L2F raises CHF 3m to disrupt machine learning

L2F is set to disrupt machine learning. The EPFL Innovation Park based company will be releasing on October 21st its open source library Giotto. As Aldo Podesta, the CEO of the startup explained in an interview to Venturelab: “the investment made this project possible, and will continue to benefit the improvement of our technology.”

One part of L2F job has been to develop the open source machine learning Giotto, and the other has been to develop L2F’s commercial software. L2F now offers software modules, which allow you to build your own custom A.I. software based on Giotto. The combination of modules adapts to a huge variety of problems and serves an equally diverse clientele. The goal is to push these on a global scale. 

Inspired by topology

As mathematicians, the L2F team asked itself whether the science of shapes itself, called topology, could be of any assistance to A.I. And it was key. “Finding meaning in data is so much easier when you have the right perspective, and shapes allow humans and computers to speak a common language. When we realized that there was no easy to use software to interface machine learning with topology, we started creating it, and Giotto is our open-source project that makes these methods available to every machine learner” explains the enthusiastic CEO.

Giotto is a bit like having an operating system on a computer, only it is for operating machine learning. When you have the right interface to use the hardware, you can do so much more. With shapes as interface, A.I. becomes immediately more relatable and more powerful, both for the data-scientist to build better models, but also for the decision maker to make a conscious decision. 

Addressing the IA trust issue 

To foster trust in A.I., L2F aims to add layers of interoperability. The machine learning startup believes every data-scientist needs to have back and forth conversations with A.I. algorithms to be able to understand, challenge and explain the results. Giotto here provides a new experience of machine learning, by immersing the user into high dimensional data spaces with an intuitive experience of topology. To achieve this, the CEO explains that L2F is fortunate to collaborate with EPFL Prof. Kathryn Hess, a pioneer using topological data analysis to explain brain function.

(ES)