their internal tools team.
She stepped away from the corporate world for a…
By Jason Weinreb
Extracting quantitative signals from text is transforming research across fields. Social scientists have built newspaper-based indicators of economic crises, partisan conflict, geopolitical risk, and economic policy uncertainty, to name just four examples. Marketing companies attempt to extract consumer insights from social media by identifying “trending” topics in a similar vein. Most such signals simply track the frequency of documents that match carefully-crafted keyword searches, and while this approach is simple and intuitive, it suffers from some important shortcomings that other methods avoid. …
By Jay Ulfelder
2018 passed without any regional waves of social unrest akin to the Arab Spring or the “color” revolutions of the early 2000s, but several countries still saw significant bursts of protest activity in the past year, and some of those bursts produced major political change.
We can track protest activity around the world in real time and in retrospect with Kensho’s topic trend scores. These scores are a weighted, normalized count of news articles associated with a specific country and tagged with a particular topic. The topic tags used in these computations are generated by an array…
By Jason Weinreb
The ongoing government shutdown in Washington has some commentators worried about its impact on markets and the economy. Others are less concerned. Whatever your view, the shutdown is a particularly nasty but now-familiar consequence of divided government in the United States, and the larger question is how that situation has historically affected economic uncertainty. The answer matters, particularly as fears of a recession are on the rise, as economic uncertainty has been shown to sap business investment, output, and job growth. One longtime argument -from both academics and investors like Ken Fisher — is that divided government…
