Author: dsa_admin

On August 29, Innosuisse assembled their experts, coaches, staff members and executives under the beautiful roof of CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation for the Innosuisse Plenary 2018. The topic of innovation was omnipresent and rightly framed in a broad fashion in the excellent keynotes by Maurice Lévy (on the creation and impact of the VivaTech exhibition & conference), Frédérick Bordry (on the mission, work and future of CERN) and William Hurley (on the history and future applicability of quantum computing). In between these inputs, the participants spread into several breakout sessions to discuss the future of innovation funding in Switzerland.

We from Data+Service had been invited to start the discussion in the breakout session on “digitalization and SMEs” with a keynote, and board member Thilo Stadelmann delivered some pointed hypotheses based on the experience of almost 2 years of Data+Service and numerous CTI/Innosuisse projects. A recording of the presentation is available online, together with the slides. The talk follows the important properties of digital innovations (namely, being interdisciplinary, aiming at automation at scale, and coming at a high speed). These are his conclusions:

• The size of an innovative idea does not need to match the size of the company pursuing it: thanks to the property of scalability, disruptive ideas for huge markets can even be implemented by start-up companies. That means: small and medium companies are not that different from larger enterprises when it comes to digital innovation – they can accomplish basically the same things. What is important for their success is the availability of an interdisciplinary network of experts to bring in the right advice and skill for actual R&D work, if this is required. We in the Alliance strive to be such a network.
• Industry sector affiliation plays a decreasing role: as digital innovation is often driven by technology, a solid understanding and mastering of this technology within the innovation team is paramount. This can be brought in by an expert who does not need to have the same industry sector background as the business in need. For example, an expert in machine learning can build solutions for companies both in the production and financial sector, as similar challenges will likely arise; and for those companies involved, the interdisciplinary exchange with colleagues from other industries is likewise beneficial: same challenges, less competition amongst the involved parties ➔ more open exchange.
• Basic and applied research converge: due to the speed of innovation in the digital area, there is a huge gap between the amount of ideas that piled up in the academic sphere, and the comparatively little ideas that are actually used in businesses. However, this pile of ideas in research is not “solid”, so to say (see picture): as the speed of development for example in deep learning increases, not every aspect of each idea is thoroughly researched before somebody builds on top of it. This leads to the situation that in an applied research project, where a specific use case triggers research for a specific solution, the research team in their search through the idea pile eventually arrives at such a “hole”. This place is characterized by two properties: (a) the closeness of related publications shows that a solution to the actual case at hand might be feasible. An example for this might be a use case of industrial image processing for quality control, with the availability of research on deep learning for natural image processing with big training sets hinting at its likely success. However, (b) the hole shows that basic results (in the sense that they would be well received at a scientific conference on this topic, if discovered) that directly suit the properties of the given case are missing. To stay in the example, this might be work on deep learning with small training sets on technical images; it poses completely distinct research challenges not yet solved satisfactory also in the academic sector. An innovation project thus runs basic research, applied research and technology transfer effectively in parallel, rather than sequentially, as is proposed by some prevalent innovation funding schemes that try to aim at a specific link in that chain.

The Alliance is very well positioned to facilitate the kind of support for SMEs and other enterprises that is outlined in the three conclusions above: it provides a network of experts with diverse background and skills who are easily approachable. It takes care for interdisciplinary and parallel approaches to all necessary levels in the innovation process, from information to consulting and finally research. Moreover, it is committed (e.g., via its Expert Group on Data Ethics) to the fourth thing that must not be disregarded when talking about digitalization (or rather: digital transformation): that the main challenges ahead of us are non-technical, and need to be solved on a societal rather than an individual level.

On June 25, 2018 the event ‘Big Data: Visualisation & Enjeux’ was held at the University of Fribourg.

The event was co-organized by Virtual Switzerland and the Swiss Alliance for Data-intensive Services.

First the participants were welcomed by Prof. Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, who presented the activities of the eXascale infolab. Then Gundula Heinatz, Managing Director of the Alliance gave an overview of the activities of the Alliance and Laetitia Bochud, Head of Marketing of Virtual Switzerland presented her organization.

Alireza Ghasemi, Data Scientist at ELCA Informatique SA, described his work on how to interpret the results of AI, especially when using neural networks.

Nicolas Delétroz, Professor HES and Chef de projet “Observatoire Valaisan du Tourisme” at HES SO Valais, gave a presentation on the use of data for the tourism industry in Wallis.

Niels Nijdam, Senior Researcher, Université de Genève, gave an overview of the research activities at his Lab: ‘Research and interest from the Conscious Analytics System Laboratory’.
Finally Alexis Roussel, Co-founder of Bity addressed the important question: Why does digital integrity matter?

The presentations were followed by an apero, during which the participants exchanged on potential projects and joint activities.

Following are some glimpses from the event. 

The event “Insights from Business Practices” that took place on Wednesday, July 18th 2018 was organized by the SDA-Expert Group “Data Driven Business Models”, with academic lead Lorenz Stähle (HSG) and industrial lead Hans Peter Gränicher (D ONE). 25 experts participated in the event located in Au Premier (Hauptbahnhof Zürich).

Dr. Jürgen Schwärzler of D ONE shared insights from his time in the Silicon Valley where he worked at Google, Netflix, and Uber. Main takeaway: the successful business model of such companies is to rely heavily on data-driven decisions. This is driven mostly by A/B testing, demonstrated with a real-life example how Uber optimized the introduction of driver profiles in its app.

Then, Pascal Waldvogel, Manager Digital Transformation at Kardex Remstar, laid out his current challenges. He is transforming the existing service business from reactively managing orders to proactively sell potential services – “from firemen to consultants”. Speaker and audience engaged in an in-depth discussion of potential approaches how to best reach this goal.

The evening concluded with an apero and vivid chats.

The next Expert Group Meeting is planned for for November 14th 2018, 16:30 in Au Premier in HB Zürich – looking forward to seeing you there.

On June 27 there was another meeting of an expert group at HSR Rapperswil – a beautiful campus at the lakeside. It was the first meeting and a kind of kickoff of the newly established expert group on “Spatial Data Analytics”. Eight attendees came from industry and the same amount of attendees came from academics. The actual number of experts has in fact grown quickly to 40 and more members.

As in other disciplines, the main challenge in spatial analytics are practical applications. According to the expert group charter the focus lies e.g. in spatial information integration, an open geodata catalog, applying location-based algorithms and map visualizations.

During the meeting the group identified several problems that can be approached with spatial data analytics:

• Site assessment
• Risk analysis
• Logistics (at large scale)
• Asset tracking (at small and medium scale)
• Disease analysis / epidemiology

Also visualization techniques, data governance issues as well as data quality related user (mis)expectations have been discussed.

During the meeting fruitful discussions came up around the topics mentioned above and many hints could be exchanged.

Finally, the meeting was rounded up with an apéro and a quite intense networking took place.

The next meeting of the expert group is scheduled for the 3^rd of October (presumably) in Lausanne. The focus will be on exchanging experiences about using preferably freely available geodata sources.

Call for Participation
Do you have a question that can eventually be answered using spatial data analytics? Then let us know! We offer the possibilities to present your problem to the expert group and we’re confident, that in the rich fund of experiences of the expert group members there will be found good approaches or even the solution to your problem.

If you have questions regarding the alliance, direct them to Dr. Gundula Heinatz Bürki, Managing Director (gundula.heinatz@data-service-alliance.ch ). For specific questions regarding the Expert Group, like about joining the group, contact the leaders Nic Lenz (nicolas.lenz@geo7.ch) and Prof. Stefan Keller (sfkeller@hsr.ch).

We recently organized the Service Lunch “Digital Twin” event in Zurich.

Christopher Ganz from ABB was talking about the digital twin.

Digital twin is a buzzword that is broadly used in the context of digitalization. Not everything that is mentioned is feasible, and not everything that creates value is mentioned in the context of digital twin. In his talk, Christopher Ganz presented a concept that is currently being pursued by ABB. With the concept of a digital twin as a digital reflection of a physical asset, it became evident that the field of applications is wide and rich. The digital twin can be applied along the product life-cycle from product design to manufacturing, commissioning, operations, and maintenance. The real challenge lies in integrating information about the context and the environment of the physical asset, i.e., about its application. Different use cases may require different levels of accuracy and different data sets with openness and interoperability being key. The presentation was accompanied by lively discussions with the numerous audience and was rounded off by networking among the participants.

Thanks a lot to Christopher Ganz for sharing his ideas with the expert group „smart services“.

On Tuesday 26th of June, the Expert Group “Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management” held its 2nd meeting at the ZHAW premises in Zurich. The meeting’s main topic was to continue the rich exchange of ‘know-how’ and ‘lessons learnt’ from different blockchain projects conducted by the Expert Group’s participants.

Two proof-of-concept presentations by ZHAW students initiated the meeting and revealed valuable insights and learnings from two different business applications of blockchain technology in Supply Chain Management. After this brief introduction and the subsequent discussion of the two blockchain prototypes, the members split into three different workshops and started to write down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of blockchain technology in Supply Chain Management.

The participants of the first workshop looked mainly into the technical aspects of blockchain, the second group elaborated on the legal issues that come along with this new technology and the third group worked towards new business cases.

Afterwards, each group presented their finding in the plenum such that all could benefit from the workshop-specific ideas and from the proposed recommendations for companies and academia. The group agreed that even though there remain many technical and legal questions open, the current development has the potential to equip blockchain pioneers with a competitive advantage and a steep learning curve. Nevertheless, there are still many points to discuss and we are looking forward to meeting again and generating further insights and learnings after the summer break in September.

The 7^th meeting for the Predictive Maintenance expert group took place at Baumer Management Services AG at their office location in Frauenfeld, and was a continuation on the topic of Sensors and their impact on predictive maintenance from the previous meeting. It started off with a presentation from Dr. Arrigo Beretta from Sulzer with the title “Opportunities and Challenges in Pump Monitoring” which covered their activities of predictive maintenance on pumps from sensor to assessment of the data, i.e. the full wing to wing solution. This presentation was followed by Peter Wyser from Roche Diagnostics who talked about predictive maintenance on their medical equipment with the presentation “Invitro Diagnostics Predictive Maintenance Approach”, describing the business driver and future roadmap. A round up discussion finalized the meeting where sensor requirement for the future was discussed, a topic that turned out to be challenging the solve in one meeting. However, in the context of predictive maintenance, being able to sense the physical quantities of value for early failure mode detection is of main importance. The sensor topic will be continued to be discussed in the group, but for next meeting the topic of retrofitting in the context of predictive maintenance will be discussed.

Below are some glimses from the meeting.

It’s already been about a week and the SDS organising committee members are still feeling the exhaustion that stays after the completion of a grand event.

On 7th of June, we organised the 5th Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS) at Kursaal in Bern. What had started as a half day workshop in 2014 with less than a hundred participants and born out of the Datalab in InIT ZHAW, is now a day conference gathering around 400 people. The conference has been a flagship event of the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services (Data+Service Alliance), a Switzerland wide network of Data and Service scientists and professionals, for the past 2 years with a strive to get bigger and better each year in terms of content and participation.

The main conference was held on the 7th and we had a pre-conference event on Deep Learning co-organized by Fernfachhochschule (FFHS) the day before. There were 3 talks followed by an apero and thereafter the Data+Service Alliance General Assembly. Tamedia, Nvidia and Datalab ZHAW presented at the Deep Learning Workshop, the slides of which can be found here.

The pre-conference event went very well and was completely sold out with 60 participants joining us. The Data+Service GA afterwards was also a good meeting and went by smoothly.

The next day, 7th June, was the big day for us. We started at 7am, setting up the location and then the day rolled out until 7 in the evening. Following are some of the glimpses to tell you more. We hope that you had a good time at the conference and are already looking forward to SDS|2019 as we are.

Our own, Dr. Gundula Heinatz Bürki opened the conference with her welcome speech. The opening was shared by our Presenting Partner sponsor, D ONE Solutions, Mr. Hans Peter Gränicher. We thank D ONE Solutions for their continued and generous support in organising this conference.

The first keynote was given by Taavi Kotka, who gave insights about creating a digital society. He is the former Estonian Government CIO and is the person behind the Estonian digitalisation of the entire society. We are extremely proud to have him at our conference and hear from him in person. 

Taavi Kotka again here and it was a housefull.

Here we have Prof. Naftali Tishby, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was our 2nd keynote speaker. Unfortunately his flight to Switzerland was cancelled and he couldn’t give the keynote in person. Thanks to the Kursaal technical team, we organised his session remotely and hopefully managed not to disappoint our participants completely. There was an entire afternoon track that Prof. Tishby was to hold, which again was held remotely. We thank Prof. Tishby for still doing it that way and the technical team at Kursaal which made it all smooth and possible.

The rest of the day went quite smooth and no further glitches were observed! The food was excellent and the breaks long enough to instigate enlightening discussions.

We had a large participation of around 400 people, here is what it looked like at the lunch break!

Because of the nice, warm weather, many people enjoyed their discussion at the terrasse.

Dr. Lisa Amini, Director of MIT IBM Watson Lab joined us as a keynote speaker. She enthralled the crowd with her talk about why AI needs even more Data Science, and vice versa.

At the end, SATW organised a panel discussion on “The impact we want AI to have on society”. The panel was held by dignitaries from Switzerland, academicians, member of parliament, Managing Director Hasler Stiftung, economists who kept the audience glued to their seats even at the end of the day. The question comes over and over again as to what the future holds for us with AI developing fast and forward hand in hand with humanity. We shall see, maybe already next year.

We thank all our keynote speakers, panelists, dignitaries, speakers and participants for making this 1 day conference a leap forward in the SDS conference series. A huge shout out to all our sponsors whose generous support is very highly appreciated.

Please stay tuned to check the conference photos, presentation slides and videos (from speakers who agreed to share) on the conference website www.sds2018.ch. They will be uploaded in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile please take some time to fill in the feedback form and help us improve SDS|2019.

We look forward to working with you all again and meeting you for SDS|2019 next year on June 13th and 14th at Kursaal again!

Photo credit goes to Mr. Tom Würsten (www.swissphotoart.com). Thank you for the incredible pictures!

The successful format of service lunches organized by the expert group “Smart services” was continued by the presentation about the topic “Servicetransformation realisieren mit Hilfe einer praxisorientierten Toolbox” (presentation in German). Adrienne Schäfer and Falko Eichen provided interesting insights in the relevance of service transformation in various industries. Many companies are trying to shift their business models towards servitization. However, this transformation is difficult if the core of the value proposition remains product-oriented. The presentation showed a toolbox to companies realize the product-service transformation step-by-step.

The 7th Machine Learning Clinic Expert Group meeting was held at the new ELCA Innovation Lab on the EPFL campus on May 3, 2018. We were hosted by Silvia Quarteroni, Senior Manager at ELCA in Lausanne (thanks a lot!).

In her talk, Silvia discussed the main “hard nuts to crack” in applied machine learning in the context of ELCA’s customer projects and R&D: “Since we have a strong focus on natural language processing, many of our issues and opportunities concern subjects such as language modelling for natural language understanding, dialogue management in virtual assistants, and dealing with the complex linguistic landscape of Switzerland.” However, the talk also presented challenges in image analysis, speech processing and statistical prediction.

Martin Jaggi, Assistant Professor at EPFL, gave a presentation about his current research work on Unsupervised Machine Learning for Text, which is performed in the EPFL Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory. Martin showed methods to analyse large scale data, including distributed training algorithms to optimize the training time. Results were given for several industrial systems (from IBM, Google and other providers) which implement these algorithms. We had a discussion on benchmarking the performance of different systems for such tasks.

The next ML Clinic meeting will be held in September. Stay tuned!