– by a member of the Expert Group “Smart Services”
Get insights from a member of the expert group “Smart Services” in this video.
“The making of…….” an applied research project: The film that was shot at the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the „Institut für Betriebs- und Regionalökonomie (IBR)“ at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – School of Business, documents how the fruitful cooperation with pistor, a SME located in central Switzerland, came about. The results from the project, in this case a toolbox for service-oriented business models, were disseminated amongst others through the „Smart services“-expert group of the Data+Service alliance. For more details see this blog.
The 9th Machine Learning Expert Group Meeting was held on February 12, 2019 at SAP in Regensdorf. About 30 participants attended from industry (SAP, Swisscom, Pax, SBB, ELCA, Google, D-One, Mobiliar, Wincasa, Siemens, etc.) and academia (CSEM, ZHAW, HSLU, FFHS, etc.).
First, Dr. Sean Kask, Senior Expert & Business Developer, SAP Leonardo Machine Learning, SAP (Switzerland) AG, gave a presentation on Machine Learning for Business at SAP, and introduced the audience to several Machine Learning examples what customers across the world today are implementing to optimize their Business processes.
Then Sergio Jimenez Otero, Data Scientist and Carl Anners, Analytics Consultant at Swisscom described the work and project on the Swisscom internal Predictive Carrier Billing, giving insights to technologies used as well as the outlook for further developing the use case.
A workshop was then held on two machine learning problems shown by PAX Lebensversicherung. Martin Weber-Nisslé, Leiter Softwareentwicklung, and Laurent
Szymkowiak, Leiter Softwareentwicklung Backoffice Applications initially introduced the challenges of the industry as well as their targets for their Machine Learning projects and facilitated very fruitful discussions.
Last but not least, Enrique Alfonseca, Research Manager at Google, gave a presentation on the research work of his team on NLP & Conversational search in the Google Assistant.
The meeting was concluded by an apéro, during which attendees exchanged further on the different topics and traded business cards and coordinates for further interactions.
Many thanks to Michael Probst and Sebastian Folk from SAP for hosting us in Regensdorf and allowing us to run a very productive meeting!
Last week’s Brown Bag Lunch was dedicated to databased services in healthcare. Two industry experts from medical technology and health IT presented innovative applications for databased services.
In front of some 30 guests, Matthias Mohler, Head of Analytics Consulting of Swisscom, presented Swisscom’s data-analytics approach. The case of an anonymized psychiatric clinic showed that one of the key hurdles of data-analysis remains the quality and standardization of data. A first step to any data-analysis project is thus to identify the most critical variables and define standard coding.
Our second speaker was Alex Geiger, Senior Specialist for Connected Health at Zimmer, the global market leader in hip and knee replacement. Mr. Geiger illustrated a very different ‘smart-service’ application: Using Apple Watches as a communication and motivation tool for patients undergoing hip or knee replacement surgery. The focus of this large-scale clinical study is to improve the patient – physician communication during the entire therapy process from a couple of weeks prior to the surgery to post-surgical rehabilitation.
A stimulating discussion after the presentations highlighted well that despite technical and data quality aspects, data protection details and trust towards the data-collecting institution are of particularly high importance in healthcare.
Our 4th meeting of the expert group “Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management” was hosted by Migros Logistics Transport. In a first speech the blockchain-startup Ambrosus explained us there approach to a blockchain-based supply chain management, whereas Migros in the second part provided us insights into their encounters with the digitalization of the supply chain and blockchain technology.
Stefan Meyer from Ambrosus presented us his view on the blockchain technology in supply chains. Ambrosus has recognized how only a holistic approach can generate value and blockchain is a tiny piece in a whole sequence of technologies. A combination of all technologies is needed to solve supply chain problems such as lack of traceability and counterfeits of goods: The basis forms the data collection with IoT devices. Without proper data, all subsequent steps are meaningless. Only after a sound data collection, technologies such as blockchain or AI are applied to improve tracking. But blockchain has a second function at Ambrosus: community management. Ambrosus has a large and active community who secures the network, tests new products and brings new ideas all organized around its AMB-Net.
After Stefan’s very exciting presentation, Thomas Wunderli from Migros Logistics Transport presented with the same enthusiasm the supply chain tower of Migros. Over the last two years, Migros has implemented a real-time monitoring system that captures everything from processes to transports in their supply chain and augments this with external data sources, e.g. weather reports. This allows Migros to react as fast as possible to unforeseen situations. Thomas also emphasized the importance of solid data in order to support decisions of the logistics headquarter. In a next step, Migros think about what data could be anchored or stored on a blockchain to create value.
As always, the participants asked numerous questions which led to fascinating discussions. We are looking forward to have more of these inspiring discussions in our fifth meeting in April.
2 weeks back we held our 2nd General Assembly for the year 2018. The assembly was located at the OBC Suisse center in Zurich, close to the Zurich main train station.
We had about 30 participants and 2 guests. The members decided on next year’s budget and updates of the Business Regulations. In terms of budget, we expect a significant increase of revenues for next year, due to both a significant growth in members, and an increase in sponsorship revenues for our flagship event, the Swiss Data Science Conference (SDS). We will use these additional financial means for substantially expanding our member support, and for increasing the number and quality of our public events, in particular the SDS conference.
In addition, six Expert Groups presented an overview of their activities during the year 2018, their highlights and some results. Expert Groups are Alliance’s core activities and often we call them the incubators of projects/collaborations. Each of the presented Expert Group highlighted such a collaboration.
We also took the opportunity to speak the SDS 2018 as the most important event of the year with 400 participants. A flashback video from SDS2018 was shown to the audience, which can also be found on the SDS website. The new concept for SDS2019 was explained, highlighting the new concept of two separate Academic and Business tracks. We are happy to announce that SDS2019 is technically co-sponsored by IEEE and the accepted academic papers proceedings will be published in IEEE Xplore.
The assembly was concluded by a networking apero.
Shortly, the GA meeting minutes and presentations will be sent to the members’ main contacts. If you are interested in the documents, please get them from the main Data+Service contact person in your member organisation.
This was a great event! Industry, academic and individual members enjoyed in-depth technical discussions about recent technical developments in the Use-Case Talks Series on Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. Dr. Thilo Stadelmann (ZHAW School of Engineering) shared his insights on the DeepScore Project, Dr. Lucas Fievet (Logic-Flow) showed an application that automatically translates computer code, and Dr. Christian Spindler (PwC) presented recent progresses in assessment techniques for black-box systems to build trust in AI.
The Use-Case Talk Series are organized by Aspaara Algorithmic Solutions AG on behalf of the Swiss Alliance of Data-Intensive Services.
The data driven company is a combination of mindset, skills, infrastructure and the capability to rapidly adapt business models. In his fascinating presentation, François Rüf, head of data and machine learning at Vontobel, presented how they are approaching these challenges.
The presentation made it clear that a broad range of methods is required for successful implementation. In particular, next to technological approaches like cloud, automation, IoT etc., creating services that are convenient and relevant from the perspective of the users as well as the development of ecosystems are essential. Moreover, the development of data-driven services cannot be tackled the same way as normal IT projects.
The highly interesting and interactive presentation was surrounded by lively discussions, which led to new inspirations and ideas and strengthened the network of the Expert Group members.
Following the presentation, the core team members of the expert group Smart Services got together to co-create ideas for further common activities. A cool list of workshops, events, or projects was the outcome. We look forward to see a firework of activities in 2019.
Last week, we had a meeting of the Expert Group Data Ethics in Bern, hosted by Mobiliar. Main topic was the discussion on how to proceed with the development of our “Ethic Codex” for commercial data usage – it is the goal of the Expert Group to create such a codex as a guideline for companies using data for doing business. The “Ethic Codex” will include the legal requirements, but will complement them with additional aspects, if we feel that just fulfilling the legal minimum could be not enough for social acceptance. The development of the ethical codex is led by Michele Loi (Uni ZH, Digital Society Initiative).
Also, Christoph Heitz (ZHAW) announced the launch of a new research project on “algorithmic fairness”: The goal of the project would be to develop a methodology to help companies to reduce and control unfairness in their algorithms. Companies from the network can still join the project. Contact Christoph directly.
On Thursday 13th of September, the 3rd meeting of the expert group “Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management” took place. More than 20 experts came together at the co-working space TGIM in Zurich to discuss the BFE-funded blockchain project “Quartierstrom”.
The expert group hosted Alain Brenzikofer from Supercomputing Systems AG who gave valuable insights into the research project: In his presentation, Alain explained the organizational structure of the project and outlined how Quartierstrom envisions a local energy market based on a blockchain network of pro- and consumers. He explained the dynamic pricing mechanism which incentivizes nodes to consume electricity in a system-friendly manner. In particular, the double-auction mechanism to allocate the solar power attracted wide interest of the expert group participants.
In order to provide inputs for future blockchain research projects, Alain showed how they evaluated several blockchain platforms until they ended up with Tendermint. In the end, Alain presented various solutions for the privacy issue with blockchains – a highly relevant topic for all blockchain projects.
Even though the participants already posed numerous questions during the presentation, the subsequent discussion revealed many fascinating subtleties of blockchain implementations. It also became obvious that the group’s experts have a very deep and multi-faceted knowledge on blockchain-technology. We are looking forward to enhance and enrich this vast knowledge even more in our fourth meeting in December. The meeting came to an end with interesting talks during the concluding networking apéro.
Under the motto “Learning through examples”, the conference on 5th September highlighted viable perspectives for Swiss SMEs. On the basis of concrete implementations, representatives of companies and universities showed what is possible today and reported on their experiences. This showed ways in which companies can take the next step in the implementation of digitalisation.
The conference focused in particular on the question of how to develop new products and services in a digitalised world. The interesting presentations and lively discussions showed which principles should guide the digital transformation in SMEs and which digital supports are already proving their worth in everyday life. In addition, it became clear that digital transformation is a multi-dimensional challenge in which, in addition to technology, one’s own organization and customers also play an outstanding role. Customers expect the services of modern service offerings and consistent product and service experiences. It was also particularly emphasized that new partnerships are an absolute necessity for smart services and products. New ecosystems are emerging in which the trust of the players is built up through co-creation in lighthouse projects.
