Latest news with #JonBrewton
Techday NZ
22-07-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Data Squared & Neo4j partner to deliver traceable AI systems
Data Squared has announced a strategic partnership with graph database company Neo4j to provide artificial intelligence solutions that address the challenge of AI "hallucinations" in both government and private sector operations. The partnership centres on the integration of Data Squared's reView platform with Neo4j's graph database technology to build AI systems that prioritise verifiability and transparency. The companies are targeting scenarios where traditional AI models, particularly retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), can deliver convincing yet inaccurate responses, which undermine trust and inhibit decision-making. Graph-based approach Graph databases model information as nodes and relationships between entities - such as people, places, and events - instead of tables of rows and columns. This structural approach allows for the identification of patterns within large, heterogeneous data sets and supports the ability to answer complex questions that standard databases cannot always address efficiently. Data Squared has developed a patented method anchored in this approach. Its system relies on Neo4j's ability to model and navigate complex relationships within datasets, forming the basis for reView's explainable AI capabilities. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Data Squared's methodology is recognised as a new way to create "hallucination-resistant, explainable AI systems." Traceability and explainability By leveraging graph-connected evidence networks, every AI-generated answer on the reView platform is anchored to verifiable sources. This ensures that end users can trace how an AI system arrived at its conclusion or recommendation, meeting a requirement that is increasingly essential for government teams and critical applications in the private sector. Jon Brewton, Chief Executive Officer of Data Squared, commented on the partnership: Our partnership with Neo4j brings together the best of AI and graph database technology to deliver hallucination-resistant AI that can be verified, trusted, and understood. With Neo4j's graph backbone and our patented hallucination-resistant approach, we're helping mission-driven teams cut through the noise and take action with confidence. Decision-makers need to rely on AI that provides robust information security, not opaque black-box systems. John Bender, Regional Vice President, Federal Sales at Neo4j, underscored the challenges their collaboration aims to address: Data2 and Neo4j are solving one of the most pressing challenges facing organizations today: incorporating AI into their workflow with superior results and greater ROI. Our graph database and analytics technology helps eliminate AI hallucinations, while reducing resource consumption and increasing scalability, making it the ideal solution for organizations looking to AI to support complex, data-driven decision-making. We're excited to deepen our work together, empowering teams in the public and private sectors to transform data into knowledge and unlock insights and possibilities that weren't possible before. Key capabilities and use cases The reView platform delivers several capabilities as a result of this partnership, including patented hallucination resistance where every output can be traced to source material, visual traceability with complete source attribution, and unified integration of structured and unstructured data into harmonised graph models. The system's architecture supports enterprise-grade security with zero-trust and cloud-agnostic deployment and offers a natural language interface for non-technical users to engage with complex graph insights. In practical applications, reView has been deployed to reduce analysis time in intelligence operations, provide traceable and explainable AI for federal agencies, improve asset management decision-making in the energy sector, and enhance fraud detection in financial services. In these scenarios, the platform claims to achieve near 99% accuracy in AI-generated insights, as compared to the 60-80% accuracy rates common to traditional RAG approaches. The companies report that public and private sector organisations requiring full audit trails, regulatory compliance, and high-reliability AI decision support can access the platform through both Data Squared and Neo4j sales channels. Additional customer support is provided via fast-track implementation, technical integration, and proof-of-concept services using client data.
Fox News
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Northern Border 'quiet crisis' brews as expert floats unconventional solution to combat human smuggling
A "quiet crisis" is emerging at the U.S.-Canada border, as one expert proposes an unconventional solution to fight human smuggling: leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. While national attention is largely fixed on the southern border, an increasingly concerning situation is unfolding along the country's northern border, said Jon Brewton, the founder and CEO of Data2 and a U.S. Air Force Veteran. "U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has seen a fairly alarming increase in illegal crossings, drug trafficking, and even encountering individuals on the terrorist watch list," he told Fox News Digital. "And as difficult as securing the southern border has been, the northern border is twice as long." While the vast majority of illegal crossings happen at the southern border, officials have been warning for years that the northern line has seen an increase. During testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel told lawmakers last week adversaries such as China and Russia have started to target the northern U.S. border with Canada. "The enemy adapts," Patel said. The Trump administration has overseen a dramatic shift at the U.S. southern border since taking office in January, with the number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded encounters plummeting by 90% in most sectors compared to the same time period last year. The administration has poured in resources to stop the spiraling immigration situation at the southern border. The sudden silence there came after record-setting numbers of illegal crossings during the four years of the Biden administration, a trend that also saw a dramatic increase in attempted crossings by immigrants outside of North and Latin America. Chinese nationals were among the most likely to attempt illegal crossings, with the number of crossings from citizens of the country rising to over 24,000 in 2023, a more than 5,200% increase from the 450 encounters just a year earlier, according to CBP data. Overall, Patel told lawmakers that between 2022 and 2025, roughly 178,000 Chinese nationals attempted to cross the southern border. CBP's Swanton Sector, which spans 295 miles of the border with Canada and covers all of Vermont and parts of upstate New York and New Hampshire, has seen more apprehensions in the last fiscal year than the previous 13 years combined. According to a report on CBS 19, the sector has seen 15,000 apprehensions in the 10 months of fiscal year 2024, the largest volume ever recorded by the sector, over 14,000 more than was recorded in fiscal year 2024. The report noted that migrants from 85 different countries have attempted to illegally cross in the area. Brewton said that there are unconventional ways that technology can be used to secure the 5,525 miles of border between the U.S. and Canada. "And so there are some non-traditional ways that we can use technology as a capability multiplier," he said. "That's just something a little bit different than just hiring more agents and building physical processes in what is a really substantial amount of land that is rocky in territory, cold and snowy and hard to manage." "I think that is where AI can help change our trajectory and success on the northern border." Brewton explained that AI could play a powerful role in border security – enhancing surveillance, radar systems, and open-source intelligence, while also helping agents monitor water crossings more effectively. "And using radar systems to understand the full scope of intelligence that's at our disposal, but using really, really smart tools to combine that intelligence in a smart way and use it at scale," he said. Traditional security systems operate in silos – each collects and processes data separately – but using AI models could give a full, connected picture, he explained. People often misunderstand border security as just invasive surveillance, Brewton said, but when done right – especially with well-designed AI – it can actually improve both security and privacy by being smarter and more targeted. "A lot of people really assume border security primarily means privacy, invasive surveillance, like facial recognition and biometrics and the roles that they can play within sort of pattern recognition. It's really about identifying suspicious behaviors and connecting different pieces of intelligence to individuals that we're monitoring," he said. Brewton emphasized that citizens should have both strong safety measures and strong protection of their rights. "Well-designed AI delivers enhanced protections for Americans and our communities while maintaining the transparency and accountability that our citizens, and quite frankly, our government, require," he said. "So if we're smart about what we do, we can make really, really impactful changes to what we're doing on the northern border and the southern border." The Trump administration has pressured Canada to enhance its border security to stop the upward trend of the flow of migrants and fentanyl by implementing 25% tariffs on imports from Canada. Energy resources from Canada will have a lower 10% tariff. "I know that the president's agenda has really been to try to understand how we can work with Canada and seek concessions from our neighbors to the north to help secure the border in both directions," he said. "The government really needs to use all of its tools at its disposal." Fox News Digital has reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for comment.
