Yewno for Education launches for universities; Vertical premium service already in hands of elite academic libraries and research centers.
Yewno, a new approach to knowledge discovery aimed at enhancing human understanding via an inference hub, today announced the launch of its first vertical offering, Yewno for Education.
A premium service designed for academic and research institutions, Yewno for Education is a connected system of curated content facilitating deeper knowledge discovery, or hyperknowledge, by mimicking the way the human brain connects related yet disparate concepts to achieve deeper learning.
Designed for academic researchers, Yewno for Education combines the most powerful components of computational linguistics, semantic analysis, neural networks and data visualization to usher in a new era of enlightened knowledge discovery. With a database of close to 50 million vetted, high-quality pieces of content, some dating back almost 200 years, Yewno counts more than two dozen publishers and content aggregators among its launch partners including Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis Group. Already used at some of the world’s elite universities including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Stonehill College, Yewno can ingest and utilize an academic institution’s existing content and subscriptions, and is complementary to existing search tools.
“Yewno mirrors the human mind’s own lateral thinking by pulling together and synthesizing analogous yet unrelated concepts to achieve deeper learning,” said Ruggero Gramatica, CEO and Founder, Yewno. “It generates results that evoke our natural abilities, using computational modeling to elegantly present both abstract knowledge and concrete linkage patterns in a visual matrix. The outcome is a transformation in creative capacity and critical thinking.”
Despite the complex technology driving Yewno for Education’s knowledge discovery platform, discovering and engaging with topics and related information is incredibly simple. Developed for research scholars and undergraduate students alike, Yewno for Education allows users to point-and-click their way to a comprehensive landscape of correlating knowledge in the form of a content column that appears along the right-hand side of the screen, providing a summary of the given concept and links to information sources. When users have identified the concepts that interest them most, they can connect to the details using multi-hop functionality which instantaneously reconfigures all of the relevant information to show the recalculated relationships between the selected concepts. Moreover, users can access the content sources straight from the relevant section where the concepts and links are referred.
Moreover, any concepts can be connected when a user hovers over a connecting line and an information icon appears that can be clicked to reveal new relationships. This allows anyone to intuitively explore a topic by navigating through correlated information and delve deeper into the rationale of how certain topics are related thus making it possible to explore cross-disciplinary details and find connections that otherwise would go unnoticed.
In addition, students at virtually any institution can utilize the power of Yewno for Education by taking advantage of open online and in-library computer access from participating institutions. Then, using the interlibrary loan program, a student can request target source materials identified during the knowledge discovery process for further reading and research.
Content categories represented in Yewno include medicine, business, humanities, engineering and technology, social sciences, education, biological sciences, creative arts and design, computer science, agriculture and related sciences, mass communications, physical sciences, legal, architecture and planning, mathematical sciences, and interdisciplinary or “undecided” determinants.
Future Offerings
Yewno for Education is the first in a series of premium services for vertical markets including financial and investment services, life sciences and news. Each specific offering will include high-quality, vetted content contextually relevant to the needs of professional users. Yewno’s vertical market offerings require per-seat license agreements with organizations and enterprises.
Academic Customers Already Using Yewno for Education
“At the library our scholars often tell us that while they love the immediate access of online research, they miss the serendipitous discoveries that wandering in the stacks can provide,” said Suzanne Wones, Director of Library Digital Strategies and Innovation, Harvard Library. “Yewno offers a way to experience both – the delight of discovering unexpected connections and the efficiency of high-performance computing.”
“At MIT we are looking to engage the community’s imagination in terms of innovative ways of discovering new connections and ideas,” said Chris Bourg, PhD, Director, MIT Libraries. “Yewno provides a completely different perspective on information and could be one of the key ways of doing this.”
“I don’t call it a search engine, I call it a discovery environment because it recurrently allows researchers and students to go back to the original concepts they started with, or supported ones, and shape and reshape their hypotheses of engagement based on ideas, not based solely on expressions,” said Michael Keller, Vice Provost, Academic Council, Stanford University Libraries. “This changes the world. I’ve been looking all my life for ways to get around the limitations of language and technology, and data formats that are restrictive. I believe that Yewno technology will enhance research in ways that we can only begin to imagine.”
“Student motivation includes learning and meeting deadlines. When students are overwhelmed by the vast resources available to them, they sometimes choose to settle for initial research results and don’t delve further into information to find the best sources,” said Cheryl McGrath, Director, MacPháidín Library. “I’m excited to incorporate Yewno for Education at Stonehill College and help students access and visualize how they can incorporate high-quality content as they develop their ideas. In presentations to faculty and students conducting research, they have found new connections that are helping them to learn what are the questions they need to be asking and where they can find the answers.”
About Yewno
Founded in 2011, Yewno is sparking curiosity, passion and the thirst for knowledge by building a new category of knowledge discovery that mimics how the human mind intuitively makes conceptual connections, allowing for dynamic linkages between related yet unstructured data. Yewno comprises a team of hands-on entrepreneurs, engineers and data scientists who have experience with technology startups and publicly-traded stalwarts alike. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in London, Yewno is venture-funded by Pacific Capital and has established more than two dozen partnerships across top research universities, publishers and content aggregators worldwide. For more information, visit http://corp.yewno.com/.
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