Srihari
pairs academics with business
Company
founded by UB faculty member to unveil new software development in June
By DONNA
LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
When
Rohini Srihari started Cymfony back in 1995, she was CEO, president,
secretary and coffee maker for the fledgling company, as well as its
founder.
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Rohini
Srihari, founder of Cymfony, looks forward to the unveiling of her
company's latest software development, Brand Dashboard™. |
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PHOTO:
JESSICA KOURKOUNIS |
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A
quiet-spoken, unassuming computer scientist, Srihari accomplished the
Herculean task of putting Cymfony, which currently specializes in data
extraction software, on the business map while teaching full-time as
an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Today,
Srihari is designated as founder and chief scientist at Cymfony, and
is looking forward in June to unveiling Brand Dashboard™, the company's
latest software development.
She
also maintains a position as a research scientist at the Center of Excellence
for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), which has developed handwritten
address interpretation software that is used by the U.S. Postal Service,
as well as the first software program designed to develop computer-assisted,
handwriting analysis tools for forensic applications.
In
all of her endeavors, Rohini Srihari thrives on seeing the growing synergy
develop between the business world and the scientific knowledge and
research it takes to develop a product.
She
says that in the early days of Cymfony, the focus was on just staying
alive financially, in part by designing Web sites and applying for research-and-development
grants. In 1997, the company received more than $2.5 million from collaborations
with the Air Force, Navy and Northrup Grumman. In 2000, the company
received $10 million in venture capital from companies in New York and
Palo Alto, Calif.
"That
year, I spent half my time on the road," says Srihari. "It's been a
long transition, thinking about what commercial product to offer and
building up the management team." She says managing her time was tough
and she scaled back her teaching responsibilities until the business
was on a sound footing. Now, she's looking forward to getting back into
the classroom this fall. "I like the interaction with students and not
only that, teaching forces you to learn the material really well," she
adds.
Brand
Dashboard™ is a tool designed to measure the effectiveness of marketing
communications. The customers Cymfony is pitching the software to include
public relations agencies, advertising agencies and clipping services—any
business that has an interest in knowing what drives successful product
recognition in the marketplace. Customers also can check out how their
competitors are faring.
"The
product essentially monitors several thousand sources of information
on a regular basis. These sources include national publications, such
as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as
well as regional publications, industry publications and trade magazines,"
says Srihari. The software tracks instances of brand mention and computes
various metrics regarding the context in which the brand is being mentioned—the
when, where, how and with whom brands are being talked about—leveraging
a company's ability to maximize brand equity. "It's a great report card
tool," says Srihari. The software eliminates time-consuming and expensive
clipping services. "I think it's hitting a sweet spot in terms of the
need for such a product," she adds.
Supporting
Brand Dashboard™ is the InfoXtract engine—"the pride and joy
of what we've worked on all this years," says Srihari. "Information
extraction is a technology that's needed for analyses of large volumes
of documents and its especially useful if you don't know what you're
looking for," she explains.
The
InfoXtract engine performs complex grammatical analysis of the text
to identify important entities, concepts, relationships and events in
the document. For example, the software is able to discover related
information hidden in unstructured documents, finding people who have
been mentioned in the last three weeks, and pinpointing events and relationships
between people. It extracts such information quickly and at the level
of phrases, she explains, saving valuable time reading huge volumes
of documents by offering smaller doses of information.
Since
Sept. 11, Cymfony has been approached by various government agencies
interested in the InfoXtract software, says Srihari.
When
it comes to negotiating the business world, Srihari admits that at first
she didn't want much to do with that side of company development. But
now she thinks she's a better researcher because of her experiences
in building a company from the bottom up.
"I've
learned so much the hard way—we still don't know how successful
we're going to be, she says. "Once you're the founder it's still your
baby."
"There
are two worlds that collide. There's the R&D world and academia—scientists
who really like to push the envelope in terms of what's being done and
then there's the real world out there," she says.
"The
business community is much more frenetic, with time and cost pressures,
but both communities are necessary."
