It was 1995, the year that Craigslist, eBay and Expedia were born. The age of the internet had arrived, and we at Forbes magazine, all too aware of academics' complaints about cashing out for research, made a prediction: Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, would be its "first victim." Yet recent years have seen Elsevier profits swell to more than £900 million closing in on a 40% profit margin. It seems to be--as the Financial Times claimed in 2015--"the business the internet could not kill." This hasn't stopped resentment from brewing as journal prices continue to rise above inflation.

In an interview at Singularity University's Global Summit in San Francisco, Anita Schjøll Brede talked about how artificial intelligence can help make scientific research accessible to anyone working on a complex problem. Anita Schjøll Brede is the CEO and co-founder of Iris AI, a startup that's building an artificially intelligent research assistant, which was recently named one of the most innovative AI startups of 2017 by Fast Company. Schjøll Brede is also faculty at Singularity University Denmark and a 2015 alumni of the Global Solutions Program. "Ultimately, we're building an AI that can read, understand, and connect the dots," Schjøll Brede said. "But zooming that back into today, we're building a tool for R&D, research institutions, and entrepreneurs who have big hairy problems to solve and need to apply research and science to solve them. We're semi-automating the process of mapping out what you should read to solve the problem or to see what research you need to do to solve the problem."

The TechCrunch conference is an event that swoops in on the startup scenes of the US and Europe, gathering for appraisal the technology world's rising movers, shakers and innovators. It's widely regarded as the place to get a feel for what's happening at the industry's grassroots – which is exactly what PwC Innovation Manager Marina Paronetto headed to London to do. As it turns out, it was the brains behind the machine – artificial intelligence – that was the star of 2016's show. It was said in sarcasm, but MC Jordan Crook couldn't have been more accurate when she said that TechCrunch's theme for its latest Disrupt conference was artificial intelligence. From what I saw, every solution on show here featured an element of AI.

There are more than 30 million research papers out there, and more than 3,000 papers are published every day. Put simply, you haven't a chance in hell to read all of them. So what's a poor researcher to do when set a challenge in a brand new field of research? Once the wave of blind panic and urge to drink copious amounts of gin has dissipated, you reach for a technology solution. Iris believes it has just the thing.

There are more than 30 million research papers out there, and more than 3,000 papers are published every day. Put simply, you haven't a chance in hell to read all of them. So what's a poor researcher to do when set a challenge in a brand new field of research? Once the wave of blind panic and urge to drink copious amounts of gin has dissipated, you reach for a technology solution. Iris believes it has just the thing.