Yves Bergquist is the Director of the “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), where his team is developing next-generation applications drawn from AI and neuroscience for the media and entertainment industry. ETC is funded by all 6 Hollywood studios, as well as technology companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Nagra, Technicolor, and Nielsen.
Yves is also CEO of AI startup Corto, which is building a comprehensive knowledge engine to help media and entertainment companies develop deep, “genomics”-type insights into how their content resonates with audiences. Corto creates integrated insights across content and audience data using semantic knowledge representation and probabilistic evolutionary meta-learning to autonomously “breed” new generations of machine learning algorithms from hundreds of “parent” algorithms. Corto is in Alpha testing with a dozen media companies including Sony Music, Legendary Pictures, Nagra, Netflix, Microsoft, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and the Sundance Institute.

At ETC, Yves and his team manage a half dozen research and development projects applying advanced AI and neuroscience methods to the challenges facing the entertainment industry, including AI-driven content development, production, postproduction, and marketing. Their efforts include: using social media conversations to model audience decisions in the theatrical window, developing the first audience intelligence application focused on the Chinese market (“Gaosu”), correlating narrative structures in film to theatrical performance (“StoryCipher”), and a Deep Learning-driven semantic content classification application through vector embeddings (“film2vec”). Yves’ team is also working on applying machine intelligence to model algorithmic structures of narrative and “interestingness” in film and TV, as well as building neurobiological models of audience emotions using fMRI.