Artificial Intelligence and its subsets, in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, drive a lot of industries towards an innovative juncture solving some significant business challenges that occurred in the path of success. Convinced that AI has the ability to solve the urgent challenges facing humanity and our planet, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria founded Sherpa.ai, a company dedicated to putting AI at the service of the people, to change people's lives and make them better. And become a better world. In just a few years, Sherpa.ai has become a leading AI services company at the global level. The company continues adding more and more countries in its operations like the USA and others. 

Sherpa.ai has been considered as one of the top 100 most innovative companies in rankings including the Fortune AI 100 and CB Insights' AI in 2020. Datamation magazine named it one of the 10 leading Artificial Intelligence companies, along with Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. 

Xabi believing the potential of Sherpa and what it can achieve went on to add more gems to his management team. He has hired Tom Gruber (Co-founder and former CTO of Siri) on board, and in 2020, Sherpa.ai added Joanna Hoffman (Ex-VP of Marketing at Macintosh, General Magic, and NeXT; Steve Jobs' right-hand person as portrayed by Kate Winslet in the movie Steve Jobs) to the team of Sherpa.ai. 

As a result of visionary leadership, in recent years, Sherpa.ai has been creating AI-based algorithms, products, and solutions. The markets, industries, and clients to which the company could focus Sherpa's solutions are practically all, so it has carried out a strategic analysis to assess which solutions would have a better balance between the implementation effort and the scientific and/or economic impact it could have. 

Once the analysis has been made, the team at Sherpa decided to focus the company's efforts on four business lines, which it sees with a great future within the field of AI. 

First is Conversational AI, which is one of Sherpa.ai's core knowledge, and which the company sees a projection of enormous growth, due to the "Voicify" trend that it sees every day in most of the industries. 

Secondly, the recommendation and predictive engines, in which Sherpa.ai is focusing has a lot of developed technology and that customers demand more and more for the concept of "hyper-personalization" of their products. 

The third is Content analysis, which is a field with a giant potential and involving areas ranging from fake news to the automatic creation of content. 

And finally the fourth is Privacy, which is one of the biggest challenges facing AI, and in which Sherpa.ai is exploring solutions as innovative as Federated Learning. In Federated Learning, the company is already making significant progress, competing with the largest technology companies in the world. 

Furthermore, in the current crisis-induced due to pandemic, in 2020, Xabi and his company, had a decisive impact on mitigating the damage caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, by altruistically and very successfully applying the use of Artificial Intelligence to prevent the collapse of ICUs. 

Given AI's potential to do good, but also its potential for harm, Xabi, along with the University of Columbia and Rafael Yuste (the neurobiologist and ideologist of Obama's BRAIN initiative) began an international initiative to regulate both AI and neuroscience. Governments have become part of this initiative, and it is awaiting a presentation at the United Nations. 

As notified by Xabi, Rafael is also the creator of technology and AI events that have brought the world's most respected technology influencers to Bilbao to share their insights with future generations of entrepreneurs. Featured guests included Sir Tim Berners-Lee (father of the World Wide Web), Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, and former Pepsi and Apple CEO John Sculley. 

Beyond all the achievements, innovation is what has led Sherpa.ai to be one of the most valued companies in AI worldwide, as shown by the various prestigious awards obtained in recent years.  

Through such encouragement that Sherpa.ai has got over the years, it has been able to develop one of the best technologies worldwide based on four fundamental axes: Predictive Algorithms, AI and Profiling, NLP & Conversational Manager and Federated Learning.  

Predictive Algorithms 

Using advanced predictive Machine Learning algorithms that are based on complex probabilistic and computational models, Sherpa is able to learn and codify complex functions that allow it to infer and anticipate relevant information for users at any given time. The company is uniquely able to understand its users across many domains of life, not just when it comes to news or traffic or shopping lists like other personal assistants.  

Having knowledge of different domains of information allows the identification and exploitation of latent relationships between the various elements present, without the need for users to interact with the system. The AI engine is constantly analyzing all information. Sherpa's algorithms are able to find patterns that underlie the data and give coherence to the information from different domains, which are theoretically unconnected. 

AI & Profiling 

Its personalized, predictive capabilities are what make Sherpa different from its market competitors. Sherpa analyzes over 100,000 parameters per user per day, in order to formulate and continuously update individual profiles: 

NLP & Conversational Manager 

Unparalleled Linguistic Intelligence 

Sherpa incorporates five levels of linguistic analysis to eliminate any possibility of misinterpretation – morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and functional. Its sophisticated natural language technology mimics human understanding to dismiss impossible or unlikely matches. 

Built-in Natural Language Capabilities 

Packed with over 300,000 concepts and 5,000 syntactic and semantic rules, Sherpa's thoroughly tested core system provides the basis for a reliable and comprehensive approach to human-computer interaction. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) 

The natural language processing expert system is best described by this internal R&D paper excerpt: 

"Natural language processing expert system: the system integrates five levels of linguistically-motivated processing to arrive at an unambiguous representation of the user's intent. Sherpa's technology is able to represent the meaning expressed through language in a conceptual, language-independent way, at an abstract level that is separate from any specific language. The engine is able to arrive at the correct analysis of ambiguous inputs by applying constraints during the analysis process that rule out all but the intended meaning, eliminating unlikely or impossible interpretations. A language-independent conceptual representation is referred to as an Interlingua. As a consequence, the time required to add a new language to Sherpa's set of supported languages is exponentially reduced. The core Sherpa system includes over 300,000 concepts and 5,000 syntactical and semantic rules, as well as the large dictionaries required to support these concepts." 

Federated Learning

According to Xabi, Sherpa.ai Federated Learning is an open-source framework for Machine Learning that is dedicated to data privacy protection. It has been developed to facilitate open research and experimentation in Federated Learning, a machine learning paradigm aimed at learning models from decentralized data (e.g., data located on users' smartphones) and ensuring data privacy. This is achieved by training the model locally in each node (e.g., on each smartphone), sharing the model-updated parameters (not the data), and securely aggregating the updated parameters to build a better model. This technology could be disruptive in cases where it is compulsory to ensure data privacy. 

Sherpa.ai is focused on democratizing Federated Learning by providing methodologies, pipelines, and evaluation techniques specifically designed for Federated Learning. The company's Federated Learning SDK enables developers to simulate Federated Learning scenarios with models, algorithms, and data provided by the framework, as well as their own data. 

According to Xabi, Sherpa.ai´s mission is "To augment and accelerate human potential through the application of personal AI to individuals," and it runs on the vision of "Virtual assistants will become our conscience."  

Furthermore, to enrich its innovative resources, the company has formed some most significant partnerships with Columbia University, the European Union, the University of Granada, Samsung, Volkswagen, Lenovo, Huawei, and Santander Bank.  

A Visionary Innovator Leading Business Advances 

Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria is a serial entrepreneur, innovator, and community activist in the field of Artificial Intelligence. As an entrepreneur, he has created world-class AI companies and has envisioned future enterprises. As an innovator, he has developed a portfolio of impressive, patented Artificial Intelligence technologies. As a community activist, he has devoted his time and talents to causes both local and global. 

Born in Bilbao in 1981, Uribe-Etxebarria earned an MSc in Industrial and Organizational Engineering and Technical Industrial Engineering (specializing in Electronic Engineering). He was studying for a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing when he decided instead to build his first company, based on his academic research. He complemented his education with further studies at leading schools, including the MIT Sloan School of Management, Harvard Business School, Deusto Business School, and TEC Monterrey.