Tag: digital service desk ai software

Significance of CI CD Process in DevOps

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Muraleedharan Vijayakumar

Developing and releasing software can be a complicated process, especially as applications, teams, and deployment infrastructure grow in complexity themselves. Often, challenges become more pronounced as projects grow. To develop, test, and release software quickly and consistently, developers and organizations have created distinct strategies to manage and automate these processes.

Did you know?  Amazon releases a new production code once every 11.6 seconds.

Why CI/CD/CD?

The era of digital transformations demands faster deployments into production. Faster deployments do not warrant defective releases, the solution – ‘DevOps’. The development team, operations team, and IT services team have to work in tandem and the magic circle that brings all of them together is DevOps.

To adopt a DevOps culture, implementing the right DevOps tools with the right DevOps process is essential. Continuous integration/continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD/CD) help us developers and testers ship the software faster and safer in a structured environment.

The biggest obstacle that needs to be overcome in constructing a DevOps environment is scalability. There are no definite measures on the scalability of an application or product development, but DevOps environment should be ready to scale to meet business and technology needs. It lays a strong foundation for building an agile DevOps for the business.

Continuous Integration and Deployment has seen many benefits in the software delivery process. Initiating automated code builds once checks are completed, running automated test suites, flagging errors and breaking builds if not adhered to compliance have eased the way of deploying a stable release into staging or production environment and eliminating manual errors and human bias.

How is CI/CD/CD Set Up?

Version control tools play an important role in the success of our DevOps pipeline. And designing a good source stage is pivotal to our CI/CD success. It ensures that we can version code, digital assets, and binary files (and more) all in one spot. This enables teams to communicate and collaborate better — and deploy faster.

Our code branching strategy determines how and when developers branch and merge. When deciding on a strategy it is important to evaluate what makes sense for our team and product. Most version control systems will let you adopt and customize standard strategies like mainline, trunk-based, task/feature branching, etc.,

Typical Branching Model Followed

A basic workflow starts with code being checked out. When the work in the branch is committed, CI processes are triggered. This can be done with a merge or pull request. Then the CI/CD pipeline kicks into high gear.

The goal of CI/CD is to continuously integrate changes to find errors earlier in the process, as known as ‘Shift Left’.  The ultimate goal of having an automated CI/CD process in place to identify errors or flag non-compliance at an early stage of the development process. This increases the project’s velocity by avoiding late-stage defects and delays. It creates an environment where code is always ready for a release. With the right branching strategy, teams are equipped to deliver success.

Continuous Integration: Integrating newly developed code with the central repository is continuous integration. Automated CI results in automated builds that are triggered to merge the newly developed codes into the repository. As part of this process, plugins can be added to perform static code analysis, security compliance checks, etc., to identify if the newly added code would have any impact on the application. If there are compliance issues, the automated build breaks, and the same is reflected to the developer with insights. Automated CI helps in increasing the productivity of the developers and the team.

Continuous Delivery: At the end of a successful CI, Continuous Delivery is triggered. CD ensures to automate the software delivery process and commits to deliver the integrated code into the production stage without any bugs or delays. CD helps in merging the newly developed code into the main branch of the software so that a ready to production product is available with all the checks in place.CD also checks the quality of the code and performs tests to check whether it can release the functional build to the production environment.

Continuous Deployment: The final and most critical part of DevOps is Continuous Deployment. After the successful merging of certified code, the pipelines are triggered to deploy the code into the production environment. These pipelines are also triggered automatically. The pipelines are constructed to handle the target environment be it jar or container deployments. The most important aspect of this pipeline is to tag the releases that are also done in the production environment. If there are rollbacks these tags help the team to roll back to the right version of the build.

CI/CD/CD is an art that needs to be crafted in the right and most efficient way that will help the software development team achieve their success at a faster pace.

Different Stages & Complete DevOps Setup

What is the CI/CD/CD  Outcome?

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About the Author –

Murleedharan is a senior technical manager and has managed, developed, and launched cutting edge business intelligence and analytics platforms using big data technologies. He has experience in hosting the platform in Microsoft Azure by leveraging the MS PaaS. He is a product manager for zDesk – A Virtual Desktop offering from GAVS.
His passion is to get a friction-less DevOps operational in an environment to bring down the deployment time to a few seconds.

Design-led Organization: Creative Thinking as a Practice!

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Gogul R G

This is the first article in the series of ‘Design-led organization’ writing about creative thinking as a practice in GAVS. It is the first step for the readers to explore the world of design and creativity. So, let’s get started!

First let’s see what is design thinking is all about

There is a common misconception that design thinking is new. But when you look back, people have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions. Design has been practiced for ages to build monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems, etc. Design is not only limited to aesthetics, it is more of a mindset to think of a solution. Design thinking is a mindset to iteratively think about a complex problem and come up with a viable solution. 

Thinking outside of the box can provide an innovative solution to a sticky problem. However, thinking outside of the box can be a real challenge as we naturally develop patterns of thinking that are based on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge surround ourselves. It takes something to detach away from a situation where we’re too closely involved to be able to find better possibilities.

To illustrate how a fresh way of thinking can create unexpectedly good solutions, let’s look at a famous incident. Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver had tried to pass under a low bridge. But, he failed, and the truck became firmly lodged under the bridge.

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The driver was unable to continue driving through or reverse out. The struck truck caused massive traffic problems, which resulted in emergency personnel, engineers, firefighters, and truck drivers gathering to negotiate various solutions to dislodge the truck.

Emergency workers were debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. Each of one were looking for a solution with their respective level of expertise. A boy walking by and witnessing the intense debate looked at the truck, at the bridge, then looked at the road and said, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?” to the absolute amazement of all the specialists and experts trying to resolve the issue.

When the solution was tested, the truck could drive with ease, having suffered only the damage caused by its initial attempt to pass underneath the bridge. It symbolizes the struggles we face where often the most obvious solutions are the ones hardest to come by because of the self-imposed constraints we work within.  

“Challenging our assumptions and everyday knowledge is often difficult for us humans, as we rely on building patterns of thinking in order not to have to learn everything from scratch every time.“

Let’s come back to our topic “What is Design thinking?” Tim Brown, Executive Chairman of IDEO – an international design and consulting firm quoted design thinking as below.

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Now let’s think about our truck example. A boy with his fresh mindset provides a simple solution to address a complex problem. Yeah! this is the sweet spot. Everyone is creative and capable of thinking like a designer, and out of the box, to come up with a solution. This way of inculcating design as a mindset for a solution is known as Design thinking.

Yes, you read it right, everyone is creative…

We forget that back in kindergarten, we were all creative. We all played and experimented with weird things without fear or shame. We didn’t know enough not to. The fear of social rejection is something we learned as we got older. And that’s why it’s possible to regain our creative abilities, even decades later. In the field of design and user experience, there are individuals to stick with a methodology a while, they will end up doing amazing things. They come up with break through ideas or suggestions and work creatively with a team to develop something truly innovative. They surprise themselves with the realization that they are a lot more creative than they had thought. That early success shakes up how they see themselves and makes them eager to do more.

We just need to rediscover what we already have: the capacity to imagine, or build upon, new to the world ideas.  But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas.

Geshe Thupten Jinpa, who has been the Dalai Lama’s chief English translator for more than twenty years, shared an insight about the nature of creativity. Jinpa pointed out that there’s no word in the Tibetan language for ‘creativity’ or ‘being creative’. The closest translation is ‘natural’. In other words, if you want to be more creative, you should be more natural! So…be natural!

At your workplace, the complex problems can be easily sorted out when you find a solution using creativity with the mindset of design thinking. Creativity can be improved by following the below steps.

  1. Go for a walk.
  2. Play your favorite games.
  3. Move your eyes.
  4. Take a break and enjoy yourself.
  5. Congratulate yourself each time you do something well.
  6. Estimate time, distance, and money.
  7. Take a route you never have taken before.
  8. Look for images in mosaics, patterns, textures, clouds, stars…
  9. Try something you have never done before.
  10. Do a creative exercise.
  11. Start a collection (stamps, coins, art, stationery, anything you wish to collect)
  12. Watch Sci-Fi or fantasy films.
  13. Change the way you do things – there are no routine tasks, only routine way of doing things.
  14. Wear a color you do not like.
  15. Think about how they invented equipment or objects you use daily.
  16. Make a list of 10 things you think are impossible to do and then imagine how you could make each one possible.
  17. For every bad thing that happens to you, remember at least 3 good things that happened.
  18. Read something you have not read yet.
  19. Make friends with people on the other side of the world.
  20. When you have an idea, make a note of it, and later check to see if it happened.
  21. Connect a sport with your work.
  22. Try food you never tried before.
  23. Talk to grandparents and relatives and listen to their stories.
  24. Give an incorrect answer to a question.
  25. Find links between people, things, ideas, or facts.
  26. Ask children how to do something and observe their creativity.

Start doing the above-mentioned steps to inculcate a creative mindset and apply it in your day-to-day work. Companies like GE health care, Procter & Gamble, UBER practiced design thinking and implemented in their new product launches and for solving complex problems in their organizations. Be natural to be more creative! When you are more creative, you can apply design thinking for seeking any solution for a complex problem in your work.

This is the first article in the series of Design led Organization in GAVS. Keep watching this space for more articles on design and keep exploring the world of design-thinking!

References:

About the Author –

Gogul is a passionate UX designer with 8+ years of experience into designing experiences for digital channels like Enterprise apps, B2C, B2B apps, Mobile apps, Kiosk, Point of Sale, Endless aisle, telecom products. He is passionate about transforming complex problems into actionable solutions using design.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

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Dr. Ramjan Shaik

Scientific progress is about many small advancements and occasional big leaps. Medicine is no exception. In a time of rapid healthcare transformation, health organizations must quickly adapt to evolving technologies, regulations, and consumer demands. Since the inception of electronic health record (EHR) systems, volumes of patient data have been collected, creating an atmosphere suitable for translating data into actionable intelligence. The growing field of artificial intelligence (AI) has created new technology that can handle large data sets, solving complex problems that previously required human intelligence. AI integrates these data sources to develop new insights on individual health and public health.

Highly valuable information can sometimes get lost amongst trillions of data points, costing the industry around $100 billion a year. Providers must ensure that patient privacy is protected, and consider ways to find a balance between costs and potential benefits. The continued emphasis on cost, quality, and care outcomes will perpetuate the advancement of AI technology to realize additional adoption and value across healthcare. Although most organizations utilize structured data for analysis, valuable patient information is often “trapped” in an unstructured format. This type of data includes physician and patient notes, e-mails, and audio voice dictations. Unstructured data is frequently richer and more multifaceted. It may be more difficult to navigate, but unstructured data can lead to a plethora of new insights. Using AI to convert unstructured data to structured data enables healthcare providers to leverage automation and technology to enhance processes, reduce the staff required to monitor patients while filling gaps in healthcare labor shortages, lower operational costs, improve patient care, and monitor the AI system for challenges.

AI is playing a significant role in medical imaging and clinical practice. Providers and healthcare organizations have recognized the importance of AI and are tapping into intelligence tools. Growth in the AI health market is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021 and to exceed $10 billion by 2024.  AI offers the industry incredible potential to learn from past encounters and make better decisions in the future. Algorithms could standardize tests, prescriptions, and even procedures across the healthcare system, being kept up-to-date with the latest guidelines in the same way a phone’s operating system updates itself from time to time.

There are three main areas where AI efforts are being invested in the healthcare sector.

  • Engagement – This involves improvising on how patients interact with healthcare providers and systems.
  • Digitization – AI and other digital tools are expected to make operations more seamless and cost-effective.
  • Diagnostics – By using products and services that use AI algorithms diagnosis and patient care can be improved.

AI will be most beneficial in three other areas namely physician’s clinical judgment and diagnosis, AI-assisted robotic surgery, and virtual nursing assistants.

Following are some of the scenarios where AI makes a significant impact in healthcare:

  • AI can be utilized to provide personalized and interactive healthcare, including anytime face-to-face appointments with doctors. AI-powered chatbots can be powered with technology to review the patient symptoms and recommend whether a virtual consultation or a face-to-face visit with a healthcare professional is necessary.
  • AI can enhance the efficiency of hospitals and clinics in managing patient data, clinical history, and payment information by using predictive analytics. Hospitals are using AI to gather information on trillions of administrative and health record data points to streamline the patient experience. This collaboration of AI and data helps hospitals/clinics to personalize healthcare plans on an individual basis.
  • A taskforce augmented with artificial intelligence can quickly prioritize hospital activity for the benefit of all patients. Such projects can improve hospital admission and discharge procedures, bringing about enhanced patient experience.
  • Companies can use algorithms to scrutinize huge clinical and molecular data to personalize healthcare treatments by developing AI tools that collect and analyze data from genetic sequencing to image recognition empowering physicians in improved patient care. AI-powered image analysis helps in connecting data points that support cancer discovery and treatment.
  • Big data and artificial intelligence can be used in combination to predict clinical, financial, and operational risks by taking data from all the existing sources. AI analyzes data throughout a healthcare system to mine, automate, and predict processes. It can be used to predict ICU transfers, improve clinical workflows, and even pinpoint a patient’s risk of hospital-acquired infections. Using artificial intelligence to mine health data, hospitals can predict and detect sepsis, which ultimately reduces death rates.
  • AI helps healthcare professionals harness their data to optimize hospital efficiency, better engage with patients, and improve treatment. AI can notify doctors when a patient’s health deteriorates and can even help in the diagnosis of ailments by combing its massive dataset for comparable symptoms. By collecting symptoms of a patient and inputting them into the AI platform, doctors can diagnose quickly and more effectively.   
  • Robot-assisted surgeries ranging from minimally-invasive procedures to open-heart surgeries enables doctors to perform procedures with precision, flexibility, and control that goes beyond human capabilities, leading to fewer surgery-related complications, less pain, and a quicker recovery time. Robots can be developed to improve endoscopies by employing the latest AI techniques which helps doctors get a clearer view of a patient’s illness from both a physical and data perspective.

Having understood the advancements of AI in various facets of healthcare, it is to be realized that AI is not yet ready to fully interpret a patient’s nuanced response to a question, nor is it ready to replace examining patients – but it is efficient in making differential diagnoses from clinical results. It is to be understood very clearly that the role of AI in healthcare is to supplement and enhance human judgment, not to replace physicians and staff.

We at GAVS Technologies are fully equipped with cutting edge AI technology, skills, facilities, and manpower to make a difference in healthcare.

Following are the ongoing and in-pipeline projects that we are working on in healthcare:

ONGOING PROJECT:

AI Devops Automation Service Tools

PROJECTS IN PIPELINE:

AIOps Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations
AIOps Digital Transformation Solutions
Best AI Auto Discovery Tools
Best AIOps Platforms Software

Following are the projects that are being planned:

  • Controlling Alcohol Abuse
  • Management of Opioid Addiction
  • Pharmacy Support – drug monitoring and interactions
  • Reducing medication errors in hospitals
  • Patient Risk Scorecard
  • Patient Wellness – Chronic Disease management and monitoring

In conclusion, it is evident that the Advent of AI in the healthcare domain has shown a tremendous impact on patient treatment and care. For more information on how our AI-led solutions and services can help your healthcare enterprise, please reach out to us here.

About the Author –

Dr. Ramjan is a Data Analyst at GAVS. He has a Doctorate degree in the field of Pharmacy. He is passionate about drawing insights out of raw data and considers himself to be a ‘Data Person’.

He loves what he does and tries to make the most of his work. He is always learning something new from programming, data analytics, data visualization to ML, AI, and more.

Center of Excellence – Security

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The Security Center of Excellence was instituted to set standards in the practice and be the point of contact for technical solutions, problem solving, etc. The broad objectives of this CoE are as follows:

  • Develop and maintain technical assets that can be leveraged across GAVS.
  • Enable Quality Governance by providing support in gating of architecture and design related deliverables.
  • Enable Operational Governance by establishing cadence for tech review of projects.
  • Create domain-based SMEs within the practice.
  • Train and upskill members in the practice.
  • Improve customer satisfactory index by implementing new ideas and innovations across all engagements.
  • Create additional SOC services for market competency.
  • Automation – Detect, investigate and remediate cyberthreats with playbooks and response workflows.

COVID and the changing nature of threat landscape

For many industries, it has been challenging period ever since the COVID outbreak, more so for those in security. Clearly, the bad actors have lot of time at their disposal which is reflective in the innovative techniques being used to attack targets. The level of vigilance required in monitoring the alerts and application of threat hunting techniques is key to diagnosing problems at initial stages of compromise in the worst-case scenario.

Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider

Remote Infrastructure Monitoring Services
Source: IBM X-Force Research

For enterprises that have no clue about MDR (Managed Detection and Response), this is a good time for them to start. We have innovative, cost effective solutions – “Make Hay while the Sun shines”. Small and large corporations alike have lost business and money because of lapse in security controls and monitoring. Now is not the time to make headlines that you are the victim of a major breach.

Our team is developing a vulnerability alerting tool, which we intend to equip customers with to provide qualified bulletin alerts, i.e. alerts only on vulnerabilities that affect them. This is a first of a kind in the market. This will greatly benefit existing and new customers.

Expanding into IAM and PAM

Security practice is expanding into Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) services. With new customers being onboarded into this focus areas for products such as Sailpoint, Thycotic, Ping, Cyberark, Okta and Azure PIM, we are expanding our talent pool through recruitment and through training and certification. This should largely benefit our existing customers and prospects who intend to leverage our security practice to fulfil their cyber security needs.

Expansion of our Red Team

Our Red Team within the practice has been expanded with many talented members, including some with bug bounty bragging rights. This has enormously helped in performing intensive tests on our internal product platforms, security assessments for customers. We have also extensively invested on tools for the Red Team to help them reduce assessment times.

Certification drive

With some more analysts having certified across AZ-500, Cyberark and trained on Darktrace. GAVS’ security analysts are taking full advantage to increase their knowledge thanks to the generosity of our alliances and training sites like Pluralsight. Even the mighty Microsoft opened their learning website for free, enabling young talent to equip themselves with critical DevOps and Cloud security skills.

As part of CoE initiatives, we have;

  • Aligned our security roadmap based on industry trends and to ensure solutions tailored for customer pain points.
  • Extended our SOC practice with IAM and PAM in 2020.
  • Identified domain-based SME and product-based SME for quick support.

We are currently in the process of creating security products, GVAS and GSMA, to help customer in proactively identifying and addressing vulnerabilities and self-maturity assessment of their cybersecurity posture. We are also underway to add Operational security to our Security practice.

If you have any questions about the CoE, you may reach out to them at COE_INFOSEC@gavstech.com

CoE Team Members

  • Venkatakrishnan A
  • Shivaram J
  • Alex Nepolian Lawrence
  • Ravindran Girikrishnan
  • Aravindah Sadhasivam Subramanian
  • Vijayakumar Veerapandiyan
  • Thubati Uday
  • Ganta Venkata Sandeep
  • Sundaramoorthy S
  • Sukanya Srinivasan

Autonomous Things

Posted on by Site Admin
Machine learning service provider

Bindu Vijayan

“Autonomous things (AuT), or the Internet of autonomous things (IoAT), is an emerging term for the technological developments that are expected to bring computers into the physical environment as autonomous entities without human direction, freely moving and interacting with humans and other objects…”

To put it simply, Autonomous Things use AI and work unsupervised to complete specific tasks without humans. Devices are enhanced with AI, sensors and analytical capabilities to be able to make informed and appropriate decisions.  They (these devices) work collaboratively between humans and the environment and provide superior performance.  Today AuT work across several environments with various levels of intelligence and capabilities. Some popular examples of these devices are drones, vehicles, smart home devices among others. The components of Autonomous things – software and AI hardware are getting increasingly efficient. With improved technologies (and significantly reducing sensor costs), the variety of tasks and processes that can be automated are increasing, with the advantage of bringing in more data and feedback that can efficiently improve and enhance the benefits of autonomous things.

The technology is used in a wide variety of scenarios – as data collectors from a variety of terrains and environments, as delivery systems (by Amazon, pizza deliveries, etc.), medical supplies to remote areas, etc. Robotics used in the supply chain has proven it reduces/elevates the danger out of the hitherto human tasks in warehouses.  And they probably have the most economic potential currently, followed by autonomous vehicles.  Drones are used to collect data across a wide variety of functions –  for surveillance, security, stock management, weather forecasting, obtaining air data, oceanic data, agricultural planning, etc.

Some fascinating use cases:

Healthcare

Drones are proving to be more and more effective in several ways – they are currently used extensively for surveillance of disaster sites that have biological hazards.  There is no better relevance than the current times when they can actually be used in epidemiology to track disease spread,  and of course for further research and studies.  Drones are facilitating on-demand healthcare by providing medicines to terrains that are difficult to access.  Swoop Aero is one such company that provides medicines via drones.  Drones have brought healthcare into the most remote areas with diagnosis and treatment made available. Remote areas of Africa have their regular medical supplies,  vaccine supplies, lab samples collected, emergency medical equipment made available through Drones. They are also used in telementoring, for perioperative evaluation and so on.  Drones have been very efficient in accessing areas and providing necessary support where ground transport is not reliable or safe or impossible.  Today, most governments have Drones on their national agenda under various sectors. The Delft University of Technology is developing an ambulance drone technology that can be used at disaster sites to increase rescue rates..

Retail

In a world where we have virtual assistants do grocery shopping, replenish stocks, and cooking machines making food, when there is a need to go out shopping, shoppers want to have an easy, fast and frictionless process.  Today, customers do not want to wait in queues and go through conventional checkouts, and Retailers know that they might be losing customers due to their checkout process.  And autonomous shops like Amazon Go are giving that experience to customers where they can purchase without the inconvenience of checkout lines.

Providers of checkout-free shopping technology like ‘Grabango’, use sensor vision and ML to actually hold a virtual shopping basket for every person in the store.  The technology is reputed to process a multitude simultaneous checkout transactions. “Grabango’s system uses high-quality sensor hardware and high-precision computer algorithms to acquire the location of every item in the store. This results in a real-time planogram covering the entire retail environment.” They say it results in increased sales and loyalty, streamlined operations and inventory management and out of stock alerts.

Construction

Companies like Chicago based, Komatsu American Corp., have autonomous haulage stems that have optimized safety in the mining industry like never before. They “help you continue to meet your bottom line while achieving zero-harm” while their focus has been on developing autonomous mining solutions, they have been doing it for more than three decades now! Their FrontRunner AHS has moved more than two billion tons of surface material so far in driverless operations.  Catepillar would be deploying their fleet of autonomous trucks and blast drills for the iron mine in Western Australia – Rio Tinto Koodaideri.  The industry is thriving with autonomous and semi autonomous equipment, and it is evident that it has brought improvements to productivity, and increased profitability. At the Australian mine “autonomous vehicles operated on average 700 hours longer and with 15 per cent lower unit costs”… Similarly, there are other companies like Intsite, a heavy machinery company; their autonomous crane ÁutoSite 100’ does autonomous operation of heavy machinery.

Transportation

Most of us think Tesla when we think autonomous vehicles.  Elon Musk’s dream of providing autonomous ride-sharing has Tesla working on getting out one million robotaxis on the road this year. We will have to wait and see how that is going to pan out. Though autonomous vehicles are the most popular, I suppose it might take a little more time before it finds answers to the regulatory challenges, definitely not an easy task.  It gets quite overwhelming when we think of what we are expecting from autonomous vehicles – it assumes correct performance no matter the uncertainties on the roads and the environment, as well as the ability to face any sort of system failures on its own, and AI is a very critical technology when we are talking real-time decision making. Those sort of scenarios call for a strong computing platform in order to do the analysis at the edge for faster decision making.  The new V2X, which is the 5G vehicle-to-everything is expected to make autonomous vehicles mainstream because the vital information would get transmitted as structured data to the vehicle. V2X is expected to have vehicles interfacing with anything, be it pedestrians, roadside infrastructure, cyclists, etc.

Today, technology is also looking at ‘vehicle platooning’ – “Platoons decrease the distances between cars or trucks using electronic, and possibly mechanical, coupling. This capability would allow many cars or trucks to accelerate or brake simultaneously. This system also allows for a closer headway between vehicles by eliminating reacting distance needed for human reaction.” It has a group of self driving vehicles moving at high speed but safely, as the trucks are in constant communication with each other and use this intelligence to make informed decisions like braking, speeds, etc.  And autonomous trucks and cars can automatically join these platoons or leave, this has the advantages of reduced congestion, fewer traffic collisions, better fuel economy, and shorter commutes during peak hours. 

Conclusion

Studies show that Autonomous things are fast moving to ‘swarm’ or a bunch of intelligent devices, where multiple devices will function together collaboratively, as against the previously isolated intelligent components/ things. They are going to be intelligently networked among themselves and with the environment, and the wider that becomes within every industry, they are going to show phenomenal capabilities. But let’s not forget there is a whole other side to AI, given how unpredictable things are in life, AI would sooner or later have to respond to things that it never saw in training… we still are the smarter ones…

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_things

https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/

https://worldline.com/en/home/blog/2020/march/from-automatic-to-autonomous-payments-can-things-pay.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6174005/

https://www.komatsuamerica.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(automobile)https://grabango.com/

Dashboard SAP Lumira Designer – Write Back Functionality

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Mohammed Fazal Uddin Kashif

Dashboards are considered to be one of the key success factors of businesses. Easy access to real-time KPIs allows them to be proactive and address business challenges before they impact the bottom line.

SAP Lumira Designer, formerly known as SAP Design Studio, is one of the robust products available in the market for developing top-of-the-line analytical applications and business dashboards. However, every tool by its core functionality has limitations for some use cases and business processes. One of such considerable cases is the ability to write back to a database directly from the dashboard.

Write back functionality assists business users to modify the data while analyzing from the dashboard rather than doing it in the source system. This functionality facilitates business users to manipulate the data and reflects refreshed data in the dashboard for further review and assessment.

This article introduces the use of Lumira SDK Extension component, POST RESPONSE PARSER, which enables the core range of Lumira designer to expand its boundary to include write-back functionality by integrating external Web API into the Lumira Dashboard.

Integrating Post Response Parser SDK Extension, the Lumira dashboard could be transformed from a pure data visualization application into an interactive data management analytical application.

Data Exploration & Smart Visualizations

Dashboards are analytical tools that visually track, analyzes and display Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the business processes or the portfolios. It provides a comprehensive snapshot of the performance of a key component within the portfolio. KPIs are business metrics which assists the leadership team to arrive at key decisions and drive towards the goals.

Business Dashboards and analytical applications provide at-a-glance visual and graphical representation of data which eliminates the need to go through long and complex excel spreadsheets.

Also, it’s time-consuming and difficult to pull out the most important business information whereas presenting that information in an appealing, visual way is more result-driven and effective.

Interactive dashboards enable us to visualize the data, filter on demand and simply click to dive deeper, quickly engage end-users, and provide an intuitive experience and insights.

Among various visualization tools available in the market, SAP Lumira has an edge being an SAP tool where end-user consumption of analytical applications is governed and secured by the SAP Business Objects BI Platform.

Extending the Dashboard Functionality

Lumira designer provides extensive customizations through scripting, styling with CSS and above all, the integration of external SDK Components makes it a pinnacle tool to achieve the desired functionalities.

Like any other technology, dashboards are constantly evolving, with versatility and impactful ability of integrating SDK components assisting the rapidly developing scope and scale of visualizations for the organizations.

Along those lines, Business users expect the ability to modify the data that lies behind a visualization component by providing data inputs to the dashboard while analyzing the data and anticipate the changes to be reflected immediately in the dashboard.

Lumira designer leverages support for updating or modifying the data in underlying database through write back functionality.

Benefits of write back in the dashboard:

  • It transforms a traditional dashboard to Interactive analytical application which supports business data modifications
  • It allows data analysis and data update from the same dashboard, rather switching over different applications for each task

SDK Extensions

SDK stands for Software Development Kit. SDK is set of tools, libraries, code samples, processes and guides that allows developers to create applications on a specific platform.

SDK Extension components can be integrated flawlessly into the core application to utilize its features for the customized product developments. The visualization of extension components is based on HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Web Application Programming Interface

Web API is an Application Programming Interface over the web which can be accessed using HTTP protocol.

Web API is an extensible framework for building HTTP based services that can be accessed in different applications on different platforms such as web, windows, mobile etc.

Integrating Web APIs into the Lumira designer enhances the dashboard functionality by adding abilities not offered in the baseline version of the tool, such as providing the possibility of writing back to the source database directly from the dashboard itself.

Post Response Parser

Post Response Parser is an SDK Extension, with which you can model your application to make AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) calls to any Web API and evaluate the response for desired interactivity in Lumira designer.

Feature of Post Response Parser:

  • Opens a request via AJAX call to any specific URL
  • Accepts parameters along the Request
  • Supports BIAL (BI Action Language) Scripting for interactive control at runtime

Business Use Case

In Banking, Credit Control & Monitoring department uses exception reports on their day to day operations for the analysis of their customers credit performance. Based on the outcomes, the team decides on the action to be taken for the respective customers with the various levels of audits.

Business Team faces challenges to maintain and track the remarks and comments on each customer by looking at the reports. So CCM wants to develop a dashboard with the ability to update their observations and comments on the same dashboard which in turn gets stored in database.

Lumira designer provides sub-optimal workarounds for capturing the filters and remarks with technical components like Bookmarks and Comments which comes along with the core application, but these components cannot not write back to the database, but incorporating  SDK Extensions along with the core would be able to achieve the desired customization in the dashboard application.

Functionality and Process Flow

The Post Response parser integrates external Web API into the Lumira designer, this SDK extension passes the parameters from the dashboard to the underlying stored procedure in Web API which in turn updates to the database.

Snippet of process to be followed:

  • Install Post Response Parser SDK Extension at client and server system
  • Encapsulate the parameters as global variable and enable its property to expose as URL Parameter
  • Create a Web service for dashboard to accommodate the database updates
  • Define an event to trigger the SDK Extension in Lumira application
  • Reload the data source through script to reflect the changes in dashboard

Conclusion

Lumira designer is competent to build Business Intelligence Applications that can be dynamic and customizable as per the business users’ workflow.

An interactive prototype is the best way for both users and designers to learn about their specific needs.

In conclusion, Lumira Designer with SDK Extensions offers that capabilities to accommodate our design process and it stands strong in its ability to build simple or complex Analytic Applications and Executive Dashboards.

About the Author:

Kashif is a SAP Business objects consultant and a business analytics enthusiast. He believes “Ultimate goal is not about winning, but to reach within the depth of capabilities and to compete against yourself to be better than what you are today.”

Discover, Monitor, Analyze & Predict COVID-19

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Bargunan Somasundaram

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. Netflix, the world’s largest movie house, own no cinemas. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

– Tom Goodwin, an executive at the French media group Havas.

This new breed of companies is the fastest growing in history because they own the customer interface layer. It is the platform where all the value and profit is. “Platform business” is a more wholesome term for this model for which data is the fuel; Big Data & AI/ML technologies are the harbinger of new waves of productivity growth and innovation.

With Big data and AI/ML is making a big difference in the area of public health, let’s see how it is helping us tackle the global emergency of coronavirus formally known as COVID-19.

DISCOVERING / DETECTING

Chinese technology giant Alibaba has developed an AI system for detecting the COVID-19 in CT scans of patients’ chests with 96% accuracy against viral pneumonia cases. It only takes 20 seconds for the AI to decide, whereas humans generally take about 15 minutes to diagnose the illness as there can be upwards of 300 images to evaluate. The system was trained on images and data from 5,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and has been tested in hospitals throughout China. Per a report, at least 100 healthcare facilities are currently employing Alibaba’s AI to detect COVID-19.

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd (Ping An) aims to address the issue of lack of radiologists by introducing the COVID-19 smart image-reading system. This image-reading system can read the huge volumes of CT scans in epidemic areas.

Ping An Smart Healthcare uses clinical data to train the AI model of the COVID-19 smart image-reading system. The AI analysis engine conducts a comparative analysis of multiple CT scan images of the same patient and measures the changes in lesions. It helps in tracking the development of the disease, evaluation of the treatment and in prognosis of patients. Ultimately it assists doctors to diagnose, triage and evaluate COVID-19 patients swiftly and effectively.

Ping An Smart Healthcare’s COVID-19 smart image-reading system also supports AI image-reading remotely by medical professionals outside the epidemic areas. Since its launch, the smart image-reading system has provided services to more than 1,500 medical institutions. More than 5,000 patients have received smart image-reading services for free.

The more solutions the better. At least when it comes to helping overwhelmed doctors provide better diagnoses and, thus, better outcomes.

MONITORING

  • AI based Temperature monitoring & scanning

In Beijing, China, subway passengers are being screened for symptoms of coronavirus, but not by health authorities. Instead, artificial intelligence is in-charge.

Two Chinese AI giants, Megvii and Baidu, have introduced temperature-scanning. They have implemented scanners to detect body temperature and send alerts to company workers if a person’s body temperature is high enough to constitute a fever.

Megvii’s AI system detects body temperatures for up to 15 people per second and up to 16 feet. It monitors as many as 16 checkpoints in a single station. The system integrates body detection, face detection, and dual sensing via infrared cameras and visible light. The system can accurately detect and flag high body temperature even when people are wearing masks, hats, or covering their faces with other items. Megvii’s system also sends alerts to an on-site staff member.

Baidu, one of the largest search-engine companies in China, screens subway passengers at the Qinghe station with infrared scanners. It also uses a facial-recognition system, taking photographs of passengers’ faces. If the Baidu system detects a body temperature of at least 99-degrees Fahrenheit, it sends an alert to the staff member for another screening. The technology can scan the temperatures of more than 200 people per minute.

  • AI based Social Media Monitoring

An international team is using machine learning to scour through social media posts, news reports, data from official public health channels, and information supplied by doctors for warning signs of the virus across geographies. The program is looking for social media posts that mention specific symptoms, like respiratory problems and fever, from a geographic area where doctors have reported potential cases. Natural language processing is used to parse the text posted on social media, for example, to distinguish between someone discussing the news and someone complaining about how they feel.

The approach has proven capable of spotting a coronavirus needle in a haystack of big data. This technique could help experts learn how the virus behaves. It may be possible to determine the age, gender, and location of those most at risk quicker than using official medical sources.

PREDICTING

Data from hospitals, airports, and other public locations are being used to predict disease spread and risk. Hospitals can also use the data to plan for the impact of an outbreak on their operations.

Kalman Filter

Kalman filter was pioneered by Rudolf Emil Kalman in 1960, originally designed and developed to solve the navigation problem in the Apollo Project. Since then, it has been applied to numerous cases such as guidance, navigation, and control of vehicles, computer vision’s object tracking, trajectory optimization, time series analysis in signal processing, econometrics and more.

Kalman filter is a recursive algorithm which uses time-series measurement over time, containing statistical noise and produce estimations of unknown variables.

IT Infrastructure Managed Services

For the one-day prediction Kalman filter can be used, while for the long-term forecast a linear model is used where its main features are Kalman predictors, infected rate relative to population, time-depended features, and weather history and forecasting.

The one-day Kalman prediction is very accurate and powerful while a longer period prediction is more challenging but provides a future trend. Long term prediction does not guarantee full accuracy but provides a fair estimation following the recent trend. The model should re-run daily to gain better results.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/Rank23/COVID19

ANALYZING

The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University has developed an interactive, web-based dashboard that tracks the status of COVID-19 around the world. The resource provides a visualization of the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths and recoveries for all affected countries.

The primary data source for the tool is DXY, a Chinese platform that aggregates local media and government reports to provide COVID-19 cumulative case totals in near real-time at the province level in China and country level otherwise. Additional data comes from Twitter feeds, online news services and direct communication sent through the dashboard. Johns Hopkins then confirms the case numbers with regional and local health departments. This kind of Data analytics platform plays a pivotal role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak.

All data from the dashboard is also freely available in the following GitHub repository.

GitHub Link: https://bit.ly/2Wmmbp8

Mobile version: https://bit.ly/2WjyK4d

Web version: https://bit.ly/2xLyT6v

Conclusion

One of AI’s core strengths when working on identifying and limiting the effects of virus outbreaks is its incredibly insistent nature. AI systems never tire, can sift through enormous amounts of data, and identify possible correlations and causations that humans can’t.

However, there are limits to AI’s ability to both identify virus outbreaks and predict how they will spread. Perhaps the best-known example comes from the neighboring field of big data analytics. At its launch, Google Flu Trends was heralded as a great leap forward in relation to identifying and estimating the spread of the flu—until it underestimated the 2013 flu season by a whopping 140 percent and was quietly put to rest. Poor data quality was identified as one of the main reasons Google Flu Trends failed. Unreliable or faulty data can wreak havoc on the prediction power of AI.

References:

About the Author:

Bargunan is a Big Data Engineer and a programming enthusiast. His passion is to share his knowledge by writing his experiences about them. He believes “Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom and sharing it is the first step to humanity.”

The Crucial Component of Data-driven Organizations

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Sankul Seth

Data is a crucial component for any organization to generate revenue and provide the best-in-class experience for their customers. Various studies have shown that 60% of the organizations fail to implement UI tools, which are heavily dependent on data-driven technologies because organizations spend millions on buying these tools but not investing in the right talent to achieve them. Understanding of data is the first stepping stone for any organization to be data-driven. I implemented various data solutions from inception to implementation, which helped organizations to derive data-driven decisions. After fifteen years of extensive experience across multiple data technologies and platform, I have developed numerous critical data frameworks which have benefited organizations to be data-driven. The first essential pillar is to build a cohesive and robust enterprise data team.

Data Center Consolidation Initiative Services

Data is a driver for any business intelligence, analytics, insights, marketing campaigns, UI applications, tools, and technologies. It’s crucial to understand why and what the business needs before deciding to invest in any data technologies. Today, organizations are leveraging data for executing campaigns and defining customer 360-degree views to provide personalized and OMNI-channel experience using data KPIs. There are unlimited data tools available, and it became difficult to pick the right one, which fits all the requirements for the business and delivers a perfect solution. It all goes back to find the right leader who has deep experience on both sides of the coin (Business and Technology). It’s hard to find such talent but not impossible, and this decides the success or failure of any data implementation projects.

About the Author:

Sankul is the Vice President of the Enterprise Data Team at PSCU. is a value-driven and business-oriented data and IT technology leader with a proven track record for building enterprise applications and data-driven platforms. He believes the current generation and future leaders should be focused and good listeners, as it helps to perceive and deliver solutions.

Heroes of GAVS

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Every day we witness these heroic acts Of GAVSians!

A special shout-out to our GAVSians who go into the hospital (BronxCare Health Services) every day to keep their vital computer systems going. 

Ivan Durbak, CIO, BronxCare – “Every day we witness these heroic acts: one example out of many this week was our own Kishore going into our ICU to move a computer without full PPE (we have a PPE shortage). The GAVS technicians who come into our hospital every day  are, like our doctors and healthcare workers,  the true heroes of our time.”

“I am especially inspired by my GAVS colleagues who are supporting some of the healthcare providers in NYC. The GAVS leaders truly believe that they are integral members of these institutions and it is incumbent upon them to support our Healthcare clients during these trying times. We thank the Doctors, Nurses and Medical Professionals of Bronx Care and we are privileged to be associated with them. We would like to confirm that 100% of our client operations are continuing without any interruptions and 100% of our offshore employees are successfully executing their responsibilities remotely using GAVS ZDesk, and other tools.” – Sumit Ganguli, CEO

“Customer Success is all about being proactive and getting ready to address newer situations. At GAVS, RITE is a key DNA and Empathy to our teams and customers is absolutely at the top. That drives us to do the right things for both our teams and customers. In this endeavor and to ensure that our teams are safe and healthy and are able to seamlessly provide support and service to our customers, we have created a task force to understand, assess and plan for events that would unfold due to this massive viral pandemic. We have created 3 broad pillars as part of the task force – 1st How do we take care of our people – people safety first (ability to shift GAVS and customer assets to their home offices smoothly and provide adequate support to enable them to stay in touch with our customers and drive value),  2nd continuation of services and support to customers (continue with newer mechanisms and tools of collaboration and governance) and 3rd is the adoption of new operating model (potential onboarding and collaborative situations in a hybrid model for the future as well and enabling culture for such adoption and collaboration). With these 3 key facets, the task force prepared a plan and executed it with measurable outcomes at every stage. Clear goals and empowerment to various teams enabled us to execute a seamless transition to the new model. We moved 700 assets over a course of 4 business days and created stock and contingency plans for an additional 50% of the workforce.”- Balaji Uppili, Chief Customer Success Officer