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Connotate Equips Penn State Seniors to Research Future Global Trends

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Connotate, the leading provider of solutions which transform information from the Web and enterprise into user-empowered on-demand applications and actionable intelligence, today announced the use of their SaaS environment as an integral part of the capstone IST 440W course offered at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The capstone course is a senior-level curriculum that requires students to work collaboratively in teams to identify research and communicate the technical and social context of a significant global challenge.

Integrated into the course syllabus as one of the key technologies for automating and monitoring clue detection tasks, the Connotate solution was often deployed as the primary technology to extract and illustrate data from Web sources. Connotate equipped the students with an educational subscription to their SaaS offering and online training, helped the students identify and select relevant sources for intelligence gathering, and delivered guest lectures and guidance on automating data collection for research projects. By analyzing the data delivered by Connotate software Agents and through other research - students discovered trends and identified potential inflection points for a variety of global challenges. A sampling of project topics and how Connotate Agents were deployed for clue detection include:

Obesity in America ― Connotate Agents monitored and gathered the data that allowed students to analyze and visualize trends between meat consumption per person, stock fluctuations for fast food chains, weekly video game sales and television viewing hours.

How Global Economic Factors Effect Bandwidth Proliferation ― Connotate Agents were used to automate the data collection of stock prices for publicly traded companies related to bandwidth consumption to visualize historic and predict future trending.

How Higher Education Affects the Economy ― Connotate Agents were used to monitor and collect data from multiple sources, including student loan and job market sites, to help students identify how money is brought into the colleges, and how the majors students are graduating from affect the economy.

Energy Consumption ― Connotate Agents monitored and collected daily dynamic information from web sources focused on oil prices, natural gas prices, prices at the pump, car sales and hybrid and combustion engines to help students determine trends and predict future trends for energy consumption.

"This has been a good experience for Penn State and the College of IST and I am proud of the students and projects they delivered," says Shawn Clark, Professor of Practice at the College of IST. "Even basic Agents created by the students alleviated large amounts of work, allowing students to focus their efforts on the more important analysis efforts. We look forward to offering the Connotate solution as a key technology in the future sessions of this course and in our research efforts."

"The capstone course was outstanding preparation for industry because the projects required the students to work collaboratively when approaching large unstructured problems that are often the norm in business," says Matt Jacobson, Connotate's vice president of Client Services. "Students needed to define the problem, identify and select relevant and reliable sources supporting their topic, work as a team, and present a conclusion to a large, significant audience. Skills and experience that will well prepare them for the jobs they'll undertake as they enter industry upon graduation."

About Connotate

Connotate is changing the way businesses leverage information from the Web and Enterprise.

Connotate's premium solution goes far beyond search allowing users to quickly create and share on-demand applications that discern high value information, automate repetitive tasks, provide analysis and alerts from information found on the Web and across the Enterprise. Its machine-intelligent Agents can do anything a human can do to monitor, mine, analyze, mashup and deliver high value content. Agents operate on a fully-automated, 24 x 7 basis. Connotate Agent Community GEN2^TM is a robust, flexible and scalable platform. Agents are created using an intuitive GUI that supports fast and easy configuration by end-users without programming experience. Content is delivered over any number of media including XML, RSS, email, text messaging, file systems and direct feeds to SQL databases and Excel.

Connotate's clients include many of the largest global publishers and online media companies; pharmaceutical, energy; financial services firms; Internet companies; and federal and state government agencies. Connotate was the recipient of the 2007 KM Promise Award and has been named one of the "100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management" by KMWorld for five consecutive years. Connotate's investors include Goldman Sachs; a relationship that includes a joint marketing agreement in which Goldman Sachs' Hudson Street Services offers Connotate's solution to its investor client base. For more information on Connotate, visit our website at http://www.connotate.com.

About the College of IST

Opened in 1999, Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology is the university's response to the rapidly-growing need for leadership in information sciences and related technologies. The college offers interdisciplinary at the graduate and undergraduate levels designed to give students the business and technical skills needed to thrive in a variety of industries. The college has a 95 percent job placement rate for undergraduate students in its two majors, information sciences and technology and security and risk analysis. For more information, visit http://ist.psu.edu.

Media:
CDPR Public Relations
Corinne de Palma, 212-399-0887
CDPR@aol.com
or
Connotate
Gina Cerami, 732-296-8844
gcerami@connotate.com