UCD research leads to major deal for analysis software
Software developed by two UCD researchers that can help analyse sentiment in the online media has been licensed by British-based market intelligence firm Polecat.
The software was developed by Professor Pádraig Cunningham and Dr Derek Greene and is the product of research that was funded three years ago by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).
The software will be integrated into Polecat’s MeaningMine system, which analyses statistical and linguistic trends in digital and broadcast media.
Polecat advises customers on what kind of comments and analysis of their products or services appears in the online media.
They would trawl thousands of news items and blog posts and summarise what has been said and identify what topics are associated with positive sentiment and what are associated with negative sentiment,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham and Greene’s software would enable Polecat to cluster that information into a set of coherent sub-groups and identify what the key terms associated with those sub-groups were.
‘‘What is special about our technology is scalability,” Cunningham said. ‘‘Sentiment analysis has been around for a long time and has existed as a manual process for almost 100 years.
‘‘Now that everything is online, the process can be automated and what our software can do is handle large volumes of data.”
The commercial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is understood that UCD stands to gain a percentage of the revenues generated by the software.
Cunningham said that the software is just one strand of the SFI-funded research that has been going on over the past three years.
‘‘We decided to market this particular strand of the technology into something we could license. So at the beginning of the summer we started bundling the technology into something we could sell,” he said.
The deal was negotiated by UCD’s technology transfer centre Nova UCD and Dublin law firm Beauchamps.
‘‘Enterprise Ireland’s development officer put them in touch with us. I think that is the missing link with this kind of research,” Cunningham said.
‘‘There is a reasonable amount of money to do research available from organisations such as SFI, but the bit that really needs to be supported is putting the researchers with something that can be commercialised in touch with someone who could license the technology. I think there is a brokering job that needs to be done.
‘‘Enterprise Ireland did it in this situation, but I do think that there is a risk that some of the outputs of research won’t be transferred unless that job is done properly.”
