Spreading the Cost Around

One of the goals of Aiaioo Labs is to reduce the cost to clients of development of specialised cutting edge products.

We believe we can reduce the cost of research and product development to client firms in the following ways:

• By employing researchers as a common resource so that clients can have access to expert advice when necessary without having to bear the cost of a full-time and long-term hire.
• By developing software components in our areas of interest that can be sold to multiple clients, thereby reducing the cost per purchaser.
• By constantly publishing and staying in the lead in the technology areas we work in so that our clients derive a competitive advantage from working with us.
• By training other researchers and engineers so that there are more people with advanced skills available.
• By developing metrics and evaluating the performance of various open platforms so that clients can have answers fast and shorten their time to market.

Our goals include:

Fostering Research

In order to create a research lab environment and encourage the growth of research talent, we offer 50% research time to associates. This allows all our associates the freedom to pursue research objectives for half their employed time. The rest of their time is spent on client projects or internal product development.

We think that a research focus is an absolute necessity in a research lab. The publications help demonstrate to clients that the lab's associates are continually keeping abreast of the latest developments in the field.

Component Development

Component development is another technique we use to reduce cost to clients, speeding up our research work and making our training programs more effective. We are developing frameworks for common tasks like classification so that we can make them available to clients without license restrictions or where open source licenses become a hindrance to adoption, as an alternative to open frameworks.

Some of the components will be packaged as product offerings. Some of them will be rolled into training software that can be used by students to learn NLP and ML concepts efficiently. Frameworks are known to have been used to assist in pedagogy witness NLTK and the Stanford/Berkeley NLP libraries.

Product Development

Some of the components that we develop will be productised. This will allow many clients to share the cost of development. We typically do not productise an internal research framework until such time as a client asks for it. Then, we bill the client approximately 25% of the cost of development of the framework and leave the rest as cost to be recovered later. This allows even firms with shoe-string budgets to leverage our expertise and contributes to reducing the cost of technology to our clients.