The Project

In December, 2013, the Modulus SharpeMind project began as the first financial application to be developed for IBM Watson to deliver real-time analysis of unstructured financial data to mobile devices.

Millions of unstructured text documents for SharpeMind were sourced from analyst reports, news feeds, governmental reports, and social media sites.

How it Worked

The system was designed to provide traders with a means to instantly access trading signals and consensus-based buy and sell recommendations.

While working on the project, Modulus invented and patented a method that allowed consensus systems, such as Watson, to process time-series data.

While not designed for time-series analysis, our system allowed IBM Watson to create time-series forecasts based on pre-processed text data alone.

About Watson

On May 11, 1997, an IBM computer called IBM Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov after a six-game match: two wins for IBM, one for the champion and three draws.

The match lasted several days and received massive media coverage around the world.

Behind the contest however, was important computer science, pushing forward the ability of computers to handle complex calculations.

In another historic event, in February 2011, IBM's Watson computer competed on Jeopardy! against the TV quiz show's two biggest all-time champions. Watson is a computer running software called Deep QA, developed by IBM Research.

While the grand challenge driving the project was to win on Jeopardy!, the broader goal of Watson was to create a new generation of technology that can find answers in unstructured data more effectively than standard search technology.

Progress

While Modulus is no longer engaged with IBM Watson, we have developed our own natural language processing systems for financial markets and more.