Chris Ahern

Chris is a software consultant with 25 years of experience, ranging from the administration of back-end Unix and Windows servers and databases, to front-end web development. After graduating from the University of Natal, South Africa, he started his career in the telecommunications industry, first with Telkom South Africa and later at MTN, a large mobile carrier in South Africa. After moving to Vancouver, he worked in a small consulting firm installing and configuring wholesale billing solutions for various telecom companies around the world until he joined Georeference Online Ltd (GOL) in 2007. At GOL he was intimately involved in the development of the company’s AI software, as well as being Product Manager of its cloud-based exploration logistics management system, CampControl.

Chris currently works at Minerva Intelligence as its Chief Software Developer. Minerva is an AI company that uses human knowledge to enhance machine intelligence. Using ontologies to store and reason with human knowledge, Minerva’s AI system has been applied to geology (mineral targeting) and natural hazards (landslides and flood susceptibility). Minerva’s AI system is domain agnostic and can be applied to any domain with the appropriate ontology and data sets.

Minerva has created a free-to-use online tool, ACE, to create logically consistent and scientifically justified taxonomies. It uses an OWL reasoner to generate the taxonomy based on properties defined for its terms and can output the result as an ontology in an OWL file. For more info, visit https://minervaintelligence.com/project/ace/. Further background can be found here: https://ace.minervaintelligence.com/help/why-ace.jsp.