Two Valley companies received grants from the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) in an initiative to bring artificial intelligence to businesses across the state.
The grant is an extension of AI Jumpstart, a $4 million program launched in April to implement AI infrastructure, and will provide businesses with an opportunity to work with faculty from Northeastern University — the lead school on the program — and Tufts and Boston universities as they work with the resources gained from the launch of AI Jumpstart.
“We’re pleased to see the geographic impact that this program will have, impacting businesses from Boston to the Berkshires,” said Pat Larkin, director of the Innovation Institute at MassTech, a public economic development agency that fosters competition in the technology industry by creating partnerships with academia and businesses. “This program will show the impact AI can have on our ‘Made in Massachusetts’ companies, showing that AI isn’t only for large, global corporations, but for small businesses looking to innovate and grow.”
The two Valley companies to receive grants are Automatic Controversy Detection Inc. (AuCoDe), of Granby, and South Deerfield-based Worthington Assembly.
AuCoDe is a startup that analyzes data sets with algorithms and can then apply that analysis in a variety of ways. The company is also a spinoff of the original AuCoDe project, which was started at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is working with professional faculty there, along with other schools.
“It’s a sounding board with one of the leading experts in our field,” said AuCoDe CEO Julian Lustig-Gonzalez. “We’ve had a really great experience working with the folks at Northeastern and MassTech.”
He said the added efforts of experts in the field and various graduate students from the schools also allow the company to work “much quicker” and “more deeply,” than it could work on its own.
“For us, it’s really like having this set of peers we can sort of collaborate with,” said Andrew Curran, AuCoDe’s vice president of product and innovation. “We get to take advantage of a sort of peer group and they get something to work on.”
Curran explained AuCoDe is exploring the analysis of social media trends and tweets about TV and movies as one of their main avenues for operating. Curran said these sources of information and opinions can be put into a data set and analyzed by algorithms and AI in a method for “quantifying and evaluating reputation” of these shows, which could then be used to drive studio and producer decisions.
“You can get an incredibly detailed and sophisticated level of analysis,” Curran said. “That’s sort of where we’re headed right now.”
With the MassTech partnership, Curran said AuCoDe’s resource pool has been greatly enhanced and will help the company get off the ground.
“The benefit to work we’re doing now is exponential,” Curran explained. “We’re very fortunate and we’ll be squeezing every last bit of juice out of this orange.”
Worthington Assembly is the other company in the Valley picked by MassTech to work with this grant funding. The company produces circuit boards for a variety of industries, but mostly focuses its resources on medical devices and smaller, experimental orders.
Chief Technology Officer Chris Denney said one of the company’s priorities is to target the inspection process of small-scale circuit board orders because those are often put together by hand because of the limited quantity requested. All circuit boards produced en masse are inspected by a machine with a camera that detects flaws, but smaller orders not going through the main production line can require hand-soldered components and must be inspected manually with a microscope.
“When do you something by hand, you factor in the skill level of the person working,” Denney said. “Can we automate the verification of work that person did by hand?”
Denney said this technology is not new in terms of large-scale manufacturing, but Worthington Assembly is trying to repurpose it for small quantities.
“If you’re building an iPhone, you already have this,” Denney said. “What we’re hoping to see is to take this technology and apply it to small-scale manufacturing.”
This in turn would help the company continue to accept small orders of circuit boards without having to worry about production time on other orders. Worthington Assembly is working with Boston University’s engineering department and will produce a proposal by May.
Denney added it’s been “nice to work with smart people” and he is hopeful the collaborations are fruitful for both the company and the school faculty.
Chief Financial Officer Rafal Dybacki said the work has been productive thus far, and could blossom into further cooperation beyond the grant period. He added the grant has provided Worthington Assembly with an opportunity it could never have undertaken on its own.
“This could result in some (long-term) collaboration, we’ll see how it goes,” Dybacki said. “Without the grant, we wouldn’t even try this.”
Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.