Analytics Vidhya’s third edition of DataHack Summit, India’s Largest Conference on Applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be held from 13~16th November 2019 at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru. Global AI Leaders, Researchers, Machine Learning Experts and Data Scientists will be attending the summit to spark discussions on nextgen data technologies like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language Processing, GANs, Computer Vision, Explainable AI, Cloud Computing, Deep Learning, Transfer Learning, Quantum Computing, and Speech Recognition.
There will be more than 1000 AI & ML professionals attending 8 workshops, 30 hack sessions and more than 70 talks.
The conference will witness speakers including
Dr. Geetha Manjunath [Founder & CEO of NIRAMAI]
Sayan Ranu [IIT Delhi]
Dat Tran [Head of AI at Axel Springer Ideas Engineering]
Ujjyaini Mitra [Head of Data, ZEE5]
Xander Steenbrugge [Head of applied ML-research at ML6]
Prateek Jain [Microsoft]
Jayatu Sen Chaudhury [American Express]
Nishant Agrawal [Intel]
Dr. Vikas Agrawal [Oracle Analytics Cloud]
Dr. Harshad Khadilkar [TCS] and
100 more experts sharing their views on the impact of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning.
According to Kunal Jain [Founder & CEO, Analytics Vidhya]
We are on mission to build next-gen data science ecosystem and with DataHack Summit 2019 – we aim to bring together people, machines and their collaborative experience to make our world data-driven! After the immense success of the DataHack Summit 2018, the Summit has become bigger and will go deeper on the subject. With more than 70 sessions from experts across the globe spread across 4 days – there cannot be a better place to learn about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
After looking at the response of the data science professionals from previous years, the organizers have decided to add one whole day of the conference as Hack Day i.e., on 15th November 2019 exclusively for hack sessions. Hack sessions are live interactive sessions by the top data scientists, who build Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning applications in front of the participants. World’s leading organizations like American Express, Intel, Ericsson and Amazon Web Services have partnered with Analytics Vidhya at DataHack Summit 2019 to build a vibrant community of Data Science.
If you are a data professional, or someone who wants to see machine learning in action – DataHack Summit 2019 is the place you want to be!
About Analytics Vidhya
Analytics Vidhya is currently India’s Largest & world’s leading data science community and with more than 4,00,000 data science enthusiasts from 150+ countries across the world.
Analytics Vidhya is the world’s leading knowledge portal for serving all the learning & career needs of data scientists through the latest blogs & articles, machine-learning hackathons, data science training, online courses & programs, conferences, meetups and job opportunities. It is also one of the fastest-growing online training platforms in the world in the AI & ML domain.
Netcore, a global Marketing Technology Company that offers solutions for enterprises that redefine Digital Marketing, organized a corporate training programme on Artificial Intelligence [AI] and Machine Learning [ML] for Marketers to get an edge in this new age of technology. Aimed at educating markets about the benefits of deploying these technologies, the initiative covered the essentials on 1. How AI-enabled Marketing can enhance customer Experience and 2. The 4 W’s of AI and beginning the AI journey to increase ROI on your campaigns.
Marketers today have moved from a ‘batch & blast’ approach to a behavior – based approach in their marketing automation strategy. By deploying analytics tools, marketers are able to set smart triggers based on various criteria such as RFM [Recency, Frequency, & Monetary analysis] combined with demographic & category affinity.
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, these professionals can derive greater value from their strategies with hyper-personalize campaigns aimed at creating 1:1 customer experiences. These technologies also enable a multi-fold increase in the Customer Life Cycle as AI allows one to harness data, and analyze it to generate insights in response to unpredictable situations, and that too in real time.
Commenting on the benefits of deploying AI and ML to marketing campaign, Netcore spokesperson said
Successful brands today have good offerings for the customer backed with a strong technologies and solutions including cloud services. However, a unified view of the customer is possible with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning who are key differentiators in a highly competitive market scenario where brands must continuously and innovatively engage with the customer. The workshop for marketers aimed to demystify several benefits and deployment of new age technologies like AI, ML and deep learning for their marketing campaigns.
The training program provided a framework to evaluate the maturity of an organisation in their Analytics journey and provided fundamentals for Machine Learning techniques and core algorithms. Conducted by experts from the field, the programme included
Learning supervised and unsupervised ML techniques and knowing the right algorithm to choose for a given problem like fraud detection, HR attrition, Churn prediction, Segmentation, Email send time optimization
Showcased case studies from various sectors i.e. Banking to Aviation, to address several challenges and understand how to apply the right algorithm for a given problem like fraud detection, HR attrition, Churn prediction, Segmentation, Email send time optimization
Group activities where participants brainstormed and presented 360 degree view of customer across various industries like e-commerce, Travel, Banking and Automotive
Quiz and open discussions around ML algorithms, techniques and applications in different scenarios for an organisation
About NetCore Solutions
Netcore, a global Marketing Technology Company that offers solutions for enterprises that redefine Digital Marketing. The first and leading Marketing Automation, Analytics and AI/ ML solutions provider in India, Netcore was established in 1997 by Rajesh Jain, an Internet pioneer. Netcore’s Digital Marketing suite also includes Promotional and Transactional Email Marketing and Mobile Marketing. For more information, please visit Netcore
Microsoft India showcased several of its own and third-party solutions that use Microsoft Cognitive Services and bring the power of Artificial Intelligence [AI] to users and organizations through vision, speech, language, knowledge and search scenarios. Over 370 enterprise customers in India already use these cognitive APIs from Microsoft. Microsoft is working with over 650 partners to bring AI solutions to benefit large, medium and small enterprises in the country.
Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of intelligent APIs that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret human needs using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these APIs to make their applications across platforms more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. Available at www.microsoft.com/cognitive, it includes APIs on
Vision: From faces to feelings, allow apps to understand images and video
Speech: Hear and speak to users by filtering noise, identifying speakers, and understanding intent
Language: Process text and learn how to recognize what users want
Knowledge: Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the web, academia, or your own data
Search: Locate relevant information among billions of web pages, images, videos, and news with the power of Bing APIs
To date, more than a million developers around the world have already discovered and tried Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Microsoft and partner solutions available to Indian customers are many. Here are a few examples.
Vision
Seeing AI – Designed for users with visual impairment, the Microsoft Seeing AI App combines Artificial Intelligence and rich computer vision to describe surrounding people, text, objects, colors, and currencies in real-time to the user, and is available for download on iOS devices. It can now detect Indian currency and narrate the denomination to the user. This includes all the currency notes that are currently in circulation including the new currency bills issued recently. The Seeing AI app now supports five different currencies including the Euro, US & Canadian dollars as well as British Pounds.
The Intelligent Kiosk – The Intelligent Kiosk is a Windows 10 Universal App showcasing workflows and experiences using Microsoft Cognitive Services. The kiosk app is a great example of an intelligent application, one that can analyze the emotions on human faces as well as still photographs and predict their age, gender and emotion. It also allows developers to quickly create and train a model to perform face identification against any pre-determined set of faces.
Transforming remote hiring – Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, India’s leading private general insurer, is using an automated video interviewing solution from Microsoft partner Talview to hire from the untapped talent from multiple cities across the country. The cloud-based solution, powered by Microsoft Azure, can be accessed by candidates from any smartphone device and is fully functional even on low speed Internet.
To be more competitive and agile in today’s dynamic marketplace, Bajaj Allianz needed to tap talent from multiple locations. This otherwise came with huge investments in time and resources from both the recruiter and candidate. Deploying automated video interviewing has saved the company time and resources while vastly improving the recruitment process. Candidates are now remotely participating in interviews via smartphones at their own convenient time and place, and hiring managers have the flexibility to assess and evaluate candidates without the need to travel to different locations. The company is also using Talview Behavioral Insights [TBI] to build behavioral profiles of candidates. These profiles are enabling hiring managers to find the right person for the job backed by data-driven insights.
Language
Real-time language translation – Microsoft has recently brought the power of AI and Deep Neural Networks [DNN] to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil. With DNN-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and sound more natural. Users can avail the benefits of DNN-enhanced Indian language translation while surfing the internet across any website on the Microsoft Edge browser, on Bing search, Bing Translator website, as well as Microsoft Office 365 products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype.
The Microsoft Translator app in Android and iOS can recognize and translate languages from text, speech and even photos. AI deployed in Microsoft’s language translation technologies is bringing more accurate speech recognition and higher quality machine-powered translations to all 60 languages supported by Microsoft’s translation technologies worldwide.
Knowledge [Conversational User Interfaces]
WittyParrot – WittyParrot is an AI & ML powered knowledge and process automation platform for sales, support and knowledge workers. Key solutions include Voice enabled Chat Bots, Document Automation, Contract Lifecycle, Omni-Channel Communication and Engagement. WittyParrot was part of Bengaluru-based Microsoft Accelerator’s 10th batch where they underwent an intensive six-month coaching and mentoring programme.
They are using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering and leverage it for technologies like big data, Internet of Things [IoT] and advanced analytics, among others, while being fully integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365, several CRM platforms and various voice enabled chat-bot technologies. WittyParrot solutions are being used by leading IT and ITES organizations such as Oracle, Couchbase, Collabera and Data Endure.
Ruuh – Ruuh, Microsoft’s social AI chatbot created specifically for India, has approximately 1.5 million users. Launched a little over a year and a half ago, Ruuh has exchanged 100 million messages with her users so far. You can engage with her on Facebook in the same way you would interact with a friend.
She is built using the vast social content available on the Internet [with strong checks and balances to protect her from exploitation]. Further, she is well versed with Bollywood and has a good sense of humor too. As an AI chatbot, she is learning increasingly from human interactions to respond emotionally and intelligently, providing a unique viewpoint, with manners and emotional expressions.
Knowledge [Productivity]
AI in Office 365 – Microsoft’s AI infused Office 365 helps organizations and employees get the most out of O365 in the following ways:
Intelligent, personalized search: This personalized experience uses signals from the Microsoft Graph to provide tailored search results across content and people in an organization based on a user’s work patterns. The redesigned results are easier to explore and allow users to preview files with support for over 270+ different file types without ever leaving the search page.
PowerPoint Designer: It is easy to get beautiful designs in minutes for even more types of slides. Designer in PowerPoint now can recommend professional design options for bulleted process lists. This expansion builds upon previous Designer updates to incorporate facial detection, color extraction and more in images. Additional categories of text will be supported in the future, such as timelines.
QuickStarter in PowerPoint and Sway: Powered by the Bing Knowledge Graph, QuickStarter in Sway and PowerPoint provides carefully curated outlines for any topic, including recommendations on information to include, categories to consider and associated images tagged with Creative Commons licenses. This provides a solid starting point to then continue building a presentation.
MyAnalytics: Users can createbetter work habits with the help of Microsoft MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics provides insights to help understand how users spend time at work, across meetings, email, time they designate as ‘focus time’ and after-hours work. This way, they can set productivity goals and monitor progress over time.
Users can also gain visibility into who they collaborate with most. In the future, MyAnalytics will deliver insights to teams and Office 365 Groups to help them establish better ways of working together, uncover hidden inefficiencies and align on priorities.
Some useful resources for getting started with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and How app developers can infuse Language & Speech capabilities into their apps can be found below:
Getting started with Microsoft Cognitive Services
Language with Microsoft Cognitive Services: Infusing language and speech capabilities into your app
AI and Microsoft
Microsoft has an ambitious goal to make AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.
Microsoft is infusing intelligence across all its products and services to extend individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and make them more productive; providing a powerful platform of AI services and tools that makes innovation by developers and partners faster and more accessible; and helping transform business by enabling breakthroughs to current approaches and entirely new scenarios that leverage the power of intelligent technology.
In its work to deploy AI everywhere, Microsoft is taking a thoughtful and trusted approach – designing AI innovations that extend and empower human capabilities in all aspects of life, while keeping people in control. Microsoft’s approach to AI puts users in control, with intelligence that is transparent and secure, and sets the highest bar for protecting privacy, while also being inclusive and respectful to all.
Technology is evolving at a very rapid pace, with technologies & trends like Artificial Intelligence [AI], Machine Learning [ML], Chatbots, Augmented Reality [AR], etc. creating a dent in every possible sector. Few years back, when you were interested in buying a property, you had to personally visit the site, evaluate & inspect it and than come at some logical conclusion.
With the advent of AR/VR, consumers can now have a look at the property/flat from the comfort of their homes thereby saving time as well as money [for the real-estate company that mostly bears the cost of the site-visits]! Artificial Intelligence is already disrupting the real-estate sector.
When we talk about online real-estate Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com immediately comes to our minds. All these companies have been game changers in their own respect, having varied business models. Today, we have a chat with Ravi Bhushan, Group CPTO, Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com about emerging technological trends, AR/VR, Chatbots, etc.
Being a CPTO of multiple portals which are into real-estate, as a PM what are some of the data points that you use to ensure that the right set of features are deployed in the respective portals ?
For all the three platforms, i.e. Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com, we have different business models that cater to both common and unique use cases. At a high level, I keep a close watch on the following data points
Traffic growth and quality
Engagement and conversion metrics
Supply growth
Demand supply match metrics
Quality score of content on a platform
Customer’s satisfaction score
There are has been lot of talks about AI, Machine Learning [ML] in the real-estate sector, how much impact will AI and ML have on the sector ?
I feel that there is tremendous scope of AI and ML in the digital real estate sector. Some of the areas wherein we are deploying and evaluating these technologies include:
AVM for price estimation in real estate
Lead quality scoring, based on the consumer’s behaviour [online + offline] data
Sentiment analysis around projects and developers based on the UGC data on IREF
Image classification and image quality check of listings
Automatic response by bots on real estate queries based on the knowledge base we have across platforms
How will emerging trends like AR/VR enhance the buying experience and how it can act as a compliment to physical site visits ?
Technology in the AR/VR sector is growing at a fast pace. Most of the global powerhouses are extensively investing in AR/VR related technology. An immersive viewing experience of a property [which does not exist] by using virtual reality, significantly solves the use case of visiting a sample flat. This technology can complement physical site visits in two ways
With these technologies one can do virtual site visits without any risk as visiting the site physically to experience the progress can be risky during construction
AR can be of immense value when it comes to customizing your house and get a near to a real glimpse of your future house
Can you list down top five features of PropTiger, Makaan, Housing from technological point of view vis-a-vis its competitors ?
I have listed the top five features that set us apart from our competitors
Comprehensive coverage of ratings and reviews of agents provided by genuine home seekers on Makaan.com solving the issue quality differentiation between sellers.
Makaan.com: First platform with real time authentic transaction data in Indian real estate
Category’s most innovative and user friendly maps based experience of 100% verified listings on Housing.com solving the issue of information asymmetry.
Category’s first ever web based virtual reality solution for most advanced visualisation [Sample flat, unit plan, construction updates, locality] targeting millions of internet users without any tech. barrier.
Deep learning based lead quality scoring engine based on consumer’s behaviour [Online + Offline].
Ravi Bhushan – Group CPTO (Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com)
Chatbots are now becoming main stream with Fintech, Banks, etc. how can chat bots be used to enhance the overall buying experience ?
Chatbots concept is still very early for real estate sector. The important thing to notice is that unlike many other sectors, in real estate, the search pattern is very broad. However, we definitely feel that with time there will be adoption in real estate and in order to ensure that we lead it from the front, we have already invested in this technology.
In fact, we are the first one to launch Facebook bot based search experience through which one can search and call sellers from the chat window itself on Makaan.com.
What are some of the measures taken by your product/tech team to provide ‘customized’ buying/selling experience and to ensure that there is a maximum conversion rate ?
There are many things which are done in this direction. Some of the important measures followed by us include:
Relevance logic: Matching of user intent with the property options provided during the search journey
Ratings/Reviews: One of the main goals for home seekers is also to find out the right seller and for that authentic ratings/reviews are very important. We are working really hard to ensure that this use case is addressed properly.
Drip marketing: Real estate being long buying cycle, drip marketing at various stages of the journey to bring back consumers and make them convert is also a significant area
High quality content: On Housing & PropTiger, we have 100% verified listings and on Makaan we have most comprehensive reviews and ratings. We also power our platform with the UGC from the biggest forum in Indian real estate which we own.
Searching for ‘your kind of flat’ is still a tedious process on real-estate portals [where search can go upto how many rooms, area, etc.], what are some of the challenges to have these initial search terms integrated in a voice-based engine so that there are less number of user interactions [with the device] ?
We have made some great progress in our Audio related technologies to parse and meaningfully understand the home seeker-seller interactions. As far as voice searches are concerned, we already have this feature in our PropTiger app. Based on the traction, we will further enable the same in our other platforms.
With the advent of sub 1500 phones, new segment of customers have emerged that could be first time data users. Are there any plans of PropTiger/Makaan/Housing to cater to this market [be it a light-weight app/site, etc.] ?
Yes, this is an area of opportunity for us to penetrate further in tier 2/3 cities in India. Jio being a light weight HTML5 based app ecosystem, we are willing to launch our experiences as soon as it is allowed. Having said that, we have already invested in technologies like Progress Web Apps [PWA], Instant apps to provide app like experience to our web users and we look forward to tap any such opportunity in future.
From a product feature point of view, there has been less push to lure multi-lingual audience [e.g. Certain audience in Kolkata might not be well versed with English but good in their native language], is there any push to cater the non-English speaking audience ?
We are witnessing some noticeable shift towards the vernacular space and we see this as an opportunity. We have already started to write some regional content on some of our content platforms such as PropGuide, MakaanIQ, Housing News, etc. Based on the traction, we will further invest in this direction.
What are some of the emerging trends in the tech-space and where do you see the real-estate sector [from tech point of view] couple of years down the line ?
With better government regulations, reforms & advancement of technology, the information asymmetry will reduce significantly in the coming years. The online platform will push their boundaries in terms of reaching towards closure to transactions.
The centralized listing content source [like MLS in other countries] is bound to emerge and lots of physical activities will be replaced with advancement in visualization technology related to AR/VR/3D space.
We thank Ravi Bhushan for sharing his insights with our readers. If you have any questions for Ravi, please email them here or share them via a comment to this article.
Leading tech firm Novire Technologies Pvt. Ltd, in association with ‘Autoplant’ and ‘ITBS-Truck ka Load’, recently held its day-long annual customer meet Ignite 2017. The conference witnessed the presence of nearly 200+ key industry leaders, decision makers & IT Heads from leading Indian companies, including Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd, Ultratech Cement, Jindal Steel & Power, Varuna, Essel Mining (Aditya Birla Group), Flipkart, HDFC Ergo, Jindal Saw, JSW Steel Ltd, Lupin, Reliance Industries Ltd., Philip India, Vadilal Industries Ltd & more.
Based on the theme, Logistic 4.0: Preparing for the New Industrial Revolution, the conference debated and discussed how emerging technologies like mobile, cloud computing, Big Data and IoT are transforming logistics and supply chain services worldwide. Industry veterans discussed why a strong logistics sector is a pre-requisite for the success of the Indian Government’s Make-in-India initiative and technology adoption in the sector is at the core for bringing transformation in logistics.
Novire Technologies, a company of Indian origin started by NRIs had initiated the Make-in-India vision in the year 2007 and was rejuvenated & exited with the PM Modi’s vision of ‘Make in India’ initiative. It has adopted the vision as an integral part of its policies and is all set to give a boost to the logistic sector in India, with its intelligent end-to-end solutions. The company has embarked upon the journey and is catering to 200+ customers, which are accruing significant benefits like reduction in cost by 5~10%, increase in on-time deliveries by 20%, increase in asset utilization, improvement in customer satisfaction level by deploying smart IT solutions in the logistic sector.
Shedding light on the central theme Logistics 4.0, Hiten Varia, Chairman, Novire Technologies said
Manufacturing companies are moving into ‘Smart factory’ models [industry 4.0], which leads to manufacturing and warehouse units that rely more and more on the work done by machines. These machines plug into IoT networks to communicate with each other, and in the process allow us to access all aspects of the manufacturing/logistics chains.
Logistics 4.0 is the new paradigm of human-machine interaction in logistics that is being implemented by manufacturers to support their industry 4.0 trends. Logistics services will need to be able to communicate with the increasing number of automated processes at factories and warehouses to provide an ever increasing seamlessness in the transition of the product/service from the manufactures silos to the customers’ doorstep.
Due to the increasing use of cyber physical systems and IoT networks, big data analysis for human-machine interactions has never been this important. The current scenario of a segmented approach to logistics is ineffective and needs to be realigned with the trends that are currently being followed.
Technology fuelling business innovation
The conference further witnessed customers sharing their best practices and how they are driving innovation in supply chain with the use of technology. Arun Attri, CIO, Wonder Cement shared how his company achieved in-plant automation and is accruing significant benefits from it.
On similar lines Abhishek Singh, Akzo Nobel elaborated how the company has eliminated bottlenecks and optimized processes by implementing mobile technology in supply chain.
With our earlier manual process, improving on-time delivery, which is a key component of dealer satisfaction, was a challenge. We implemented mobile GPS device across all our warehouses to address the business issue. This has enabled web-based order and vehicle tracking for both sales and logistics teams. Post implementation, email and SMS alerts are sent to dealers regarding material dispatch, which has led to significant rise in dealer satisfaction. Further, vehicle utilization, detention and delivery delays have been substantially minimized.
Some of the early adopters of Logistics 4.0, have re-looked at their end to end processes and also adopted Novire-Auto plant’s end to end to plug the gaps in logistics and supply chain. V.V. Benugopal, CEO Panther Transfreight Limited and Ittaya Sirivasukarn, CEO OF INSEE Digital Company Ltd had partnered with Novire-Autoplant to implement their E2E Solution.
Swapnil Bagul, CTO of Writer Safeguard Pvt Ltd shared his company’s achievement by implementing IoT solution for their cash vans & ATMs. Additionally, Shidan Murphy, Angoss and Mrugank Parikh, Byte Prophecy discussed how Big Data can be leveraged to enhance business efficiencies and also presented real life use cases illustrating the use of Big data.
About Novire Technologies Pvt Ltd
Novire Technologies Pvt Ltd, founded in year 2004 by Hiten Varia and Suresh Sachdev, is in the business of developing and providing business solutions that are basically confluence of four major business trends-Mobile Technologies, Cloud Computing, Big Data and IOT. The company has a nationwide presence and has also recently forayed into international market with its first operations in Thailand. For further information, please visit Novire Technologies Pvt Ltd
