AUTOMOTIVE

RiverGlass's technologies are the brainchild of Michael Welge, the company's founder and chief scientist and the head of NCSA's Automated Learning Group These tools enable users to extract meaning from massive amounts of data of diverse types by searching for patterns, making predictions, identifying unusual features, optimizing complex problems, and visualizing the results. "We are helping organizations change how they use data to manage risks, explore new opportunities and make informed decisions," said Kirk Dauksavage, RiverGlass CEO. "We have a unique product that allows our customers to view and manipulate data from a multitude of real-time data streams. The end result is that they are able to make the best decisions possible and to be proactive in dealing with problems because they are better informed; they are basing their decisions on the most up-to-the minute data." Among the markets RiverGlass is targeting are law enforcement, homeland security, financial services, market intelligence, and network security. A counterterrorism analyst, for example, sifts through massive amounts of data each day, including web-based information, email messages, police reports, travel records, and news wire reports. Using the RiverGlass streaming data mining system, the analyst is able to bring these disparate data streams together in an easy-to-use intelligent desktop, which can then categorize the data, extract content, and find key relationships among data from different sources. New relationships that might have taken months to find can be pinpointed in real time, and potential terrorist threats can be thwarted at an early stage. In December 2004, the company secured funding from IllinoisVENTURES, Waypoint Ventures, and the Illinois Finance Authority. The new investments are in addition to an early round of funding from IllinoisVENTURES last summer and will allow RiverGlass to recruit new talent and further develop its streaming data mining products, said Dauksavage, the former vice president for sales of the i-Solutions division of CheckFree Corporation and RiverGlass CEO since April 2004. RiverGlass now operates from two locations: at Enterprise Works, the university's business incubator in Champaign; and in West Chicago at a university-run technology commercialization center. For more on RiverGlass, go to www.riverglassinc.com.