Jeavons Launches New Firm, Mass Cognition

In Hove, UK, research tech veteran Andrew Jeavons has launched a new consultancy called Mass Cognition, focused on two areas, AI persona engineering and structured semiotics.

Jeavons (pictured) began his working life as a psychologist, then moved into medical statistics, before embarking on a research technology career across the USA, the UK and Australia. A co-founder of E-Tabs and ATP (which became Cobalt Sky), he has since worked in senior roles for Nebu, QuestionPro and most recently Signoi Ltd.

The new consultancy focuses on two areas: AI personas. and structured semiotics for the MR and advertising industries.

Mass Cognition uses a structured approach to defining the AI personas now being used to simulate consumers - Jeavons calls this Persona Engineering, and has developed the Persona Engineering Module (PEM), a development environment for AI personas that treats them as version-controlled structured data rather than prose. For research teams building personas, it provides a formal schema, and clients can test them in live interviews with the AI model of their choice, map how the personas 'relate to and are separate from one another,' and publish them as system prompts for use by any conversational AI application. Client companies can develop and own their AI persona definitions independently of whatever platform runs them in production.

The semiotics practice establishes a fixed taxonomy of ten sign classes which it applies to advertising imagery, and uses AI to produce a 'mechanism fingerprint' of how each image 'makes meaning.' By applying the same classes in the same way to every image, it allows results to be compared across executions, brands and time. Examples of how this works, using publicly available campaigns, can be found on the firm's web site.

'People can be complicated,' says Jeavons, 'and AI personas have to reflect that. Seven demographics and an OCEAN score is a horoscope, not a person. AI persona definitions need to be
structured, comprehensive and portable.'

The new consultancy's home on the web is at www.masscognition.com .