Arria NLG Plc (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their 5th US patent, patent strategy and a positive 2016
Q1: First off, congratulations to Arria on receiving approval on your 5th US patent. Can you tell us a little bit more about what it was for and what it means to Arria?
A1: Sure, well it’s one of those foundational patents in natural language generation that Arria’s getting known for. If you recall Giles, you know how Arria NLG specialises in this taking data and turning it into content so taking data and turning it into rich narratives. So what this patent covers is any scenario where an alert is triggered, where a system whether it be a financial system seeing a spike in the stock price or an engineering system seeing an alert pop up due to a temperature differential in a weather system, any of those scenarios where the data is tripping a trigger, causing a trigger to alert and a system then has to recognise that that trigger has been tripped and then try and build a story, look at other data sources to build a story to describe what’s actually happening in language, in narrative, that’s what this patent covers. So it’s very foundational, anyone that wants to generate an NLG system, a natural language generation/artificial intelligence system, who wants alerts and triggers to result in a language explanation of what’s going on, will need the sort of technology that this patent covers.
Q2: Have you got then a patent strategy in place?
A2: Yes, we sure do, we’ve had a strong strategy for our team and for our patents since the company formed. We’ve got of course, or we started with the three leaders in the field Professor Ehud Reiter, Dr Robert Dale and Dr Yaji Sripada, who literally wrote the book on natural language generation and who are the most cited in the field in that form of artificial intelligence. So for the first few years, our patent strategies have been around taking their intellectual property and ring-fencing it with IP, taking their ideas and innovations and putting it in place via a patent programme with our great patent firm, Alston Bird in the United States. Now, that patent programme has extended which one of the things as one of the founders and the strategy guy at Arria NLG, I’m pleased about things, our IP programme now covers all of the other PhD’s that we’ve got working for us, we’ve got some very smart folk, almost half of our developers have PhD’s in NLG or related fields so they’re encouraged and they’re rewarded for coming up with innovations within this form of artificial intelligence that we can patent. So we’ve got a large hopper full of patentable elements in the field of natural language generation that is slowly working through that programme that we set up with Alston Bird in the United States. So investors will see, the public will see, patents coming up again and again as the months go by as we secure what we describe as our patent mat that allows us to dominate that NLG space as it evolves so that original idea about patent strategy is maturing now and we’re seeing our patent IP engine delivering these patents and that’ll be set to continue going forward.
Q3: Brilliant. Now Arria NLG Plc has had a string of good news since December, are you feeling positive about 2016?
A3: Very positive, as I’ve said before the positivity comes from meeting clients’ needs with an increasingly swift deploy, easy to deploy technology set. So what we’ll see through 2016 is an increasing number of those big platform clients, those big ticket clients who use us for that high end mission critical environment, that more and more of the mid-range firms and developer firms with our NLG ecosystem, our NLG developer cloud that’ll be coming out later in the year, will be able to use the NLG toolkit to build their own innovations, to come up with their own business services for whatever vertical they’re in; finance, industrial, medical, public sector, using our patented technology. So a big shift for us in 2016, this is our pivot year and this patent is our more proof point that supports that pivot strategy.
