Announcing the HoloLens Innovation Accelerator

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Today at Augmented World Expo 2018, we are incredibly excited to announce our HoloLens Innovation Accelerator! This marks an important day for us at Kopius for two reasons: first, it is the first of many Innovation Accelerators we will release this year, and second because it marks an important milestone for Kopius and our approach to augmented reality.

Everyone at Kopius works with a lot of enterprise customers, and time and again the number one challenge they deal with is simply finding a way to get started with new and emerging technologies. In many ways, the very fact that these new technologies — like artificial intelligence, voice and chat, robotics, blockchain and more — are so powerful and flexible is exactly why it can be so difficult to pick one and get moving.

Our Innovation Accelerators represent an important step in solving this problem. They provide a specific — and often vertical, industry-oriented — framework that helps “jumpstart” a real-life solution. An Innovation Accelerator contains sample code and a reference architecture that our customers can build from, working together with Kopius.

Our first Innovation Accelerator is focused on the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality platform. HoloLens is a very powerful mixed reality headset, and it provides a lot of flexibility for solution developers (like Kopius!) to make end-to-end solutions. One of the many things that we believe mixed and augmented reality is good for is getting contextual information on physical objects simply by looking at them.

Our HoloLens Innovation Accelerator provides a framework for doing exactly that. It is built using the Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unity, combined with the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, Azure Cognitive Services and ASP.NET SignalR. We bring these components together so a user, simply by directing the field-of-view toward a piece of industrial equipment (or any object, for that matter), can view key IoT data in a digital dashboard projected above the actual object.

For us this is a great way to show the value of a “front-end” data visualization experience integrated with industrial “back-end” IoT data stored in enterprise systems.

We are super excited to be demo-ing this while at AWE 2018 — Contact Us for more details and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @KopiusTech.

Artificial Intelligence: How Smart Is It?

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

How Smart is AI?

So are computers ready to take over the world and subjugate the human race, given our inferior intelligence and processing power? How smart is artificial intelligence?

That’s been a major Hollywood theme for decades. Who doesn’t remember the chilling lines in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” when it suddenly becomes clear that the supercomputer HAL has gone rogue.

Or the ominous scene in Bladerunner, when escaped “replicant” Leon murders the police officer administering a diagnostic test of his humanity (or, in this case, lack of humanity).

Although there are real concerns about setting AI free in the world, much of the media-hyped fear about the coming AI apocalypse is overblown. And even if there are valid technological and ethical considerations, the technology is still a long way off from that point.

Here’s how Andrew Ng, the chief scientist at Baidu from 2014 to 2017, put it in an interview with Vox earlier this year: “Worrying about evil-killer AI today is like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars. Perhaps it’ll be a problem someday, but we haven’t even landed on the planet yet.” (He does believe we should be thinking about how AI will displace the workforce of tomorrow, though.)

The Power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The reality is that artificial intelligence and machine learning (let’s add some acronyms: AI and ML), are incredibly powerful technologies. They are able to find patterns in mind-boggling quantities of data orders of magnitude faster than humans. Plus they can learn to recognize objects and predict outcomes, and they get better at that over time. So while they are not likely to turn into evil killers of humanity, they are likely to transform, well, everything.

They will absolutely change the way we interact with the world — through Natural Language Processing (Hey, Siri, take me home.) and computer vision systems. Soon enough we will be able to initiate voice commands like “OK, Google, take me to the mountain in this photo.” Already Facebook can tag you practicing that embarrassing dance move at your best friend’s bachelor party. Or giving the keynote at an industry convention, for that matter.

AI Applications Across Industries

AI and ML will automate many of the boring or repetitive tasks that people perform now, which will transform the future workforce. Think of virtual assistants who schedule meetings and send automatic follow-up messages or appointment reminders.

We already have giant industrial robots that manufacture cars, and they are only getting smarter — like knowing how to avoid injuring people or even scheduling their own tune-ups so they don’t break down and cause expensive, disruptive work stoppages.

AI in the Automotive Industry

Autonomous vehicles rely on many of these AI systems strung together: a series of sensors — including video cameras, LIDAR, sonar, and motion sensors — detect the environment and feed that data to the car’s processing systems, which then analyze and act in real-time. The technology is marching forward at breakneck speed, with VC investments and high-profile acquisitions constantly making the news.

Although fully autonomous vehicles are many years off, multiple features that use AI tech are completely functional in cars on the road right now. These include adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, lane keeping assist, and front collision warning systems, to name a few.

AI Applications in Healthcare

Healthcare is also an area of incredible promise when it comes to AI and machine learning. IBM’s Watson Health mines health data to find patterns that no human mind would be powerful enough to recognize. This will help speed drug discovery, detect insurance fraud, and create personalized plans to keep people healthy, among other innovations.

Accessible Cloud-Based AI Innovations

It all sounded so sci-fi only a few decades ago. But now AI is upon us, and the speed of discovery is accelerating. That’s in part thanks to the availability of cloud-based AI services like Amazon’s Lex and Rekognition, which enable you to add voice and video recognition into your own systems. Or Microsoft’s AI services, which let you add analytics, speech recognition, and machine learning. Or the ubiquitous Google Translate, which can translate text, entire web pages, and even the writing on the outside of packaged goods in multiple languages all over the world. What used to be open only to Google, Facebook, and world superpowers is now accessible to everyone.

JumpStart AI for Your Business with Kopius

Kopius supports businesses seeking to govern and utilize AI and ML to build for the future. We’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders, equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Plan & define data strategy, quality, and governance for AI and ML
Rapidly prototype data & AI solutions
And, fast-forward success

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

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IoT: Everything Talking to Everything Else

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Are you curious about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it might factor into your business?

The Internet of Things is transformative for business because there’s a whole world of IoT that is suited to commercial, industrial, or infrastructure contexts.

Let’s explain what IoT is, in the first place. The Internet of Things (IoT) starts with devices (things) that are fitted with sensors to collect data and then connect to a network that can be on servers or in the cloud. The incoming data is then processed and analyzed, so the network can make data-driven decisions and initiate smart actions.

Recent technological advances have lowered the cost of deploying IoT, plus we’ve found new ways of processing the vast amounts of data these systems generate. So what once was possible but expensive is now broadly accessible to everyone.

With IoT, you get extraordinary visibility into connected devices, which enables the devices to use artificial intelligence to make informed choices. This can even happen at the outer edges of a network, skipping the need to check in with a centralized system. Think of it as using spinal reflexes when you need to make fast decisions versus relying on your brain to tell you that burner is hot.

Visibility can also give organizational leaders insights about business processes and customer needs, and potentially open new business opportunities.

Here are a few examples of IoT concepts:

In a connected city, smart buses can talk to smart traffic lights, which will adjust their operation to make sure traffic flows quickly and doesn’t snarl up in trouble spots. A smart bus can talk to a monitoring station to inform operators that the engine is running below peak performance and should be tuned up. Predictive maintenance is better than preventive maintenance, and both are better than dealing with unexpected breakdowns, emergency repairs, and disgruntled transit customers.
In healthcare, people living with diabetes might be fitted with smart insulin pumps that measure blood sugar in real-time and dispense the optimal dose of insulin while sending data to the healthcare provider. This could enable patients and doctors to prioritize health maintenance, preventing illness and unnecessary emergency room visits. Imagine improving patient and caregiver experience while reducing healthcare costs, thanks to connected devices.
Global supply chains could be connected from end-to-end, with smart warehouses sending signals to shippers and manufacturers to replenish items before they run out. How much down-time could we prevent if parts arrived just before they were needed.

IoT is still new technology, and organizations are learning how best to use the vast information that IoT generates. According to CMS Wire, there are 50 billion connected devices in circulation, generating 50 zettabytes of information. That’s 10 to the 21st power, which is 1 billion terabytes or 1 trillion gigabytes. And yet our networks analyze only 1% of that data.

How much data do we need to collect? At the moment, we are collecting more information than we need to run the models and algorithms. So in the short term, we are over-collecting data, and as we learn more, we’ll know what to eliminate to save more time, energy, and money.

There is one important caution, though, and that is security. With everything connected to everything else, the potential to hack into a system from anywhere at any time increases exponentially. So it’s important to create robust, redundant security measures when you start taking advantage of the enormous potential of IoT technology.

JumpStart Your IoT Success

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

Blockchain: Is it More than Hype?

Posted on April 13, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

The term “blockchain” has turned into the latest catchphrase rather than the latest technology.

There’s no one universal definition that everybody agrees on. In fact, blockchain technology has inspired so much hype and interest that it seems like everyone is claiming to be developing blockchain platforms or piloting new blockchain use cases.

Note that cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is the most famous example of blockchain technology, but blockchain and cryptocurrency are not interchangeable. Cryptocurrency was built using blockchain technology.

At its core, blockchain is a technology that enables digital transactions to be conducted securely in a decentralized peer-to-peer network of records duplicated across a web of participants. Because the records are replicated across all nodes on the blockchain and need to be validated before they can be added in a “block,” blockchain is thought to be resistant to fraud and abuse.

Blockchain networks can be public or private. The rules that govern how transactions are validated vary. Modern general purpose blockchains, like Ethereum and Hyperledger, have rules attached to each action, so the platform can execute a smart contract.

The potential of blockchain is a big deal, and it holds a lot of promise. The ability to get rid of centralized systems and facilitate peer-to-peer payment systems or to handle land title, currency exchange, or energy markets in an accurate, secure, unalterable digital environment is remarkable. The potential to save billions down the entire supply chain or manage patient health data holds incredible promise.

That’s undoubtedly why there were no fewer than 134 blockchain startups with initial coin offerings of at least $500K between 2014 and 2017. And that’s why Gartner predicts that blockchain tech spending will reach $9.7B over the next three years (up from $945M spent in 2017).

But the truth is blockchain technology is fairly new. It was actually a 1976 paper called “New Directions in Cryptography” that marked the initial discovery that led to the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. So far, most of the uses of blockchain outside of cryptocurrency exchanges have been tests or pilots by major companies and organizations around the globe, including Mastercard, Walmart, IBM, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Analysts predict that 2018 will be the year that large-scale uses of blockchain will put the technology through its paces. And in fact, IBM and Maersk just launched an open blockchain shipping platform that they hope the entire ocean-going market will adopt, from ports to transit companies to customs authorities to shippers.

But until we have a few more years under our belt, it’s safe to say that blockchain holds tremendous promise, but it is complex and needs to be deployed in smart ways to meet specific business needs.

That’s where Valence comes in. We’ve been living and breathing blockchain since its inception, studying both its strengths and its pitfalls. We know what works and what doesn’t. We are experts at adapting existing platforms (like Ethereum and Hyperledger). Plus we have deep expertise in creating new use cases across different industries. Want to know more about how blockchain can help your business? Contact us, and we’ll help you separate the hype from the reality.

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Chatbots: Much More Than A Novelty

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Brian Lamilla

Chatbots: Much More Than A Novelty

The promise of Artificial Intelligence and chatbots is here.

Sure, humanoid robots s aren’t yet roaming the earth, but AI-induced applications and AI-infused services are transforming the world around us into a more intelligent, interactive, and empowered domain. Looking for a good example? Ask Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or CleverBot. They, collectively, are the answer.

Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Cleverbot are all examples of chatbots — “a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.” Some chatbots use natural language processing ability to understand your speech and then respond verbally. Apple’s Siri is perhaps the most famous example of this type of chatbot, though Alexa and Cortana are also widely used. Other chatbots are text-based, responding to typed questions, commands, or observations. Microsoft’s Xiaoice, for example, was released in China in 2014 and, as of only a year later, had already been used by over 40 million smartphone owners (25% of whom had reportedly said “I love you” to their “virtual friend,” which is available on China’s two most prominent social media platforms — Weibo and WeChat).

Chatbots have been the subject of controversy — see Microsoft’s Tay — and frequent comic derision — see, e.g. Siri. More generally, many people see them as little more than a novelty — a fun way for consumers to interact with technology. But they are much much more than that. Simply put, chatbots are a powerful example of the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence into mainstream society. And we are just scratching the surface of their capabilities.

To-date, the landscape of chatbots available for consumers and enterprises has been dominated largely by the tech titans mentioned above. It is in the process, though, of getting significantly more diverse and dynamic, a phenomenon driven by the release of numerous chatbot frameworks for developers.

Chatbot frameworks are essentially software development kits (SDKs) for the AI-verse. They provide a platform — the technology infrastructure — for developers to build chatbots in a manner which meets their needs. The release of frameworks like Microsoft’s Bot Framework and Facebook’s Bot Engine (wit.ai) means that any developer, be they a hobbyist or professional service provider, can build a chatbot to improve their life or the lives of those around them.

Want to build a chatbot that speaks to you in Captain Hook lingo in time for the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19)? Have at it! Think your business can benefit from a chatbot designed to provide a more intuitive way to access and organize the data that fuels your success? Build it!

…or let us build it! Valence understands that chatbots are more than a novelty; they are a paradigm shifting technology that can digitally transform businesses in any sector. That’s why we’re putting them to work for our clients in ways that support both their strategic objectives and their day-to-day tactics. And that’s why we’re looking forward to learning how we can put them to work for you.

Learn How to JumpStart AI For Your Business

Kopius supports businesses seeking to govern and utilize AI and ML to build for the future. We’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders, equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Plan & define data strategy, quality, and governance for AI and ML
Rapidly prototype data & AI solutions
And, fast-forward success

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

Additional Resources

Natural Language Understanding: It’s Not Just Chat

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Brian Lamilla

The recent standardization of speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies has led to the first step in enterprises embracing newly enabled capabilities: The chatbot. Beginning in 2016, enterprise businesses began to seriously invest in chat as way to rethink interfaces to business data, to streamline how employees and customers access services, and to enable cost-saving strategies such as self-service. However, chatbots are simply the first foray into new capabilities enabled by NLU, and the next round will see the emergence of systems that leverage NLU to optimize the interface between the human and the digital to maximize value.

Soon, over her morning coffee, a sales director will be able to speak out loud about her previous day. Her end-to-end NLU-enabled system will respond by automatically queuing up dynamic reports on her screen, optimizing her to-do list for the new day based on her past behavior and serving that automatically to her device, reaching out to the appropriate team members and scheduling her meetings for the week, all while holding a conversation with her about her recommended weekly plan via her digital assistant.

This will all be possible with systems optimized based on how humans communicate best, how digital systems process information, and how the two work together.

Letting Humans be Human
Speech to text, NLU, and the standardization of how developers interact with these algorithms has, for the first time in decades, upended how humans can pass information to digital systems. These technologies are undergoing their own renaissance for the plain fact that they allow humans to communicate in the way we’ve been doing it for millenia: speech. Speech allows users to rely on their own ability to communicate nuanced, precise flows of information in a way that is so natural, it far outstrips the standard of touch-and-keyboard in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Letting Digital Systems do Their Thing
Chatbots have been the first step because they are what we know. Starting with the first messenger applications, we’ve been sending and receiving information in natural language formats for decades. This paradigm is a natural first step for NLU. But, we are now at the cusp of seeing a revolution in how digital systems process human speech and provide information back to the user in all the ways digital systems are able (and in the ways humans cannot): dynamic data explorations, virtual reality experiences, pervasive multi-device workflows and more.

A Perfect Balance
By marrying Natural Language Understanding with the full menu of existing and future digital communication models, we can optimize the passing of every piece of information to fit the specific communication style and need of the sender and receiver. The result: enterprise systems that fundamentally change core business technologies, leading the way to efficiencies, cost savings and new business models.

JumpStart Your AI Success With Kopius

Kopius supports businesses seeking to govern and utilize AI and ML to build for the future. We’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders, equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Plan & define data strategy, quality, and governance for AI and ML
Rapidly prototype data & AI solutions
And, fast-forward success

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

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