Company Blog

Where is Kingland focused within the overall Cognitive / AI / Machine Learning space? Our passion and investment are in two primary areas: 

• Extracting data / important information out of unstructured content
• Learning from vast amounts of data to make discoveries and decisions

Examples of Enterprise Data Management Requests

Regulatory documents, government registries, corporate sites, news and industry trade journals, product documents, you name it – they all represent important sources that contain an incredible amount of valuable data, insight, sentiment and analysis that is ripe for processing. Clients approach Kingland because of a great opportunity for efficiency – they typically already staff teams of data / business subject matter expert analysts to manually extract data and information out of these types of unstructured sources, yet they continue to pursue higher quality, better timeliness, and more productivity from these teams when managing data from such sources.

Historical data from the enterprise data management programs within our clients offer a level of quality management and predictive capabilities, if harnessed appropriately. In one example, legal entity data that has been classified with NAICS codes can offer machine learning opportunities to build models that can verify the classification accuracy of millions of entities, including additionally predicting the NAICS classifications of newly onboarded entities. In another example, retailers benefit from recommendations learned from past consumer behavior, for the benefit of timely product and complementary offerings.

Proper hierarchy data management capabilities are key to risk and compliance use cases. Clients want to manage a variety of complex hierarchy structures, understanding the relationships among data domains such as legal entity and natural person.  

Properly secured and authorized applications are an important foundation to any global enterprise, and clients need to enable this foundation for a variety of data management use cases.  That’s why we’re providing several “how it works” overviews to show how the Kingland Platform solves some of the industry’s enterprise data challenges.  

Cognitive, AI, Machine Learning … to Deep Learning, Neural Nets, Natural Language Processing and Entity Recognition … to Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Home, Watson … and just for fun, to Skynet, The Matrix, Westworld, and my personal favorite, Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S.

With the onslaught of (enter your favorite term(s) from the above themes) nearly everywhere we turn in business, home and entertainment, have you ever found yourself trying to make sense of it all?  Trying to figure out how it all relates – if it even does? 

So why Iowa? It’s a question we get often from executives around the world. For such an innovative company of software architects, artificial intelligence engineers, and data SMEs, how and why do we do it from Iowa? The answer is quite strategic, and I'll go over four of the key reasons we choose to grow Kingland from Iowa. 

Last week leading banks, broker dealers, and regulators gathered in New York for DTCC’s third annual Fintech Symposium. This is always a must attend event for Kingland as its incredibly well run and covers many of the emerging trends in the industry in an afternoon.  DTCC’s perspective is critical as they sit at the cross roads of the sell side, buy side, and global regulatory environment, so if an issue is on the table, there’s a strong reason. 

As the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) saga continues to unfold, there is continued uncertainty throughout the industry. When are the reporting deadlines? Are the specifications published and final? Are we reporting personally identifiable information or not? All of these questions are clearly on the table, being discussed by the SEC, SROs, and firms throughout the industry. As the weeks go by in 2018, we expect the answers to these questions to become clear. 

For years and years, regulatory and legal requirements have created hundreds if not thousands of processes that require companies to capture information in documents or records. This information includes details about their customers, suppliers, market activity, and many other facets of their business. I don't know a company on the planet that really values all of this documentation. However, in the era of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, we're discovering that all of this documentation may be a goldmine of data for these large enterprises. 

I loved playing with LEGO pieces as a child. I remember building specific things such as castles, vehicles and helicopters from the different shapes and sizes. I may have started to build those models a time or two according to the directions before I started using the blocks to build other things, things not imagined by the designers of the sets. The innumerable outcomes of creating things with LEGO blocks allowed me to imagine and design numerous 'products' for me and my friends. 

Blue. Green. Red. Black. No, I'm not just talking about colors. I'm talking about a specific deployment technique we use at Kingland that allows for near zero downtime and the ability to easily rollback to a previous release if there are too many issues with the latest release. 

Blue/green is a deployment technique where there are two identical sets of infrastructure. One set/environment - blue - has the current production release installed. The other set/environment - green - has the next production release installed. To keep things running smooth, a load balancer sits in front of the two environments and is pointed at the blue environment. When the green environment has the latest release installed, has been smoke tested and is ready for production, the load balancer is changed to point to the green environment. Any transactions occurring in the blue environment are allowed to finish, but all new transactions are directed to the green environment. In the event there is an issue with the release in the green environment, the release is rolled back by changing the load balancer to point to the blue environment.