A tech company backed by Edinburgh investor Frontier IP is helping in the fight against the coronavirus.
Elute Intelligence, known as Computational Forensic Linguistics (CFL) Software until October 2019, has created a document reader to help scientists find information about coronavirus in vast research databases. The software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up its searches.
The software company explained: “Elute’s AI searches, compares and analyses documents to identify similarities between them by mimicking the way people read. Researchers enter an entire paper already identified as of interest to find other relevant research. The approach is very different to conventional keyword or Boolean search technologies. A patent application has been filed to protect developments of the technology.”
Elute was founded in 1994 by David Woolls, an expert in comparing documents, who developed CopyCatch Investigator, a plagiarism detection program used in education. Frontier, which helps universities and businesses make money from their intellectual property, owns a 43% stake in Elute.
Matthew White, Frontier’s chief commercialisation officer, said: “The Covid-19 document reader demonstrates just some of Elute’s ability to rapidly identify relevant information in unstructured datasets. It is great to see the team deploy this capability in such a short space of time.”
