The Web, 1st July 2009 – 8:00 am Before opening up its innovative marketplace to external companies, social problem solving platform hypios.com posted its own internal problems to its global network of solvers.

The first problem posted by hypios is for a problem suggestion engine: an algorithm that can actively push problems to solvers that they might be able to solve.

“Posting this problem is a first test of both our business concept and of our platform.” says Simone De Liberato, hypios co-founder and chief scientific officer.

“It will help us to better understand what kind of information and presentation solution seekers need to give in order to get their problems solved,” says De Liberato.  Even more importantly, according to De Liberato, is the opportunity to test a hypothesis.

One of hypios’ basic claims is that many solutions involve the transfer of existing techniques and technologies across disciplines. “We are curious to see whether the solutions to the problem we post will involve such a transfer or if they are solved by people with the background we would naturally expect,” says De Liberato.

The problem-suggestion algorithm is part of hypios’ efforts to implement emerging social semantic web technologies to interact with its global solver network.

“Our solver network includes many active researchers. The amount of web-based interactions these people participate in is staggering—and that comes with a cost. hypios doesn’t want to add to the noise of useless information. It’s absolutely mission-critical to cut through the noise and present users with content that’s actionable and interesting to them,” says Jérémie Bertrand, co-founder and vice president of hypios.

Since hypios believes that solutions often involve exchanges from neighboring fields, hypios’ problem-suggestion engine must be able to identify solvers from other fields likely to initiate a solution transfer. The posted problem seeks an algorithm that will support this function, allowing hypios to identify potential solvers that are both within and outside of the discipline where the problem is found.

hypios is offering an award of €2500 for the best solution to this problem.

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Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service. “Seekers” post R&D problems to the network and select a deadline and a price for the successful “Solver.” Hypios, which draws from a network of 950,000 experts across the world, has been solving R&D problems for global companies since 2008.

Press Contact

Hypios
Saman Musacchio
smusacchio(at)hypios(dot)com
Tel+33 1 77 13 67 79

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