Missoula, Montana, 7 January 2014 – GCS, a geoanalytics company, has hired Rob Kinnear as Director of Strategic Partnerships. Among Kinnear’s primary responsibilities will be the development of new markets for custom Big Data solutions built on top of the IBM Watson cognitive computing technology.
Kinnear brings an ideal background to the challenges of his new position. He worked at GCS from 2008 through 2012 as a Geospatial Solutions Engineer before moving over to TerraEchos Inc., a GCS spin-off company, in the role of Senior Applications Engineer. In that capacity, Kinnear spearheaded creation of Big Data processing solutions using IBM InfoSphere Streams, the same technology GCS has used as the real-time analytical processing engine behind solutions developed for Defense/Intelligence, Energy, Healthcare and Government clients.
“IBM has changed the paradigm of computing once again by opening the Watson Ecosystem as a platform for cognitive solutions development,” said GCS President Alex Philp, PhD. “GCS is now building custom Big Data solutions – called GeoAPI’s – that tap directly into the Watson intelligence for deep content analysis and evidence-based reasoning in support of critical decision making.”
GCS is developing GeoAPI’s for markets that rely on Big Data processing to make business decisions. These industries include Healthcare, Retail, and Travel, as well as Defense, Energy, Utilities and Government.
The IBM Watson Ecosystem is a cognitive engine that combines natural language processing, machine learning, and hypothesis generation and evaluation to deliver confidence-based responses. Watson can tap into an encyclopedic database of information and then apply reasoning based on its previous experiences to answer complex questions posed to it. Integrated with InfoSphere Streams analytics in the GeoAPI framework under development at GCS, this technology represents a shift in cognitive computing.
“We will change the way organizations think, act and operate by delivering evidence-based intelligence through our GeoAPI’s that leverage IBM Watson and InfoSphere Streams technologies,” added Rob Kinnear. “Our GeoAPI’s will accelerate and improve decisions and optimize outcomes across many industry-specific domains.”
GCS delivers highly customized solutions that communicate meaningful geographic information and enhance workflow optimization. GCS clients come from a broad spectrum of industry sectors with a common need: streamlined access to business insights distilled from massive, complex data sets. Technical expertise and collaborative client relationships allow the GCS team to design the powerful, elegant solutions needed to maximize productivity. GCS systems are crafted at the convergence of cloud, analytics, and mobility to ensure the entire enterprise can access answers everywhere, all the time.
“GCS will continue to recruit talented high-tech individuals in 2014,” said Philp. “We are in a growth mode.”
About GCS
GCS is a geoanalytics company delivering award-winning solutions through cloud, mobile and analytical network infrastructure. With over 200 years of technical expertise, GCS converts your Big Data into Smart Data through customer-driven, innovative applications. GCS customers gain strategic value through increased productivity, efficiency and profitability, optimizing mission-critical business processes. For more than a decade, the GCS team of experts has delivered smart solutions for a diverse array of public and private organizations – from start-ups to multinational corporations – helping our clients make location information actionable, meaningful and valuable.
