Dataminr
Dataminr is a New York based company that specialises in artificial intelligence to provide real-time information alerts to clients. It was founded in 2009. History. Dataminr was founded in 2009 by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel and Jeff Kinsey. Dataminr came to wider notice when it issued an alert that Osama bin Laden had been killed 23 minutes faster than major news organizations. Dataminr’s clients span both public and private sectors, including CNN, USA Today, the United Nations, Airbus, Shell and the New York City Office of Emergency Management. In 2018, Dataminr closed a $ 391.6 million Series E round of funding that valued the company at $1.6 billion. The company has raised $577 million in funding to date. In 2019, Dataminr claims to have detected the first signals of the COVID-19 outbreak within public social media posts at 9:11am EST on December 30, 2019. The company went on to detect clusters indicating future spikes in 14 different US states. Seven days later, all 14 states were hit hard by the coronavirus. The company ranked #5 on the Forbes AI 50 List in 2019 and was the winner of an 2019 AI Breakthrough  Award for Best Overall AI Solution. In 2020, Dataminr was named to Forbes Cloud 100, and Deloitte Technology Fast 500, ‘Most Innovative Use of AI’ at the 2020 AI & Machine Learning Awards. Dataminr’s AI team published several papers in 2020 including, “Unsupervised Detection of Sub-Events in Large Scale Disasters,” for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence quarterly journal; “Clustering of Social Media Messages for Humanitarian Aid Response during Crisis,” for AI for Social Good, Harvard CRCS Workshop 2020; “The ApposCorpus:  A new multilingual, multi-domain dataset for factual appositive generation,” for COLING 2020; and "Multimodal Categorization  of Crisis Events in Social Media" for IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Dataminr's social media intelligence contract for the FBI was taken over by Zerofox at the end of 2020. Controversies. In 2020, "the Intercept" released a report that police departments used Dataminr services for surveillance during the George Floyd protests, including accessing social media posts about protest locations and actions. As written in the article, "The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies ." Twitter claimed that the company was just "news alerting."