TECHNOVATOR

Co-founder & CEO Integration Wizards Solutions

An AI enabled computer vision platform IRIS, offered by Integration Wizards Solution is helping enterprises and the B2C segment with real time surveillance across sectors. Founded in 2014 by three co-founders, Kunal Kislay, Saquib Khan and Kumar Raman the company has created a platform for enterprise mobility. Over the past six years they have incorporated industrial IoT, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Computer Vision AI into it, always staying updated with the changing technology. While talking with Nitisha from BISinfotech, Kunal Kislay, Co-founder and CEO of Integration Wizards Solutions elaborates the value of drones and its usage for the industry’s people.

Drones were primarily being developed for surveillance, but it has evolved to provide solutions across industries and customers in today’s era. From delivering parcels to delivering key medical supplies it is helping us in more ways than we can imagine. Let us look at some of these to understand how it’s going to help us and our future generations.

In an industrial setup, it is helping reduce the risk factor involved with inspection, service, and maintenance of manufacturing facilities. Working at height for inspection work is being replaced with drones carrying AI-powered high-resolution cameras assisting the workers. One primary example of this is the inspection of wind farms, where working at height is a major occupational health & safety risk. In factories and power plants, it is helping inspect the infrastructure for cracks, rust, and other damages. In solar farms, it is helping reduce the time and effort for visual inspection improving the efficiency of its workforce.

When we look at the health care industry, drones are working on providing life-saving medical supplies and equipment, drastically reducing the time taken to deliver by road. Where typically it would take 30-45 mins in traffic, using drones the same task can be completed in under 10 mins.

Disaster Management is another key area where drones will play a vital role. It will help us in locating people, identification of the current conditions, providing key supplies to stranded people, and improve the search and rescue operations.

These are just a few applications of drones and I believe there will soon be a time when we are going to see drones in action more frequently in our daily lives.

I started Integration Wizards Solutions in 2014 with Saquib Khan and Kumar Raman. Most of the data created in the world today is visual. CCTV cameras, mobile phones, drones and satellites create petabytes of information every hour. At integration wizards we wanted to provide our customers a way of making sense of it.

One of the first sources of visual information we targeted was CCTV cameras.

The idea was to help industries transform their passive CCTV cameras into active analytical tools. We started developing IRIS, as an enterprise AI platform that plugs into existing CCTV cameras to provide real-time actionable insights. In the beginning, we focused on solutions for organizational health & safety and later added solutions around warehousing, manufacturing, retail, and construction. Today IRIS has over 150 use cases that cater to every industry vertical. With use cases around safety, efficiency, and utilization we were moving strongly towards being an industry leader in our segment. By end of 2020, we have over 45 deployments across 16 countries, and our solutions were being used across 6 different languages.

IRIS was already being accepted across the industry as a cutting-edge computer vision AI platform and we were helping organizations enhance health & safety across their facilities. As the COVID19 pandemic hit the world, we quickly launched COVID19 safety compliance solutions on IRIS to help organizations re-open safely. Since March 2020 IRIS COVID19 safety compliance solution has helped over 70 manufacturing facilities, warehouses, malls, and workspaces safe re-open its operations.

Today, IRIS is a bleeding-edge innovation, and we are already transforming the industry with it. But for us, innovation never stops and we had been working on the next version of IRIS that would transform the way IRIS operates. We have just launched IRIS 2.0 which is a one of a kind “no-code” enterprise AI platform and it is going to revolutionize AI solutions and deployment across industries. With IRIS 2.0 deploying use cases is a simple drag and drop.

We are seeing a growing concern about personal data privacy across the globe and governments are bringing inlaws and legislations to formulate guidelines and regulations for organizations and how they can use personal data. These regulations will help us in keeping a check on the use of AI technology, focusing on ensuring ethical practices across organizations. Most of these regulations are focused on creating a framework where organizations must take ownership of their policies and practices.

These regulations also provide the possibility of manual intervention if and when demanded by consumers in cases where the result of an AI system in one way or another impacts the rights of an individual or has some legal implications as an output of its decision. In our perspective without getting into details, these are necessary precautions rather than a hindrance. So far what we have observed is that these legislations do briefly slow down the process of AI adoption, but it does ensure that when the technology is adopted it’s been through exhaustive scrutiny, leaving no scope for any oversight while designing the system/solution.

As I mentioned earlier, Disaster Management is one of the key areas where drones will have a great impact. Let’s take the example of floods in India where people are stranded for days and depend on the Search & rescue efforts of our disaster management team and first responders.

Using drones will not only help us in the identification of areas that are critical but will also help us in locating people and getting key food and medical supplies to them.

It will also help the rescue teams in navigating through cities and forests to reach different locations more efficiently and assess the danger to prepare their equipment and gear accordingly.

AI technology will enhance the capabilities of these drones to provide real-time analytics on the entire situation and key insight to improve decision-making. AI can help in automating the entire process of locating people, planning supply drops efficiently, and identify different areas and their severity.

The accuracy of these AI models highly depends on the data set we train them with. The bigger the data set the better the learning. But it comes with its own challenges in terms of speed and resource requirement. This is where inserting QC in the classical framework can help improve the quality of the AI models and the speed of training and predictions. Quantum enhance generative models can be used to work with larger data sets which help drastically improve the accuracy of the AI models.

Let’s take a look at the use of these technologies in the context of COVID19. We are currently helping over 70 manufacturing facilities, warehouses, malls, and workspaces using our Computer Vision AI platform IRIS to help them reopen safely. Safety protocols like social distancing and face mask usage are being monitored in real-time on existing CCTV cameras, providing feedback and alerts to employees and safety officers. Facial recognition is helping organizations go contactless by automating access control and attendance. It is also being used to map and register employee’s temperature daily. Lastly, when we talk about drones, they can be used to monitor public places to ensure social distancing and facemask compliance. Drones can cover wider areas that lack CCTV surveillance and assist law enforcement agencies in ensuring the safety of citizens.

We have launched IRIS 2.0 our “no-code” computer vision AI platform. It is going to transform how organizations currently deploy Computer Vision AI solutions. We are moving to an approach where our customers will be able to deploy use cases as and when they require, and they will have complete control over the platform. A simple drag and drop is all it is going to take for them to deploy use cases. With IRIS 2.0 we intend to completely democratize video analytics.