Tracking assets with Make In India AI
As a student pursuing BTech in 1999, Amit Shrivastava did a project on voice-activated phone dialling. He recalls how challenging the exercise was, given that systems could only process numbers from 0 through to 9 and had to be pronounced very slowly to be comprehended by the machines. "I have always been fascinated with hardware-software co-design but the late 90s was definitely too early to see these products gain maturity. At best, one would see ideas germinate in materials labs of engineering colleges," he says. And he's right. At the time he was finishing up his undergraduate studies, India's technology landscape looked very different. The dotcom boom had led to the mushrooming of contact centres and the country was a prime offshore operations hub. Hardware innovation was very nascent and successes, few and far between.
Cut to 2021 and Shrivastava is the cofounder of Constems AI, a full-stack AI solutions company providing computer vision-based artificial solutions and immersive solutions such as augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality and Internet of Things (IOT). It has been a long journey for Shrivastava, who bid his time and believed that there would be a day when India would be ready to embrace hardware innovation wholeheartedly. Soon after completing his studies, Shrivastava landed a job at ST Microelectronics, where he spent nearly 17 years building programmable chips, embedded software and hardware for audio and video tools. It was only after a decade of working at ST Microelectronics that Srivastava got around to working on concurrent design (hardware-software co design), and it was towards the end of his tenure at the company that he began dabbling in AI. After completing an executive degree in management at IIM Lucknow where he met his cofounder Amit Singh, the duo started their company.
Constems AI - which is an abbreviation for Connected Systems AI - is one of the handful of hardware startups in India that's a full-stack vertical AI solutions company. The proprietary technology is built on computer vision and machine learning. Video and sensors solution extracts relevant information from image and video data. The team has built superlative processing capabilities and have developed algorithms to send alerts based on pre-defined user KPIs. "We bring along high compatibility and flexibility advantage; our solutions seamlessly fits in to existing infrastructure to work seamlessly with e-POS and any access control, intrusion control systems, and other third party systems," he explains. Bovi Analytics' cloud-based video data processing and analytics platform provides any-time, any-where access to users. It is designed to operate on minimal internet bandwidth, especially in factories and manufacturing units, and assures uninterrupted access in bad weather conditions. Web-based and mobile-based interfaces permit freedom to access information with ease, and density maps track traffic concentration and movement, providing behavioural data for developing business insights.
Largely, Constems AI works in the retail, logistics and manufacturing industries. In retail, the application is more software-focused and involves supporting brands manage their SKUs across multiple locations if needed. Some of the key solutions offered to retail clients include designed planograms that improve store efficacy, monitor staff and general process compliance. In the transport sector, analytics-based fleet management and data capturing is driven by computer vision. In manufacturing, the company can install its own devices on surveyor lines and assembly lines to oversee production more effectively.
Constems AI was incubated out of IIM Lucknow, and works with companies like P&G, ITC Infotech and Reckitt Benckiser in India and some overseas markets.
Credits : https://indiaai.gov.in