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For Immediate Release

Franz’s Vice President of Corporate Development to Keynote at the 14th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2016)

OAKLAND, Calif. — March 29, 2016 — Franz Inc.’s Vice President of Corporate Development, Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu, will be a keynote speaker at the 14th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2016) this August in Phuket, Thailand. The PRICAI is a biennial international event which concentrates on AI theories, technologies and their applications in the areas of social and economic importance for countries in the Pacific Rim. The Program Committee invites technical papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI-2016 aims to bring together a large and diverse community, which includes practitioners, researchers, educators, and users. This event aims to bring together many scholars, researchers and managers of various areas and industries for intellectual exchanges, research cooperation and professional development.

Dr. Wu's talk, "Global Data Warming for AI Spring"

The explosion of data may have made AI trendy again. Google has just made their AI chief the head of Google Search, which holds the world's biggest repository of data. One of the key AI endeavors is knowledge acquisition and discovery. Typically, we turn the data we collect into information by applying its context. We then interpret the information to derive knowledge from it. Knowledge is what provides value to our endeavors, as we believe. Is this paradigm still true with the explosive growth in Big Data? One of the most consequential examples is medical science. Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, we have dreamed about treating patients more effectively based on their genomic profiles. Such a dream remains elusive. The fundamental difficulty lies in the complexity of biological systems that have evolved through billions of years. On the other hand, major progress can be and has been made in "personalized medicine" by applying classic AI machine learning on the massive patient medical data accumulated. In essence, we can uncover new knowledge from the data to help patients without knowing the why a priori. Lack of direct value brought forth the last AI winter. Perhaps Big Data will foreshadow the coming spring of AI. Exploiting Big Data brings another set of management problems, namely the heterogeneous nature of data sources and taxonomies, the enormous size of data volume, and huge data analytic processing requirements. We will discuss all these issues and show some examples in healthcare at this talk.

About Dr. Wu

Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computer Graphics from Cornell University in the US. He has, since graduation, involved in several software companies, including the founding of the first integrated CAD/CAM/CAE company. In the last 20 years, he worked as a senior corporate executive at the leading Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Technology company, Franz Inc in Silicon Valley, with responsibility in application development, marketing, consulting and new business development. Dr. Wu has also in many occasions collaborated with Bioinformatics experts from Harvard Medical School, Stanford University and Astra Zeneca, working with massive biological data. Dr. Wu has been focusing on Semantic Technology over the last 8 years. He routinely lectured on AI and Semantic Technology at conferences. He was a keynote speaker at PRICAI 2004 in Auckland NZ. Most recently, he gave a keynote at KSEM 2015 in China and will deliver another keynote at KMO 2016 in Germany. He has, since 2007, conducted more than 20 week-long workshops on Semantic Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Malaysia, China, Singapore, India and other Asian countries. Dr. Wu has also consulted on several Big Data and Semantic Technology projects in the US and Asia. Some of the projects include: Biodiversity Repository, Precision Agriculture for Citrus Plantation, Telecom Customer Relation Management, Malaysia R&D Knowledgebase, Intelligence analytics, Meta Data Management and E-Learning System.

About Franz Inc.

Franz Inc. is an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology with expert knowledge in developing and deploying complex Big Data analytics solutions. AllegroGraph, Franz's flagship, high-performance, transactional, and scalable Semantic Graph Database, provides the solid storage layer for Enterprise grade NoSQL solutions. AllegroGraph's Activity Recognition capabilities provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. For additional Franz Inc customer success stories please visit:

• AllegroGraph - http://franz.com/agraph/success/
• Allegro CL - http://franz.com/success/

Franz's Professional Service team is in the business of helping companies turn Data into Information and Information into Knowledge. We combine Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics consulting services under one roof for our customers. Franz, an American owned company based in Oakland, California, is committed to market-driven product development, the highest levels of product quality and responsive customer support and service. Franz customers include dozens of Fortune 500 companies and span the healthcare, government, life sciences and telecommunications industries worldwide. Franz has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability since inception.

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