QS announces Project Cerebrum: A self-sustaining knowledge ecosystem powered by AWS

QS Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)—a global leader in higher education analytics, insights, and services—unveiled a groundbreaking prototype called “Project Cerebrum” at the annual Back to School Summit in New York, the latest evolution of its proprietary knowledge graph technology. Built in collaboration with AWS, Project Cerebrum introduces a new frontier in AI-powered knowledge management: a self-sustaining, agentic knowledge ecosystem that learns, adapts, and grows with the global higher education and workforce landscape.

From knowledge graph to agentic intelligence

Project Cerebrum directly addresses one of the defining challenges for modern organizations: building and maintaining a living knowledge base that evolves in real time with a rapidly changing market landscape.

Building on the global intelligence platform HolonIQ, acquired by QS in 2024, Project Cerebrum introduces a new paradigm of applied AI in research and decision-making.

“We’re not just building another research tool,” said Patrick Brothers, co-founder of HolonIQ and executive director at QS. “Project Cerebrum represents a shift from static data management to a dynamic, self-sustaining intelligence ecosystem where human expertise and AI act in concert.”

A step change in knowledge management

Building on HolonIQ’s early advances in natural language processing and structured data capture, Project Cerebrum now delivers:

• Self-maintaining knowledge graphs: Continuously constructing and enriching complex knowledge maps of university rankings, institutional benchmarking, student recruitment, and labor markets.
• Dynamic research integration: Conducting research, parsing findings into verifiable facts, and integrating them seamlessly into an evolving intelligence base.

Project Cerebrum’s capabilities include:

• Automated data acquisition, cleaning, and validation
• Integration of institutional and “ecosystem” knowledge
• Advanced pattern recognition across global datasets
• Context-aware insights tailored to user needs

Built on AWS innovation

The platform leverages cutting-edge AWS technologies including: AWS AgentCore to deploy and operate AI agents; Strands Agents for AI agent creation, management, and orchestration; Amazon Bedrock for advanced language modeling; Neptune for managed graph analytics; Aurora as a relational database; and OpenSearch for simplified search capabilities. This comprehensive utilization of cutting-edge cloud and AI services enables QS to offer a solution that can handle complex, large-scale knowledge management tasks with unprecedented efficiency and insight generation capabilities.

Transforming research and decision-making

By automating routine data collection and validation, Project Cerebrum frees human intelligence to focus on what matters most: deeper analysis, better strategy, and faster decision-making.

“This isn’t about replacing human intelligence,” Brothers emphasized. “It’s about massively augmenting it—shifting the center of gravity from data wrangling to strategy, insight, and action.”

Shaping the future of intelligence

As organizations worldwide confront the exponential growth of data, Project Cerebrum sets a new benchmark for knowledge systems. By uniting QS’s market leadership in education and workforce intelligence with AWS’s technical innovation, Project Cerebrum points to the future of institutional intelligence: dynamic, autonomous, and endlessly evolving.

To learn more, visit the QS website.