PEARSON EDUCATION TO ACQUIRE
KNOWLEDGE ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGIES
UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J., June 29, 2004 - Pearson
Education,
the world's largest education company, today announced the acquisition
of Knowledge Analysis Technologies, a privately held Boulder, Colo.,
company that provides products and services based on proprietary and
patented machine-learning technology for text understanding. Terms of
the acquisition were not disclosed.
The company will become a business of Pearson Education and will
operate two divisions, The Knowledge Analysis Technologies Institute
and Pearson KAT. It will continue to be based in Boulder. The current
management will remain, including founder and president Dr. Thomas
K. Landauer, who will report to Douglas Kubach, president and CEO of
Pearson Educational Measurement.
Knowledge Analysis Technologies' flagship product, the Intelligent
Essay Assessor, is designed to automatically analyze and score
standardized writing assessments. "We're very excited to add
the knowledge and expertise of the KAT organization to our portfolio
of solutions for the educational market," said Douglas Kubach.
"We believe KAT's proven, valid and reliable technology offers
Pearson many potential applications across the enterprise."
"Joining Pearson Education is a dream come true for KAT,"
said president Tom Landauer. "The founder's vision was to bring
the enormous educational potential of our unique text-understanding
technologies to the service of educators and students worldwide.
The technology is now mature. The market is now ready. With the vast
and varied strengths of Pearson Education and the other Pearson
companies joined in the effort we now feel certain of success."
Knowledge Analysis Technologies was formed in 1998 by Dr. Thomas K.
Landauer, Dr. Darrell Laham and Dr. Peter Foltz to develop educational
applications of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). It is affiliated with
the University of Colorado, which holds IP relating to applications of
LSA for automated essay scoring.
Dr. Landauer, who will continue as president of Pearson KAT and The
KAT Institute, is an internationally recognized leader in applied
cognitive science research and was a distinguished scientist and
director of Cognitive Science Research at Bell Labs and its
descendent Bellcore (now Telcordia) for 25 years. He is currently
professor and fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the
University of Colorado.
Dr. Laham, the chief technology officer, is one of the inventors,
along with Landauer and Foltz, of KAT's innovative technologies, and
is KAT's chief software architect. He is appointed vice president of
product planning for Pearson KAT. Dr. Foltz, a colleague of Dr.
Landauer's on LSA research at Bellcore, is widely published in the
fields of information retrieval, natural language processing,
educational technology and cognitive science. He is a professor at
New Mexico State University and chief scientist at KAT. He will
continue in this capacity at The KAT Institute. Dr. Lynn Streeter
has worked at U S WEST Advanced Technologies, where she served as
vice-president and general manager, and at Bell Labs and Telcordia.
There, she and Dr. Karen Lochbaum invented systems using similar
mathematical techniques for business coordination solutions. She will
continue as vice president of business development. Dr. Karen
Lochbaum, senior scientist, also worked in development and
application of the basic science behind most of KAT's products at
Telcordia and U S WEST Advanced Technologies. She will be vice
president of software engineering.
Pearson Educational Measurement, the largest full-service provider
of large-scale assessment services in the U.S. and a business of
Pearson Education, will use KAT's Intelligent Essay Assessor for
essay and other constructed response test questions. Pearson
Educational Measurement provides comprehensive assessment services
and products to local and state education agencies as well as other
assessment organizations and the federal government.
About Pearson Education
Educating 100 million people worldwide, Pearson Education is the
world's leading education company. With brands such as Pearson
Prentice Hall, Pearson Longman, Pearson Addison-Wesley, Pearson
Allyn & Bacon, Pearson Benjamin Cummings, Pearson Educational
Measurement, Pearson Digital Learning, Pearson VUE and others,
Pearson Education provides quality content, assessment tools and
educational services in all available media, spanning the learning
curve from birth through college and beyond. Pearson Education is
part of Pearson, the international media company, whose businesses
also include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.
About Knowledge Analysis Technologies
Knowledge Analysis Technologies' products and services are based on
proprietary and patented machine-learning technology for text and
understanding. The company's focus is educational technology;
applications of which cover an enormous range: from teaching reading
and writing skills, to developing leadership skills, to selecting
high performance teams, to matching people to jobs. Clients include
publishers, large testing and test preparation organizations, the
military and other government agencies.
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