COGNITEE Inc.Kawano Rie

Please tell us about the development of COGNITEE’s software that removes cognitive bias

COGNITEE Inc. aims to provide technology and a service to determine and point out oversight and bias in people’s thinking and communication, using the context structure categorization framework “CogStructure” as the base technology.

CogStructure is COGNITEE’s original technology based on an academic article published by British cognitive linguist Steven Toulmin 50 years ago. With the foundation of our company in 2013, we started to work on paper prototyping to experiment with the categorization of 300 online contents, which included speeches, movies, blog posts, and government reports. As a result, we were able to establish rules to categorize and visualize all the flows of human thinking and information structures.

CogStructure belongs to the field of artificial intelligence called “knowledge representation” (which includes ontology engineering). It uses an upper approach compared to today’s common approach to artificial intelligence.

Based on the data from more than 70,000 contents converted for CogStructure from the past five years, we developed UpSighter, software that automatically compares and diagnoses sales talks, interviews, and conversation structures. UpSighter has been used by more than 80 companies in these two years, assisting the visualization of management issues and improving the efficiency of training and educational programs.

Tell us what made you start your own business.

COGNITEE Inc. is the second company I created. I was 19 when I founded my first company. I had very hard and painful experiences with my first company, so I thought I would never have my own company again. I worked at a manufacturer and an IT company for seven years after that.

However, looking back at the moments I made big decisions in my life, I noticed that it was always a sense of urgent need that drove me to make such decisions; I had to do something because I had been stuck in the same spot for a while. I have always pushed myself to go beyond my limits. However, I realized that the reason I was stuck last time was something that was out of my control and I couldn’t do anything about it. The only option left for me was to start a company again.

Although the business of my current company is very different from what I did with my first company and during my career as an employee, my passion has always been to create a streamlined society with science technology. Because I knew that entrepreneurship involves a lot of struggles and distress anyway, I wanted to tackle the most challenging issue that I could think of.

Tell us about the future developments.

I want to make COGNITEE Inc. a huge company that can hire many employees. Although we are only in the beginning of our journey toward our goal, I hope to expand our business overseas this year and make COGNITEE Inc. into a company that receive expectations and support from many companies and people involved.

I believe that conflicts, jealousy, and regret can be reduced by having technological support to eliminate the limits of human thinking and cognitive bias (prejudice, shortsighted thinking, stereotypes, etc.). I am also looking for people who would like to join our team and work together to globally promote COGNITEE’s approach to cognitive bias which is the most challenging issue that I can think of.