What's behind the AI at Sorcero?

Artificial intelligence uncovers new worlds of innovation. At Sorcero, we’re building an AI-powered platform with vast potential. Our Language Intelligence platform helps medical experts improve patient outcomes and save lives. But, who and what are behind the AI at Sorcero?

AI-driven impact. 

This is our purpose at Sorcero. We're on a mission to improve patient outcomes by empowering life sciences experts to dramatically increase productivity.

Effectively delivering on this goal is an incredible challenge—yet a momentous opportunity.

What is Sorcero's Language Intelligence (LI)?  

Language Intelligence (LI) enables advanced language models to work with custom ontologies. It delivers powerful AI applications to a specific sector, organization, or workflow. Through adaptive training and learning, LI utilizes the most advanced deep-learning models and most comprehensive domain-specific ontologies to organize and understand how language is used in the life sciences. This has shown double-digit absolute performance above models released by Google and OpenAI across all study and literature types, combined with our AI-generated disease-focused ontologies.

Sorcero's AI for life sciences can source across the largest set of the world’s open-access scientific sources. This includes 39-million abstracts, 31-million full-text articles, 401,000 clinical trials, 87,000 journals, 1000s of medical guidelines, and over 1000 biomedical ontologies, as well as social media feeds, such as Reddit and Twitter. It can source unstructured media and content types, such as PDF and Powerpoint, as well as audio and video sources.

Low-Code Interface

Sorcero makes its adaptable Language Intelligence technology available through low-code and no-code interfaces. Both technical and non-technical experts can have direct access to all levels of the platform. Collaboration and expertise-sharing can happen across the board. New efficiencies and creative solutions unfold with ease. Our AI is a companion to subject-matter experts.

The benefits of Sorcero’s technology only grow over time. LI learns and adapts from each interaction. It builds an understanding of context as an intermediator of information and insights. Each use enhances LI's ability to augment human expertise.

Pushing potential. 

Language Intelligence platforms have a major potential impact on the life sciences. Our engineering team allows us to push the boundaries of possibility. At Sorcero, machines and humans are partners that learn from each other.

Behind the AI: Who are the engineers behind the AI at Sorcero? 

Sorcero engineering teams use machine learning algorithms and natural language understanding to deliver language-intelligence solutions. Our AI/ML engineers build the foundation for intelligent workflows. This drives our ability to capture, monitor, and analyze scientific and medical language at scale. Our platform engineers deliver these workflows to our customers through APIs and consumption interfaces. How did some of our engineers get started?

“I gained exposure to and experience with AI through work at a laboratory at my school. I assisted in the development of an autonomous vehicle that used reinforcement learning to navigate an environment,” shared Software Engineer Nicholas McElroy.

“After that, I interned at a small early-stage startup. I developed natural language processing capabilities for the company’s product. At Sorcero, I am a part of the integrations team, working to maintain our open source Ingestum library and develop new features for it. Currently, I’m finding new ways to integrate artificial intelligence into Ingestum. We're using the latest deep learning models and methodologies to allow for more flexible and robust document ingestion and transformation.”

We have 30+ engineers organized into eight teams. Our teams continue to grow alongside our business. In 2021, we grew by 126% and we have no plans of slowing down.

Our engineering teams balance ownership and collaboration. Engineering teams thrive in a remote, flexible environment. We collaborate through Slack and Zoom, manage our source code on GitLab, run bi-weekly sprints using JIRA and Confluence, and deploy using Jenkins and Kubernetes. We run regular virtual demos, an AI reading group, Spanglish meetups, High-Five Fridays, and more. 

Engineering at Sorcero is goal-focused. We move fast and deliver timely solutions to problems. Our engineers have clarity of purpose and the autonomy to “own” problems; we put trust in their judgment and experience.

We are opportunistic at Sorcero—we leverage the best of publicly available tools and infrastructure while enhancing these tools with our deep understanding of machine learning and semantic approaches to AI. This approach allows us to rapidly solve tangible business problems and offer insight into emerging problems.

At Sorcero, we build systems that enable machines and humans to partner. Our AI learns through its interactions with our customers and our customers become more accomplished through their interactions with our AI. Together, we bring clarity to complex problems.

Tech Stack. 

We largely run Python and deploy our solutions in the Cloud. Some technologies in our toolkit include ML models such as the various flavors of BERT and ontologies such as UMLS. We also contribute regularly to free/libre open-source software projects, namely Ingestum - our extensible, scalable, free and open source unified ingestion framework to make it easier to create and use NLP programs.

Our leadership. 

Walter Bender, CTO + Co-founder

Walter Bender is a technologist and researcher with over 40 years of notable innovations. As CTO and Co-founder of Sorcero, Walter leverages technology in support of learning and expression by people and machines and applies that thinking to some of society’s most pressing problems. Previously, Walter was a Senior Scientist in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. As Executive Director of the MIT Media Laboratory from 2000 to 2006, Walter oversaw an annual research budget of $40 million and led a team of researchers and graduate students in fields as varied as tangible media and affective computing. He was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, where he held the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. In 1992, Walter founded the MIT News in the Future consortium, launching the era of personalized digital news. 

In 2008, he founded Sugar Labs, an organization that develops and maintains educational software used by millions of children in more than 40 countries. In 2006, he co-founded One Laptop per Child with Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. His book, Learning to Change the World, recounts the story of the “$100 Laptop.” Outside of Sorcero, he writes programming languages for children. Walter's current passion is Music Blocks, a collection of manipulative tools for exploring fundamental musical concepts in an integrative and fun way.

Sandra Carrico, VP of Machine Learning

Sandra Carrico is an AI architect moving the machine learning state of the art forward. As Sorcero’s Vice President of Machine Learning, Sandra leads the shipping of machine learning solutions and develops a mathematical representation of language that enables a multitude of machine learning natural language solutions in the life sciences. As former Principal AI Architect at Anthem, Sandra led the TeleHealthOS product and prescription prior authorization improvement project. At Gynt.ai, Sandra invented Mixed Formal Learning, an architecture for the development of efficient machine learning solutions that relies on formal mathematical models. Her Glynt algorithm currently reports less than a 1% error. 

The Spirit of Sorcero.

At Sorcero, we strive to make a dent in some of the most critical realms of innovation out there. Ours is a culture that celebrates world-changing challenges and the individuals who dare to take them on. We’re curious and critical in everything we do. We empower one another to tackle world-changing problems. And we’re here for one another when it comes time to deliver.

No matter what challenges await us, the Sorcero team grows together by learning from one another and supporting personal development. From flexible, remote working arrangements to meaningful interactions with teammates across the globe, Sorcero provides a supportive community to bring out the best in our team.

Are you inspired by complex problems with solutions to improve lives? 

Sorcero has opened several new engineering positions to support our continued growth. Explore current open positions at Sorcero on our careers page.