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Indian Grandma's Software Raising Industry's Eyebrows -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- May 5, 2003 "The real challenge in creating artificial intelligence," says a 57-year-old grandmother from her home in South India, "is the intelligence itself. Anyone can design a software that shows logic. But wisdom is something different. Wisdom stretches back over time. Over thousands of years." If you've never met this woman before, you can be excused for smiling charitably at this point. Few people would guess this unassuming housewife, known on the Internet simply as Amma (which means "mother" in many South Asian languages), is the co-founder of one of the most popular lifestyle sites on the Web. And even fewer people would guess the technology she helped design is proving revolutionary to the way computer networks process knowledge and maximize intelligence. Amma's website, Ammas.com, was started from New Delhi in 1996. It began as a simple cooking site, featuring Amma's cooking advice, and inviting users to share their own. But identifying ways to share cooking knowledge proved just the first step in a long process of discovery. Within a few years the site was offering such topics as beauty, fashion, parenting, health, investment and marriage. More importantly, Amma and her team were exploring ways in which the system could filter valuable knowledge -- or what Amma called wisdom -- from the increasing amount of information passing through her site every day. But how, after all, can a computer system recognize and promote wisdom? "We began to break down the whole process of information exchange in the real world," says Suren Talla, a former Bell Labs researcher and co-founder of Ammas.com. "We began asking such questions as, how do we learn? What makes us trust the advice we receive? What makes people give advice in the first place? By breaking this process down in all its parts, we could attach test values to everything -- then it was just a matter of trial and error on the millions of unique users passing through Ammas.com." From a single Amma in 1996, Ammas.com now has over 3700 registered advisors, all of them ranked according to performance, the top 100 of whom Amma calls the "genius of Ammas.com." The site receives over 300 new articles of advice each day and ranks first in its category on Google, the Internet's largest search engine. But perhaps most impressive is the site's ability to filter questions and advice in such a way that higher quality information is generated more quickly, and displayed more prominently. "Many visitors to the site still think of it as a small, intimate website with a very wise woman sitting behind a computer," says the founding Amma. "They don't realize how much technology exists behind the scenes. How many years of programming was involved." As the quality of advice increases, and the response time decreases, many people in the computer industry are beginning to take the Ask Amma system seriously, as a prototype for a next generation of Internet-based search engines. "Until now, search engines have focused on retrieving information from a centralized database," says A. Robinson, a communications scholar who invested in the site in its early stages and now sits on the Board of Directors. "The Ask Amma system, however, can search thousands of human brains, filter the information, and then provide the best response as quickly as possible. Unlike traditional search engines, it works equally well in both the real and digital worlds." To achieve this level of wisdom, Ammas.com invented a knowledge processing system it calls the Ask Agent -- a patented set of formulae and system code designed by the Ammas.com team. The Ask Agent can work with any large web community and is now beginning pilot programs as an expertise management system in large businesses, universities and media sites. "I've looked at literally hundreds of e-business models," says Logan Muller, an e-business lecturer at the University of Technology in New Zealand, which is now piloting the Ask Agent for their students. "The moment I saw the Ammas.com system, I knew it was the e-business model of the future." "Intelligence is not an individual quality," explains Robinson. "By the time we're a year old, our brain has already hooked up with a large community of brains around us. No one would know who Einstein was today if he hadn't submitted his intelligence to other brains, who could then determine, through a filtering process, that indeed, Einstein's brain had something brilliant to offer." But in real life there are many factors involved in the distillation of intelligence -- "including," says Robinson, "one of the most important of all, and that is money. We knew that money plays a role in how people interact, so we were sure to include it in our system design. This is why we've been able continue forward at all, although we still have some ways to go before we achieve our full revenue potential." Today Amma herself sits on the Board of Directors of Ammas.com Ltd, a New Zealand-based company which owns and has commercialized the Ammas.com property. She recently wrote a popular cookbook called Amma's Cookbook, from Indian Village to Internet, which is published by HarperCollins, and she's considering writing another. She's also been involved in the production of a cosmetics range -- Ammas Cosmetics -- which are the first all-Natural Indian range in the world, with no synthetic ingredients, preservatives or alcohol. "When your system has responded to over 50,000 beauty queries, you know what your customers want," she explains. With revenues increasing from such customer-driven products, now Amma and the other directors of Ammas.com Ltd can spend their time thinking about bigger issues -- such as the new search engine they're plan to launch next month, will they claim will be more powerful than Google. "For our business, the burst of the dotcom bubble was a great relief for us," says Talla. "We always knew there was a difference between something like Ammas.com and an overpriced brochure site with an e-commerce backend. On the Internet, the only commodity you can truly buy and sell is knowledge -- the rest belongs to the postal service. What's taken the IT industry a long time to figure out is how to price digital knowledge as a commodity. But that's what we do. That's what we've finally solved." __________________ For more information, please visit http://www.ammas.com, or email info@ammas.com. |
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