The Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services, (Data+Service in short), was recently mentioned in the “The Greater Zurich Area” blog-site highlighting its role in being the precursor of data-science network of innovators in Switzerland. Data+Service has its roots in the ZHAW Datalab which specialises in joining threads of the various topics of data-science, analysing and bringing them together to design innovative services for industries as well as for humans. The article mentions the role of ZHAW Datalab in founding this network of data scientists and experts in Switzerland. We thank “The Greater Zurich Area” for the acknowledgement and appreciation and take the opportunity to update our readers with some facts and figures about Data+Service.

The “Data+Service” story began a few years ago at ZHAW Datalab with an idea to create a network in Switzerland where experts and scientists working in the field of Data Science come together, share their experience and expertise and make Switzerland an internationally recognised hub for data-driven value creation. ZHAW Datalab, a multi-disciplinary entity, recognised the potential of data-science in two application pillars which are, Industrial Services (around Industry 4.0/Internet of Things) and Digital and mobile services for humans to form the basis of the network.  And thus began the exercise of inviting and involving educational institutions and industries to shape the data and services landscape for the alliance.

Data+Service is recognised and supported by Switzerland’s Center for Innovation and Technology as one of the 11 National Thematic Networks and focuses on 3 main areas;

Education: to provide training on both technical and business related topics around data-driven value creation.

Innovation: to catalyse scientific innovation into data-driven products, services and business models.

Inspiration: to make achievements visible and thus inspire innovation and entrepreneurship.

Being officially founded in October 2016, so far, the network comprises of 15 academic members, 24 industry members and 10 National and International partner organisations. The belief of creating value through multi-disciplinary networking is core to the Data+Service alliance. Interested parties are welcome to get in touch with us to have their questions answered about our activities and membership benefits. Meanwhile, our activities can be followed on twitter at @DataServiceCH.

The newly formed expert group “Data Integration, Governance and Sharing” is going to have its kick-off meet on the 22nd of March 2017 at ZHAW Lagerstrasse campus inZürich.

The expert group focusses on finding and sharing solutions around Trusted Data, tackling typical issues such as the following:

• Data integration: Lack of a joint data model that data experts understand, and that data experts can manage and develop in an intuitive language with only little involvement of IT.
• Data governance: Lack of control over data versions, including all dependencies with different entities and source systems. As an example the group may investigate where companies could find a balance between the value generated by exchanging data with others (e.g., value from developing more reliable predictive models due to more accessible data), and the associated impact of leaking trade secrets (or in other terms, how to avoid leaking trade secrets from exchanging data). Both, academic research and corporate innovation projects will contribute to answer this question.
• Data sharing: Lack of a common data language amongst teams, systems, and organizations. Substantial efforts are required to make data sources compatible and non-trivial conversions are necessary to aggregate items of different granularity. Smart access rules and anonymization algorithms are key enablers for trustful data exchange.

Most users of data today, both inside and within third party organizations, assume the data items they use for processing, decision-making, internal and external reporting, or potentially sharing to be of adequate quality. However, in most enterprises, system integration lacks behind the mentioned requirements thus hampers value creation. This Expert Group sets out to tackle these issues from a conceptual basis to very concrete implementations.

The first meeting will focus on identifying the expectation of the group members, positioning within the evolving expert group ecosystem and discuss the plans and goals for the next meeting. The group will also discuss what are the gains and pains of data integration today and will initiate a discussion on whether you would like to share your data with your competitors.

The group is lead by Prof. Gerold Baudinot from ZHAW as the academic lead and Dr. Christian Spindler from PwC Zurich as the industry lead. The participation in the group meeting is limited to the members of the Data+Service alliance, therefore if you are already a member of the alliance and would like to participate in the first meeting, please directly get in touch with the group leaders. However if you are not a member of the alliance yet, please get in touch with us to discuss the various member benefits and the different membership plans.

We look forward to hearing from you and have your participation in the expert group!

The Expert Group of the Data+Service alliance, “Software & Tools”, is meeting on the 31st of March 2017 at ZHAW Lagerstrasse Zurich. The first meeting of the expert group was on January 20th 2017, where the group officially kicked-off and the activities were planned.

Data Science has recently gained significant attention both in academia and industry. Especially in the areas of big data and machine learning the software and tools landscape is changing rapidly. This makes it very difficult for companies to keep up to date and choose the right time to embark on new technologies. Unlike universities that typically experiment with the latest features, companies are often more conservative due to legacy software.

The goal of this expert group is to provide a technology radar for software and tools and to discuss new trends as well as best practices. Similar to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, the idea is to become the major reference to Data and Service Science related technology insights.

The expert group is lead by Kurt Stockinger (ZHAW), Philippe Cudre-Mauroux (eXascale Infolab) and Christian Gügi (Scigility).

The expert group activities are accessible only to the members of the alliance. If you are a member already and would like to join this expert group, please get in touch directly with the group leaders. If you are not a member of the alliance, please get in touch with us to discuss the different membership possibilities.

For the upcoming workshop following 2 talks are scheduled which will be followed by a round of discussion.

Text Mining: Open Source versus Proprietary Software – Mirco Rossi, Mobiliar

Many data science projects at Mobiliar are in the domain of text mining. The main goal is to unleash the information of unstructured text data. Methods like text clustering, text classification or named entity extraction are used, which are implemented both in open source and proprietary software. This presentation should open the discussion to share the experience of the group members  in “open source versus proprietary software” in the text mining or related domains.

Data science architecture at SwissRe – Lukasz Lewandowski, SwissRe

With the introduction of a data science workplace Swiss Re embraced a bi-modal approach to support practical data science operations in an enterprise IT context. A light-weight release model for analytics apps and microservices embeds these activities in a larger software development lifecycle of the company, and allows for effective prototyping and roll out of text mining and predictive solutions.

On Oct. 24, the expert group „Services for Individuals“ held a successful workshop at the iHomeLab in Lucerne. We were guided by our question „how to provide service value to individual users by systematically leveraging the benefits of data“. The workshop was started with five short expert inputs to the topics:

– Systematic methodology for data product design

– Maturity model for the development of data-based products

– Hidden needs and pains

– Willingness to share data

Upon this, one of our industrial partners took the role of the problem sponsor and pitched his specific data-service design challenge. With the fresh impressions of the five methodological inputs, we split up into groups and put our heads and hearts together to find innovative approaches to the solution of the business challenge. In the wrap-up discussion, the break-out groups reported their findings to the entire team. The problem sponsor highly appreciated the new approaches and findings, which help him pave the way to a successful business solution.

The inspiring afternoon was concluded by an impressive visit to the visitor center of the iHomeLab. We got a touch and feel of what smart living may bring to our lives in the future. In the evening, the team enjoyed a pleasant dinner in the beautiful old town of Lucerne.

Thanks a lot to all for their active and inspiring participation! We are looking forward to our next workshop in April 2017, where we plan to tackle another exciting business challenge by one of our partners. 

Read this interesting article from the Harvard Business Review: 

The search for new business ideas and new business models is hit-or-miss in most corporations, despite the extraordinary pressure on executives to grow their businesses. Management scholars have considered various reasons for this failure. One well-documented explanation: Managers who are skilled at executing clearly defined strategies are ill equipped for out-of-the-box thinking. In addition, when good ideas do emerge, they’re often doomed because the company is organized to support one way of doing business and doesn’t have the processes or metrics to support a new one. That explanation, too, is well supported…