Posted by In a matter of days, 2021 will slip through our fingers letting 2022 surprise us with the unknown. Here we are wrapping up another year, summarizing what BigMLers have witnessed in a pretty intense year presenting challenges brought by the global pandemic that evolves from one variant to another. From a business perspective, we have seen the continued rise of interest in Machine Learning across all industries and sectors and their need to create smart applications to deploy them in production to make predictions en masse. This market interest seems to be growing exponentially year after year, along with real-life use cases moving from ideas to operationalization.
BigML customers are the lifeblood for the team to keep improving our Machine Learning platform. We enthusiastically work on making our platform robust and more 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 how BigML has contributed in 2021 to make Machine Learning adoption a reality for hundreds of thousands of users working in finance, banking, transportation, retail, food industry, healthcare, manufacturing, automation, computer vision, surveillance, and almost every industry vertical you can imagine.
Last January 11th, 2021, the company celebrated its 10th anniversary! This was a great milestone for the BigML team as well as for the Machine Learning community, since BigML pioneered Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) after which industry applications of Machine Learning took a different turn going from being used mostly in academic settings or labs to being applied to towards real-life use cases.
It’s hard to believe that it has been a decade since a small group of Machine Learning and Software Engineering experts founded BigML back in 2011 with the audacious mission to make Machine Learning easy and beautiful for everyone. Since then, we have built a comprehensive, intuitive, friendly, and robust Machine Learning platform that is enabling the development of predictive applications across different sectors and teams, regardless of their level of Machine Learning expertise. BigML has made possible the ML platformization in plenty of organizations, changing their employees’ lives and improving their decision-making processes along the way.
Major Product Release: Image Processing
The greatly enhanced new version of the BigML platform after the Image Processing release has brought a lot of pride and excitement to the whole team! After multiple man-years designing, implementing, and testing in projects with large clients that every piece of its functionality worked smoothly, BigML recently launched Image Processing to address hundreds of new business use cases that involve image data.
10 years ago BigML pioneered the MLaaS concept, and this release compounds our MLaaS capabilities as it lets you easily label image data, train and evaluate supervised and unsupervised models using it (alongside text, categorical, numeric, datetime, and items), make predictions, and automate end-to-end Machine Learning workflows. All on a single platform and with remarkable ease of use!
Other image processing solutions let you build your ML models but they require many hours of programming and steep learning curves few can master. BigML allows you to do it in a single click, or with a single API call. We created the first 1-click modeling, followed by the 1-click AutoML with BigML’s OptiML, and this year complements those with 1-click Image Processing!
You can find out more details about this major release and what’s in it for your business by reading the following blog post series for a gentle introduction to Image Processing:
- Image Processing: Easily Solving Image Data-Driven Business Problems
- Introduction to Image Processing
- Composite Sources in BigML
- The Many Ways of Labeling Images on the BigML Platform
- Building a Simple Image Classifier on the BigML Dashboard
- Machine Learning in Manufacturing: Detecting Defects with Unsupervised Learning and Image Feature Extraction
- Programming Image Processing
- Automating Machine Learning with Images
- Image Processing: The Simple and The Complex
Industry-Focused Events
In March 2020, the world learned that we had to start working remotely to keep the economy rolling, and so the events industry did, when in-situ events and conferences were replaced with virtual ones. In 2021, we have continued creating our Machine Learning events virtually.
In May, we organized the Intelligent Mobility conference, where experts and product owners emphasized how transportation industry leaders and decision makers have the opportunity to transform their sector by using their data, and simultaneously, make their industry more environmentally friendly and socially responsible. In June, we co-organized the EdgeML event together with our Partner A1 Digital, the event emphasized how Machine Learning is applied on low-power devices to solve plenty of creative IoT use cases. A month later, in July, we approached the impact that Machine Learning has in the Governance, Business Risk and Compliance (GRC) sector and the growing need for stricter GRC requirements that differ across industries, countries, and sectors. Finally, in November we saw the impact Machine Learning can have in the Retail industry in a webinar co-organized with our long-time customer CatsAi, a firm focusing on sales predictions in the retail industry. You can watch all these sessions anytime on the BigML’s Youtube Channel.
Virtual events were the main industry-focused events BigML has organized during 2021, however, we have also participated in many other events that tackled different economic areas such as the legal sector, an event organized by the international law firm GA_P, the American Automotive and Manufacturing Summits, the International Conference of AI, or the Data Science Nigeria AI Bootcamp, among others. Feel free to check our dedicated events page to see them all.
Teaching and Learning Machine Learning with BigML
BigML takes Machine Learning education and training very seriously, as we believe it is the basis for a meaningful Machine Learning adoption worldwide. Since we launched the BigML Education Program back in 2016 we’re happy to highlight that more than 700 universities have been using BigML in their classrooms and 7,000 students and professors keep using BigML to teach and learn Machine Learning with our platform. To further contribute to this educational mission and in addition to the events mentioned in the previous section, last February, BigML organized the first international and virtual Machine Learning School for Business Schools in collaboration with several Universities and Business Schools that have been democratizing Machine Learning in their classrooms for years, e.g., Northeastern University in Silicon Valley (USA), the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, Nyenrode Business University in The Netherlands, Prague University of Economics and Business in the Czech Republic, IE Business School, ESADE Business School, ICADE Business School, and EOI Business School in Spain, among others.
The event covered how professors bring Machine Learning into their classrooms, how to teach the next generation of business leaders what Machine Learning is, how to use it, what they can do with it to optimize their resources, and the level of maturity in Machine Learning these future business leaders need to reach to make data-driven decisions on a daily basis. The sessions were followed by 1,600 attendees from 97 countries! You can watch all these sessions again to learn from the professors that are changing the business landscape by helping introduce Machine Learning to a new generation of leaders that wish to automate their businesses.
More Machine Learning in Action!
More BigML customers are automating processes with smart applications built on top of the BigML platform. Below, we share some recent use case examples we published in our Blog. Feel free to visit the BigML Blog to find more examples.
- Machine Learning in the Entertainment Industry:
- Machine Learning in Transportation: Machine Learning in Mobility: Transforming Road Operations with Computer Vision
- Machine Learning in IoT: EdgeML Webinar Video: Machine Learning on Low-Power Devices
- Machine Learning in Manufacturing: Detecting Defects with Unsupervised Learning and Image Feature Extraction
- Machine Learning in Retail: https://blog.bigml.com/2021/10/28/machine-learning-in-retail-know-your-customers-customer/
The BigML Team
All the activities listed in this blog post are possible thanks to a dedicated team distributed across the globe and working hard to develop the best and most inclusive Machine Learning platform ever! The BigML Team will be delivering more Machine Learning goodness in the new year and we look forward to making a difference for more and more businesses. Want to join the ride? Do not hesitate and send us an email at info@bigml.com and let us know how we can help you achieve your goals!
The Official Blog of BigML.com 
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