Cambridge Computer Lab Ring: Product of the Year 2017 goes to Grakn Labs
Four years ago, I sat in an Automated Reasoning class, during my studies at the University of Cambridge, and since then I’ve always wondered how amazing it would be to enable computers to reason over data and derive new conclusions for us. And of course, there have been many great minds before us that have pursued this idea and got us much closer to realising this ambition. A couple of years later, I found myself extremely fortunate to be working together with a brilliant team, on exactly this problem. Together, we worked hard to build Grakn Labs, a distributed knowledge base with a query language that performs automated reasoning over data. Why? To simplify the dimensionality of searching through complex data, and to automate the process.
A year into our work, we joined the University of Cambridge Computer Lab Ring — an association of 255 technology companies founded by Cambridge alumni, which includes ARM, Sophos, SwiftKey, Raspberry Pi, Improbable, and Google DeepMind. It is an honour to be part of this community, as these innovative technology companies from my alma mater have always been a source of inspiration to me.
On Wednesday evening, it was the Ring’s 13th annual dinner and we were delighted to be attending for the first time. Towards the end of the of the event, we were pleasantly surprised that the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring Product of the Year 2017 was awarded to Grakn Labs for Grakn, joining the ranks of companies like SwiftKey and Google DeepMind in the Ring’s Hall of Fame.
It’s been an incredibly long journey for us at Grakn Labs, filled with so many ups and downs, and this award serves as a strong reminder for us to keep on pushing forward. Also, since my time as a graduate student the university was seminal to the founding of Grakn Labs, this award from some of the most distinguished members of the university and alumni has another layer of significance to me.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Computer Lab Ring, our developer community, and most importantly, the entire Grakn Labs team for all their hard work that got us to this point! This is a tremendous piece of validation for our work that we are truly humbled by and grateful for.
We look forward to the challenges ahead in the coming year!
Here at Grakn Labs, we have created a knowledge base so that AI applications have a way to leverage all the data that an intelligent system needs. If you want to find out more about what we do, take a look at our documentation and our blog, come to our meetups, join our community or leave a comment below.
