John Snow Labs has been recognized by CIOReview Magazine as the recipient of “Top 20 Artificial Intelligence Solution Companies - 2018,” based on our proprietary methodology, reflecting its position in the industry. This profile has been developed by the CIOReview research and editorial team based on insights from an interview with Ali Naqvi, AI Platform Lead, Anju Aggarwal, PMO Lead, Dia Trambitas, Data Market Lead and Saif Addin Ellafi, Spark NLP Lead.

John Snow Labs
Accelerating AI for Healthcare

The year is 1854; the streets of London’s West End have become a place of death and disease due to a sudden outbreak of Cholera that claimed hundreds of lives in a matter of weeks. With the discovery of the connection between diseases and microbes being decades away, a physician named John Snow set out to end the outbreak with a unique approach. Snow collected information from the families of the deceased and the ailing and plotted it on a map of the area. This integration of data led him to the source of the outbreak—a water pump on Broadwick Street. After convincing the local council with his studies on the disease pattern, the source pump was shut down, and the outbreak was stopped. Today, John Snow Labs—named after the famed Victorian-era physician—assists healthcare organizations to collect and prepare data for analysis, process natural language, and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to boost operations.

Healthcare has always been a complex sector to innovate for given the bigger regulatory, technology and talent challenges. Most new technologies that disrupt the business world don’t apply out-of-the-box in a healthcare context and require substantial investment and domain expertise to apply. John Snow Labs is a team of specialists built to address this: a third of the company has a Ph.D. or M.D. degree and 80 percent has at least a master’s degree. The company counts Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and Roche Pharmaceuticals among its customers.

John Snow Labs offers three primary solutions for healthcare organizations that are planning to incorporate data science into their operations—an AI platform, a frictionless data market, and the Spark Natural Language Processing (NLP) library.

The AI platform is designed to accelerate data science teams in building and deploying AI models. The prime challenge for industry executives today is turning the machine learning (ML) and AI models developed by their data scientists into systems that can be utilized reliably on a production scale. In healthcare, this challenge goes a step further due to the increased rate of model decay caused by the changing patients, hospital clinical guidelines, and local workflows. With John Snow Labs, organizations can deploy and manage hundreds of models—all under the strict security and compliance requirements of healthcare.

For organizations on the lookout for best practices and design patterns on building machine learning pipelines and AI models, look no further than John Snow Labs. The AI platform offers out-of-the-box, enterprise-grade components that cover everything from visualization and collaboration tools for data scientists, to versioning and continuous integration of trained models. The platform is cloud agnostic with existing production deployments on AWS, Azure, and on-premise.

Next up is John Snow Labs' NLP Library for Apache Spark. This is an open source text processing library that's built on top of Apache Spark ML and packages state-of-the-art natural language understanding in easy to use Python and Scala libraries. The library raises the bar on accuracy, performance, and scale in open source NLP. Public benchmarks have shown it to be by far the fastest NLP library on a single machine. It’s also the only open source NLP library that can scale to use a cluster. It supports training custom models—essential to support specific domains or languages—and is the only NLP library with optimized builds for deep learning on the latest Intel and Nvidia chips.

Beyond offering commercial support for the library, John Snow Labs licenses Spark NLP for Healthcare. This is an extension of the open source library that productizes a set of healthcare-specific deep learning NLP models.A team of data scientists regularly tracks new research papers to ensure this library stays state-of-the-art—that is, productizing the best performing peer-reviewed papers published to date.

Spark NLP for Healthcare was the first to market with the most recent deep learning models for biomedical named entity recognition, negation detection, and entity resolution. It remains the only collection of production-grade, trainable, and scalable implementation of the best performing models for these NLP tasks published in the past two years.

Lastly, the Frictionless Data Market enables data scientists to speed up their progress by leveraging a catalog of over 1,800 datasets on terminologies, measures, providers, guidelines, and 15 other categories. Every data set is curated by a clinical domain expert: the catalog is the result of more than 50 man-years of detailed work by teams of doctors, pharmacists, public health and medical billing experts. Every dataset undergoes three levels of quality review before its release, to ensure the delivery of clean data to data scientists. Datasets are normalized into one unified type system and come with detailed metadata. The data is kept always up to date—and is easily accessible from 26 analytics platforms.

Customer success is a core value for the company, and each time a customer comes on onboard, John Snow Labs takes a consultative approach to understand their exact needs. This has proven essential since many organizations are taking their first steps into AI, so gaining lessons learned from their first projects is a priority. Consulting and support are provided for all subscriptions directly by the R&D teams—so a data scientist with a question about optimizing healthcare NLP models, for example, can speak directly with the person who coded them. John Snow Labs is a virtual company whose people are in 17 countries and 14 time zones, so someone is almost always nearby.

John Snow Labs enables healthcare organizations to deploy state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, models and data in production today

Highlighting the impact of John Snow Labs’ solutions is their success story with healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. John Snow Labs helped the healthcare services company build an AI platform and assisted their enterprise architecture team in integrating data from medical facilities and developing a model that forecasts patient flow in a hospital. Further, in order to predict who will be admitted from the emergency department, John Snow Labs deployed custom deep learning NLP models that mined patient records. This work was presented as a joint case study at the Strata Data Conference earlier this year.

Going forward, John Snow Labs will continue focusing on putting the latest academic research, novel innovations and AI best practices into their customers’ hands. Recent releases include a complete data integration, quality & monitoring component; the first scalable model serving and management solution for high-compliance industries; and advanced OCR & data extraction capabilities from long free-text documents. All in all, the company firmly believes that AI is an emerging space for the healthcare and life science industries but one with tremendous scope. John Snow Labs is all set to break new grounds and help organizations realize this potential as fast as possible.

John Snow Labs

John Snow Labs Announces Program for the 2023 NLP Summit, the World’s Largest Gathering on Applied Natural Language Processing

Monday, September 11, 2023

LEWES, Del.-- John Snow Labs, the healthcare AI and NLP company and developer of the Spark NLP library, today announced the agenda for its annual NLP Summit, taking place virtually October 3-5. In its fourth year, the event is the world’s largest gathering of the artificial intelligence (AI) community that explores today’s cutting edge use cases, advancements, and challenges of applied natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs).

The NLP Summit has attracted more than 10,000 attendees and is expected to do the same this year. Covering important trends in the field that have real business impact, some of these include putting LLMs to work, new open-source tools for semantic search and responsible AI, and their applications in healthcare, finance, manufacturing, life science, advertising, insurance, science, and more.

This year’s keynotes include expert sessions from Anyscale, Neo4j, JPMorgan, The Department of Veteran Affairs, Microsoft, and John Snow Labs, among others. With three full days dedicated to open source, healthcare, and applications, experts will discuss improving the robustness and fairness of LLM and NLP models, benchmarks of medical chatbots, and effectively leveraging generative AI models in healthcare.

“While there's been tremendous buzz about the promise of generative AI over the last year, there is limited knowledge about what’s actually working and what’s not when it comes to real-world applications of the technology,” said David Tably, CTO, John Snow Labs. “We’ve built this year’s program to answer just that by sharing best practices and lessons learned from successfully applying LLMs, GPT, vector databases, and other aspects of generative AI.”

In its pursuit to make AI accessible to all, John Snow Labs announced the release of Spark NLP 5 earlier this year. The major update delivers material speedups for calculating text embeddings, a critical step in populating vector databases for RAG LLM and semantic search applications, and the fastest currently available to the open-source community. Read the full press release to learn how Spark NLP 5 can enhance your LLM’s efficiency, reliability, and scalability, improving your AI application’s overall performance.

John Snow Labs Announces Fourth Annual Healthcare NLP Summit Program Focused on Applied Generative AI

Friday, March 08, 2024

Registration is Now Open for the Free, Virtual, Two-Day Conference Covering Challenges, Lessons Learned, and Best Practices in Healthcare AI

LEWES -- John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced the speaker lineup for the fourth annual Healthcare NLP Summit, taking place April 2-3 online. The free event is the world’s largest gathering for the healthcare AI and applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. Focused on applications of generative AI in healthcare, the agenda includes two days and 30+ technical sessions highlighting real-world use cases of the technology.

This year’s program covers topics from using large language models (LLMs) for clinical decision support, patient journey trajectories, and efficient medical documentation, to enabling physicians to build conversational AI agents, scaling generative AI for the enterprise, and more. Presented by experts in the healthcare AI field, this year’s speakers include:

• David Talby, John Snow Labs

• Yanshan Wang, University of Pittsburgh, AMIA NLP Working Group

• Hoifung Poon, Microsoft Health Futures

• Sonali Tamhankar, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

• Mike Schaekermann, Google Research

• Thirupathi Pattipaka, Novartis

• Chen Shani, Stanford University

• Leo Janze, Optum/UnitedHealthcare

• Alice Chung, Genentech

• Dusan Milovanovic, World Health Organization (WHO)

• Ghulam Rasool, Moffitt Cancer Center

• Amani Namboori, Amazon

“There’s been an avalanche of new tools, claims, and ideas about what generative AI can, cannot, or should not do over the past year. Despite the hype, there are only a handful of successful real-world enterprise projects applying the technology,” said David Talby, CTO, John Snow Labs. “Healthcare is on the forefront of generative AI, and with a breadth of use cases under its belt already, The Healthcare NLP Summit will help practitioners share best practices and lessons learned to continue pushing the industry forward.”

In addition to the cutting-edge speaker lineup, live Q&A sessions, networking opportunities, and live training and certification workshops, John Snow Labs will announce the results of the first ever Generative AI in Healthcare Survey. In partnership with Gradient Flow, the survey will explore investments, hurdles, and use cases of generative AI.

John Snow Labs Announces Fifth Annual NLP Summit, the World’s Largest Gathering for the Applied NLP, LLM, and Generative AI Community

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Newly Released Program Focuses on Value Creation from Real-World Projects in Finance, Healthcare, Recruiting, Marketing, Life Science, and Education

LEWES, Del-- John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced the program for the fifth annual NLP Summit, taking place virtually September 24-26. The free conference, which attracted over 10,000 attendees last year, is the world’s largest gathering of the applied Generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) community.

Despite being a landmark year for Generative AI, few are capitalizing on its promised business value. This year’s agenda includes more than 50 technical sessions, covering cutting-edge applications that make a real impact. The program covers solution architectures, lessons learned, and trending open-source libraries, including the following keynote sessions:

• The Age of Synthetic Data and Small LLMs - Loubha Ben Alla, Hugging Face

• Multi-Agent Based Agentic Workflow in Healthcare - Sanjay Basu, Oracle

• Deconstructing Graph RAG: An Overview of Concepts and Methodologies - Prashanth Rao, Kuzo

• Applying Healthcare-Specific LLMs to Build Oncology Patient Timelines and Recommend Clinical Guidelines - Vishakha Sharma, Roche

• Identifying and Mitigating Bias in AI Models for Recruiting - Katie Bakewell, NLPLogic and Jason Safley, Opptly

• Quantizing Large Language Models - Supriya Raman, JPMorgan Chase

• Automating Systematic Reviews of Academic Research - Dia Trambitas, John Snow Labs

• Deidentifying Free-text Patient Notes: No Need for Tradeoffs - Ross Bierbryer, Dandelion Health

• Pedagogical and Strategic Utility of Large Language Models - Michelle Banawan, Asian Institute of Management

• Enhancing Marketing Campaigns with NLP: Data-Driven Decision Making in Consumer Analytics - Saurabh Kumar, The Kraft Heinz Company

“There’s a lot of noise around Generative AI today that makes it hard for teams to understand what to build next and how to do so effectively,” said David Talby, CTO, John Snow Labs. “The role of the NLP Summit is to bring together the community of practitioners to learn from each other what actually works and moves the needle.”

John Snow Labs is one of the organizations contributing to progress in applied Generative AI. In July, the company announced its automated responsible AI testing capabilities in the Generative AI Lab—a first-of-its-kind no-code tool to test and evaluate the safety and efficacy of custom language models. In August, John Snow Labs launched turnkey deployments of medical language models as fully managed, private API Endpoints, boosting efficiency, security, and compliance.

Company
John Snow Labs

Management
Ali Naqvi, AI Platform Lead, Anju Aggarwal, PMO Lead, Dia Trambitas, Data Market Lead and Saif Addin Ellafi, Spark NLP Lead

Description
Provides AI platforms, data packages, and NLP libraries that help healthcare organizations deploy AI faster

John Snow Labs Accelerating AI for Healthcare