SHARES in ARRIA NLG have surged 53 per cent after the company, whose reporting tools are based on research from Aberdeen University, said it will develop products for the oil and gas industry with IBM.
The increase left some academics who worked on the research sitting on stakes in the firm valued at £2 million.
Aim-listed Arria NLG said it has agreed a partnership with the US giant's IBM Watson arm under which it will prototype analytics products for the oil and gas sector.
Arria's chief executive Stuart Rogers sees big scope to win business by combining the company's natural language generation tools with IBM Watson's expertise in interrogating complex data.
Arria's technology turns masses of data gathered by organisations in areas like health and safety into readable reports.
" There are innumerable use cases in the oil and gas industry for our combined tool sets," said Mr Rogers
Demand for technology that can allow oil and gas firms to reduce costs is likely to increase in response to the recent crude price plunge.
Arria has developed a product that can allow oil and gas major to analyse and report on huge amounts of data gathered by sensors on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico in less than a minute.
With shares in the company closing up 13p, at 37.5p investors appeared enthused by news of the partnership.
This could bode well for Aberdeen University, where Arria has a research and development centre. Arria has headquarters in London.
The company says its Natural Language Generation engine has its foundations in more than 20 years knowledge and research gained at Aberdeen University by academics who started the Data2Text spin out in 2009.
Founded by Professor Ehud Reiter, Dr Somayajulu Sripada, Ian Davy and John Perry, Data2Text was initially involved in looking at ways to generate high-quality text for weather forecasts.
Arria acquired the company in 2013.
Mr Reiter, Mr Sripada and Mr Davy have 5.33 million shares in Arria each. Their stakes were valued at around £2m at yesterday's close. Aberdeen university has 4.86m shares, worth £1.8m.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article