Nate Nichols of Narrative Science

Recent years have seen massive investments and improvements in various components of the modern BI stack, but these advances have not benefitted the business users we expect to consume and act on this information: only a third report getting insights in a way that is meaningful to them.

This fact causes widespread disappointment and frustration in many organizations today. We believe the issue lies primarily with the presentation layer: dashboards deliver visualizations but are too underpowered to provide the accompanying narrative and extra-data context necessary for real understanding and action.

Fortunately, advances in NLP enable the automated generation of data-driven narratives as well as providing deep support for additional context. Together, these capabilities deliver on the last mile of data understanding and allow organizations to unlock more of the returns from the investments they’ve made in their data and analytics technology and processes.

This talk will discuss the current state of the art, as well as planned future work.

Biography:

As Chief Scientist, Nate Nichols is responsible for defining Narrative Science’s vision for AI and automated data storytelling, ensuring that our products are aligned to that vision, and articulating that vision outside of the company.

Over his 10+ years at Narrative Science, Nate and other NS inventors have been granted 25 patents, with another 20 filed. Prior to NS, Nate earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in Artificial Intelligence with his thesis, “Machine-generated Content.”