Lytica adds AI braintrust for cost, risk assessment of electronic components

Ottawa-based Lytica Inc., providers of electronic component price benchmarking services, has appointed Dr. Shahzad Khan as its new chief research officer (CRO), along with three of his colleagues, which have also joined the firm’s research staff. 

A serial entrepreneur, with a PhD in computer science from Cambridge University (UK), Dr. Khan will be responsible for setting research direction and defining the core technologies required for Lytica’s product roadmap. He has 22 years of experience in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and computational linguistics. He has authored more than 20 research papers and holds six patents related to relevant inventions. His latest venture – Gnowit – has been focused on AI consulting and real-time media, industry and government intelligence applications.

Dr. Khan and his team are familiar with Lytica’s Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) and proprietary technologies. The knowledge and expertise the Gnowit team brings is a valuable addition to Lytica. Gnowit partnered with Lytica last year to drive a 20x+ increase in priced components within Lytica’s Freebenchmarking.com (FBDC) using AI techniques. As a result, Lytica is acquiring Gnowit’s professional services division and licensing its technologies to effectively leverage AI in its products and processes.

Industry-wide problem within the ecosystem revolves around inadvertently corrupt data

Ken Bradley, Lytica’s founder and CTO, explained the recent collaboration: “An industry-wide problem experienced by every participant within the ecosystem revolves around inadvertently corrupt data. Companies compensate for this issue by diverting their ‘subject experts’ and tasking them with cleaning up part number and product attributes prior to the data moving further upstream or downstream. Last year, we demonstrated through our work that advanced AI algorithms can reliably repair corrupt data.” Mr. Bradley added: “This core work has already improved our current products and enables a number of planned product releases for supply chain enhancement.”

“Dr. Khan’s work with Lytica’s ATC has seen an exponential increase in the number of valid and priced components within the Freebenchmarking.com (FBDC) database. This increase was possible through the application of AI techniques,” adds Mark Tayles, Lytica president and CEO.

Dr. Khan commented on his role as Lytica’s CRO: “I’m excited as this represents an investment in excess of $2M over the next few years. Working as part of the Lytica team allows us to laser focus our AI and language processing technologies expertise squarely at the root of some complex industry problems.”

Dr. Khan further elaborated on how to navigate the continuously evolving industry. “The morphing of the electronic industry from a vertical to a horizontal orientation has exposed a number of legacy friction points that impede the rapid and reliable transmission of component information. AI and deep learning are ideally suited for identifying and replacing these friction points.”