Chie Technologies

Chie (智慧) Technologies is a Japanese company specialising in artificial intelligence research, headquartered in Aoyama, Tokyo. As of 2014, its CEO and majority shareholder is Kyōko Nishiyama, daughter of the company's late founder, Susumu Nishiyama. Following a failed takeover bid, the company is 15% owned by Anansi Technologies. Japan's leading economic newspaper, the Nikkei, believes that Anansi Technologies will attempt another takeover in the future.

=Name= 'Chie' is the Japanese word for wisdom, though it is normally written as 知恵. When written as 智慧, as it is in the company's logo, it is understood to refer specifically to wisdom in the sense of the Buddhist concept of prajñā, one of the three divisions of the Noble Eightfold Path.

=Founding= Chie Technologies was founded in 1982 by Susumu Nishiyama. In its first years, Japan entered an economic slump, making this appear to be bad timing. However, Chie Technologies received a great boon from Japan's massive economic expansion between 1986 and 1992, leading some fringe economists to speculate that Nishiyama had foreknowledge of this growth. Such speculations were, however, dismissed by serious economic analysts.

=Projects=

The Oracle
The Oracle was intended to be a multi-purpose query engine. Susumu Nishiyama described it in 1983 as, "taking the principle of an expert system and expanding it to a system that is an expert on everything". Chie Technologies officially abandoned the project in 1994, selling their existing work to the MCC to be folded into Cyc.

SigInt software
In 1996, the Diet of Japan passed a law creating a new central military intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Headquarters. Several companies were contracted to provide new signals intelligence software to the newly formed agency. Although the list of companies involved is a state secret, Chie Technologies is rumoured to be among them.

The Consciousness Engine
Little is known about this project. All that is publicly available is a vague abstract of a paper, written by Catriona Reid, that was submitted to the AAAI Conference in 2013. The paper was rejected by the conference's exacting reviewers on the grounds that it made use of several unproven premises.

=Recent History= In July 2010, the founder and CEO of Chie Technologies was found dead in his apartment. The police have been investigating the death as a murder, although other events in Tokyo have taken resources away from this investigation.

Following the terrorist attack on Orochi Tower in August 2010, many companies in nearby locations, including Aoyama, began to take increased security measures. Particularly following the murder of its CEO, Chie Technologies was no exception.