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18 • WATERLOO CHRONICLE • THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2017 BUSINESS WATERLOO CHRONICLEWATERLOO CHRONICLE By Bob Vrbanac Chronicle Sta� There's a great tradition of tech-nological innovation being inspired by modern popular culture. � ere's no mistake that the mod- ern cellphone looks a lot like a com- municator from Star Trek. "Beam me up, Scotty," is probably something every engineer wishes they could say. So it should comes as no sur- prise when a number of University of Waterloo grads, who stayed in touch when they moved to San Francisco to work in Silicon Valley, came together to brainstorm their own idea for a new tech company their inspiration also came from the big screen. "We're all big fans of the Iron Man movie," said Desmond Choi, one of the partners in a new com- pany called Diamond. "I would say we were all inspired by Iron Man and the Jarvis system. "So we had all started companies before to solve some of those ele- ments." Jarvis is of course the voice of the artificial intelligence that helped power one of the � rst versions of the Iron Man suits and put all of Tony Stark's technical genius at his fin- gertips. He was a computer butler or a real digital assistant. There was no time lost in trying to access multi- ple emails, Google Drive or fi les on Dropbox. Imagine if you had your own arti� cial intelligence that could sort though all that minutia and have the information you're looking for when you need it. "It's like a personal intelligence system that can help us to work bet- ter," said Choi. That was the idea they came up with two years ago and are ready to bring to market this year as they closed their � rst round of angel fund- ing for $2 million and were in New York last weekend to meet with the chief technology officers of tech companies like Amazon to help make it a reality. "We're continuing to improve our product and getting more users," said Choi. "We're working on our scalability and able to scale to more users, and by the end of this year we hope to launch it and reach every- one." Choi said that they all started out as friends and classmates at UW, coming out of the Velocity program as founders still looking to develop their own new technology. "We came to California for job opportunities, but while we were here we stayed in touch," said Choi. "We all wanted to work on some- thing together." A r t i f i c i a l i n t e l l i g e n c e a n d machine learning are hot areas of development right now as tech developers come up with ways for computers to do the mundane tasks of everyday life. It has the potential to revolutionize how we see and use technology as it become more intui- tive of our needs and helps increase human capacity and productivity. "With the rise of data and infor- mation we thought it was time," said Choi, who is responsible for prod- uct and growth development at Dia- mond. "Personally, I have six emails, Google Drive and Dropbox and so many other cloud services. "It's so hard to find information and documents." Diamond hopes to be the AI layer on top of all that information and hopes it can drill down to discover the documents you need. "It will allow you to access docu- ments and information much faster and better," said Choi. "In the future we hope that Diamond can under- stand the context and the identity of who you work with and what you're trying to do. "We hope we can build a very useful technology that will help us work better." Right now it's a text-based system getting the AI to recognize the cues that would better sort that informa- tion. � ey'd love for it to be a voice recognition system like Jarvis some- day, but there are doing ground- breaking work for designers, entre- preneurs, educators and investors who have to process reams of data to distill it down to the information they need. "It's for someone who works a lot on their computers and has a lot of fi les across diff erent cloud services," said Choi. "We hope to offer them better suggestions on their search results." That will save them time and money, and ultimately increase their productivity. "We have so much noise these days and information overload," said Choi. "We think that when it comes to workfl ow and work on computer, the search on your computer will be your fi rst gateway through Diamond. "Our vision is to have it seamless- ly integrated into someone's life." A team of ex-pat University of Waterloo students have come together in San Francisco to cre- ate a � rm that will be your own byte-sized butler. SUBMITTED PHOTO A real diamond mine Diamond hopes to be your personal digital assistant "We're all big fans of the Iron Man movie. I would say we were all inspired by Iron Man and the Jarvis system. So we had all started companies before to solve some of those elements." Desmond Choi Partner in Diamond