Interesting background on Ayasdi (literally, “to seek,” in Cherokee, perhaps sparking the newest trend in startup names deriving from indigenous languages) and its DARPA roots:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/ayasdi-a-big-data-s...

And a link to founder and Stanford Math Prof. Gunnar Carlsson's seminal AMS paper on "Topology and Data":

http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2009-46-02/S0273-0979-09-01...