Posted by There is no doubt that 2020 has been an intense year for all of us due to the unforeseen COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world. However, as the famous Queen tune goes, “The Show Must Go On”, and indeed the show went on at BigML despite hardships. This year we witnessed the further rise of interest in Machine Learning across all industries and sectors. In hindsight, it seems that as the pandemic forced businesses to make swift adjustments against the challenging backdrop, they turned in greater numbers to digitalization powered by the insights hidden in their data. This trend has manifested itself through more and more smart applications with Machine Learning models and timely predictions at their core. Having left behind another year in powering such mission-critical solutions for our customers and partners, here are the highlights that made 2020 a memorable (if a bit twisted) one in our journey.
BigML registered customers are the thrust behind the BigML Team to keep on improving our Machine Learning platform each year. We enthusiastically work on making our platform more complete and accessible for all types of business professionals and organizations such as government agencies, educational institutions, big corporations, and small businesses alike. In this blog post we present some examples of what we have been doing during 2020.
Product Enhancements
In 2020 the BigML platform released more options to import data directly from external databases which makes it easier for all our customers to easily work with their data wherever they have it stored. We are well aware that gathering the data to start a Machine Learning project can be a hard and tedious process, so focusing on our vision to make Machine Learning beautifully simple for everyone our platform now supports MySQL, SQL Server, and Elasticsearch in addition to PostgreSQL.
Additionally, we have also made veritable improvements to the BigML platform that are included on our What’s New page, e.g., API request preview, WhizzML optional inputs, and the latest updates on BigML’s add-on for Google Sheets. All of this was made possible via 82 production deployments.
But the best is yet to come! We will shortly announce our upcoming major release that is going to provide a great upgrade to existing BigML’s capabilities. So stay tuned for future announcements to find out more!
Machine Learning Events and Webinars
The worldwide lockdown caused by COVID-19 is having a huge impact on the events industry, which has drastically changed since March 2020. The sector had to adapt to the new situation as best they could and replace in-situ events and conferences with online ones. As such, with everything ready and set for the live Machine Learning School that was to take place in Seville last March 2020, days before, we decided to reboot the event and run it virtually for the safety of our attendees and speakers since they could attend from the comfort of their homes. The response from the virtual audience was overwhelmingly positive, easily exceeding the attendance in prior BigML events and reaching 2,500 registrations from 89 countries! Feel free to visit the MLSEV event page to watch the video recordings of each presentation as you please.
In addition to our Machine Learning Schools, we also enjoy organizing joint webinars and last October we had one together with our partner INFORM GmbH. The webinar “Machine Learning Fights Financial Crime” presented how to detect fraud with RiskShieldML, the Hybrid AI solution from INFORM powered by BigML.
This year BigML speakers, advisors and board directors attended 16 business conferences to present and discuss how they are implementing predictive applications or to illustrate the latest product improvements of BigML’s comprehensive platform with other Machine Learning experts and practitioners.
We always look forward to organizing more events every year, either in person or online, and we have already been focusing on our upcoming Machine Learning School for Business Schools that will take place early next year, starting with a free, virtual one on February 17, 2021. Check out the event page for information on the speakers and the agenda. Remember to follow on the footsteps of the 700 people so far and register to reserve your spot to learn from the esteemed professors that will be teaching the next generation of business leaders!
Real-World Use Cases: BigML in Action!
More BigML customers are automating processes with smart applications as seen in the examples use cases below. We are looking forward to adding to this list in 2021 to help even more businesses gain efficiency.
Machine Learning for Healthcare
- Perspectives on self-serve Machine Learning for rapid insights in Healthcare.
- PlusVitech uses Machine Learning for drug treatment to win the #EUvsVirus Hackathon.
- A1 Digital, BigML’s Partner, and BigML join forces to support COVID-19 research.
Machine Learning in the Retail Industry
- Machine Learning fights cannibalization in the Retail Industry.
- Machine Learning in retail and wholesale: Accurate and affordable demand forecasting by catsAi.
Machine Learning in Industrial Chemicals and Machinery
- Machine Learning in industrial chemicals: Process quality optimization.
- Machine Learning in industrial machinery: Optimization of passenger waiting time for elevators.
Machine Learning in Construction
Machine Learning in Business Services
Machine Learning for Marketing Professionals
General Machine Learning Blog Posts
You can visit the BigML Blog for more use case examples in the new year.
Strategic Partner, Alliance, and Client Highlights
2020 has brought interesting strategic partnerships to BigML that let us expand our technology without limits. We are excited to highlight our alliance with Fundación ONCE, a Spanish foundation that has a long history of improving the quality of life of people with disabilities. Both organizations are jointly evolving the BigML platform to make it more accessible and allow all people, with or without disabilities, to effectively use Machine Learning and build predictive applications. On the other hand, we have also solidified the BigML brand in South America, with the special help of our partner, Panda ID Soluciones, the leading company in the development of smart solutions in Colombia and Venezuela. We are jointly helping enterprises in Central and South America adopt Machine Learning with customized predictive applications for their businesses.
In April, we announced our collaboration with Claire Global, a marketplace devoted to the global B2B food trading business. It is purpose-built to implement Machine Learning-driven solutions to optimize the buying and selling processes that are critical to the wide-reaching global supply chains of the food industry.
On the other hand, long-time BigML customer Rabobank’s, whose Master of AI Jan Veldsink, was featured on ‘AI in Banking’ Podcast last January. We invite you to listen to this illuminating podcast about how Rabobank utilizes NLP and unsupervised learning techniques such as Topic Modeling to make sense of large collections of documents and their underlying textual content.
Teaching and Learning Machine Learning with BigML
Education is key to changing the world. Thus, in addition to our Machine Learning Schools and other events described above, we actively collaborate with education institutions that wish to use BigML in their classrooms. Since we launched the Education Program back in 2016 we kept adding to the number of universities and schools that use BigML to spread Machine Learning know-how in academia. This year we added 112 new education institutions to our map, received 165 new ambassador applications, and participated in a large amount of workshops and seminars presented by the BigML Team in many universities distributed around the world. Last but not the least, we ran 8 new batches of our BigML Certification courses.
The BigML Team
All activities listed above have been possible thanks to the BigML Team, working remotely since 2011 and distributed worldwide. 2020 has been the year when plenty of companies discovered virtual meetings and understood that it is perfectly possible to work efficiently without forcing employees to attend the same office. In that regard, we did not have to adapt our way of working because BigML has operated that way since inception.
Once again, we are ready for more Machine Learning highlights to add to our Milestones page in 2021 and would love to have you and your company be a big part of it. Do you want to join the ride? Send us an email to info@bigml.com and let us know how we can help you!
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