Lum AI

Accelerating scientific discovery

Lum specializes in novel natural language processing and machine reading technology that helps top-tier seed solutions and agriscience companies quickly access ground-breaking industry discoveries. Say hello to your new research assistant.

Kevin McLaughlin

Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder

Kevin advised the team at the University of Arizona prior to co-founding Lum in 2017. He brings over 30 years of experience in technology commercialization, and executive leadership working for companies like Motorola, Cray Research, SGI, Cisco Systems and Avid technology. Kevin works with Tech Launch Arizona as Mentor in Residence for UA startups.

Mihai Surdeanu

Chief Scientist & Co-founder

Associate professor in the Computer Science department at University of Arizona, co-authored over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has over 15 years of experience in building systems driven by NLP and machine learning. His experience spans both academia (Stanford University, University of Arizona) and industry (Yahoo! Research and two other NLP-centric startups).

Gus Hahn-Powell

Co-founder

Holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics with a focus on implementing linguistic theory in machine reading systems, ordering and assembling machine-read fragments, and identifying non-interacting research communities engaged in complementary work.

Marco Valenzuela-Escárcega

Co-founder

Holds a PhD in Computer Science. He has previous experience with multiple startups and is an expert on machine reading technology.

Wendy Bell

Co-founder

Holds a PhD in Linguistics with a focus in natural language processing. She specializes in complex linguistic phenomena and adapting machine reading to new domains.

Keith Alcock

Keith has over 30 years of software development experience in a broad range of programming languages (Scala, Java, C/C++/C#, Smalltalk, VBA, Python, JavaScript, etc).

What we do

Our natural language processing (NLP) technology accelerates scientific discovery by distilling unstructured text to reveal cause-and-effect relations, knowledge gaps, and research communities to provide insights into the changing research landscape and its impact on R&D priorities.

The company was founded in 2014 by a team of University of Arizona researchers with expertise in language-understanding systems. Lum's work was initially funded by DARPA through the Big Mechanism program to uncover novel genetic pathways for seven types of cancer. Subsequently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's used Lum AI in their Healthy Birth, Growth and Development (HBGD) initiative to successfully retrieve, assemble and interpret knowledge fragments from more than a hundred thousand publications relevant to children's health. Today the company focuses on helping seed solutions companies and agricultural societies achieve more rapid success in addressing global food supply challenges through breakthrough discoveries using their Influence Search technology.

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