News and Events > Pearson Education Acquires Company Founded By CU Researchers

Pearson Education Acquires Company Founded By CU Researchers

July 6, 2004

BOULDER - Pearson Education, the world's largest education company, announced June 29 its acquisition of Knowledge Analysis Technologies, a privately held Boulder-based company that provides products and services based on proprietary and patented machine-learning technology for text understanding. Much of the core intellectual property, including the essay grading technology, was developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Knowledge Analysis Technologies' flagship product, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, is designed to automatically analyze and score standardized writing assessments.

"This agreement is yet another market confirmation of the high value of intellectual assets created at CU," said David Allen, associate vice president for technology transfer. "Moving intellectual property from the university into domains that benefit people is a priority for this institution."

As a business of Pearson Education, the company will remain in Boulder and will operate two divisions, The Knowledge Analysis Technologies Institute and Pearson KAT. 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. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"Joining Pearson Education is a dream come true for KAT," Landauer said. "The founders' vision was to bring the enormous educational potential of our unique text-understanding technologies to the service of educators and students worldwide. With the vast and varied strengths of Pearson Education and the other Pearson companies joined in the effort, we now feel certain of success."

Landauer, along with partners Dr. Darrell Laham and Dr. Peter Foltz, formed Knowledge Analysis Technologies in 1998. Applications of the company's educational technology include teaching reading and writing skills, developing leadership skills, selecting high performance teams and matching people to jobs. CU has licensed intellectual property to KAT relating to applications of Latent Semantic Analysis for automated essay scoring. Clients include publishers, large testing and test preparation organizations, the military and other government agencies.

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.

Interestingly, all three partners have CU-Boulder affiliations. Laham, earned his doctorate degree from CU-Boulder, where he completed his dissertation on the core technology. In 2000, Laham was the first graduate from the university's advanced joint degree program in Cognitive Science and Psychology. Foltz received his doctorate degree from CU-Boulder.

Dr. Lynn Streeter will continue as vice president of business development. She served as vice president and general manager at US WEST Advanced Technologies and while at Bell Labs and Tecodia she worked with Dr. Karen Lochbaum, KAT senior scientist. Lochbaum will become vice president of software engineering. Before coming to KAT, Streeter and Lochbaum invented business coordination systems using mathematical techniques similar to those underlying KAT's products.

Pearson Education is part of the international media company Pearson, whose businesses also include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.