There are staff shifts afoot at Nara Logics, a Cambridge artificial intelligence company that is helping businesses better understand their customers.
Jana Eggers, a Lycos and Intuit veteran who joined the company as president in September, has replaced co-founder Tom Copeman as chief executive. Also, neuroscientist and Princeton professor Sebastian Seung, who is something of rock star for his work on the wiring of the human brain, has joined company’s advisory board.
It is not unusual for a young company to recruit a seasoned executive to replace a founder, but changing a chief executive usually does not mean things are going well. Copeman welcomed the appointment in a press release, saying Eggers “has demonstrated that she’s the obvious choice to lead the company in this next phase.”
Every business seeks to know its customers better, but Nara’s approach is deeply influenced by neuroscience. The company’s software mimics methods that the brain uses to parse information, and in doing so can spot relevant connections in a data set.
For example, the software can digest information about your favorite movies and use that information to make recommendations about what other titles you could like.
It is not just meant for entertainment — Nara is beginning to apply this matching technique across industries. The firm is working with an airline to perfect a mechanism to match frequent fliers with the best-placed seats, and another effort seeks to determine how the texture of a consumer product, like a shampoo, affects sales.
“The ground that we’re breaking is that it’s truly individualized,” meaning the software thinks like an individual would, Eggers said. Those mechanisms are based on work that co-founder Nathan Wilson did as a master’s student and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Along with Wilson’s former research colleague Seung, the advisory board includes Wilson’s mentor at MIT, neuroscientist Mriganka Sur, and another colleague, Emily Hueske, who works at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard. The board’s role is to keep Nara’s software on the cutting edge, dynamically updating the product as the science informing it improves.
Movie tips are just a warmup for tougher problems, Eggers said.
Nidhi Subbaraman can be reached at nidhi.subbaraman@globe.com.