Author: Andreas Greilhuber

Start-Up Advisor. Artificial Intelligence Enthusiast.

GOING 5G AT ALLEY IN NYC

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The Anyline team has been growing steadily over the past number of years. As a result, we’ve had the opportunity to travel all over the world to show people our mobile OCR technology. This has brought us to places like Berlin, Istanbul and soon China. However, there’s one location we’ve had our eye on for a while – The Big Apple.

New York attracts giants from the worlds of business, art and nowadays, technology. We’re expanding our support of the US market and our search only lead us to one place. We’ve been lucky enough to secure an office space at Alley NYC. We came across Alley and once we found out that their office space supported 5G networks, we jumped at the chance to work there.

So why is 5G so important? 5G networks are the next generation of mobile connectivity. And while 4G brought the power of broadband internet to mobile devices, 5G is set to blow the possibilities of mobile internet wide open.

HOW WILL 5G CHANGE THE WAY I USE MY DEVICE?

5G networks differ from 3G and 4G LTE by offering high bandwidth with low latency. While 4G connections are strong enough to support mobile browsing in most locations, 5G will take mobile internet a step further. Your mobile connection will be capable of live streaming sports events in the highest definitions and communicating with connected devices from large distances.

The ability to link mobile devices with connected devices in the internet of things offers huge potential for innovation. Technology like 5G will be crucial for the development of autonomous driving, VR experiences and cloud-based computing.

Current 4G networks support these types of technologies but the low latency of 5G networks will mean improved user experience as “lag” becomes a thing of the past. The full potential of 5G is yet to be realized as developers still wait for a device that supports 5G connections to be released. But early signs show that the adoption of 5G devices will be a large stepping stone for realizing the smart homes and smart cities of the future.

WHY HAVE ALLEY BROUGHT 5G TO THEIR WORKSPACE?

The 5G network was brought to Alley NYC through a cooperation with Verizon. It’s part of a collective of similar projects known as the Verizon 5G Future Series. Together, they will host workshops, seminars and talks to discuss and discover the future of mobile internet and how 5G can be used to connect the world around us.

While streaming services will be immediately enhanced, it’s the application of 5G in the internet of things that will revolutionize the way we think about the world around us. As a result, Alley have launched the 5G Lab at their workspace to empower entrepreneurs and startups to work with this new technology. They want to see what can happen when innovators have the opportunity to leverage a high bandwidth, low-latency internet connection to fuel their ideas.

HOW TO MEET US AT ALLEY

While we don’t have a team based in the US full-time, team members from our HQ in Vienna travel to the States on a regular basis. New York is a great base for Anyline while we have team in the USA and Alley is set to be our new hangout while we’re there.

Our next scheduled trip to NYC is between June 21 – 28. Get in touch if you’d like to meet!

A Showcase for the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow

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Anyline-WU

I was invited to talk at the Vienna University of Economics on March 15 about anyline.com. My talk was part of a current speaker series being run at the university. I gave the students an introduction to Anyline and explained the challenges of founding and how Anyline became an established company in the Austrian technology scene.

Presentation on Anyline & Mobile OCR

From Humble Beginnings

Started my presentation by telling the story of how Anyline was formed. Once I explained how Anyline emerged as the solution to a problem held by mySugr, I moved on to introducing the company goals that were set in 2014.

20180320-WU-Wien-Anyline-Presentation.001

Since making this commitment, Anyline has grown to a company of 30 people. In addition, +10 million scans a year are now reported and we have +100 enterprise customers worldwide.

Where Are We Now?

Once the Anyline origin story was clear for the students in attendance, Andreas explained what we’re working on now and how we plan to achieve our future goals. Since becoming COO, Andreas has brought his favourite maxim into play wherever possible.

“Clarity affords focus” – Thomas Leonard

The result is what we call the Anyline compass. This compass has two key components, which are our mission and our vision. Below is the slide I used to convey this to the audience at the WU.

Anyline-Compass.001

After clarifying the importance of of the compass, I introduced the audience to the technology behind Anyline and gave examples of how it can be vertically integrated across a number of fields and industries.

Anyline in Action

We’re happy that we work with a lot of market leaders and we try our best to show off the ways that these companies make use of Anyline to create and optimize innovative processes. Andreas gave the students a full rundown of Anyline’s partners and the solutions they use to improve their businesses.

red-bull-example.001

Questions & Answers

At the end of the presentation, we opened the floor to questions. Thomas Reutterer, the event organizer and a professor of service marketing and tourism at the university noted that the students were highly engaged and asked very pressing questions. Andreas had a similar opinion.

“I was very impressed by the laser-sharp questions asked by the students. They showed a fantastic understanding of our business model, the risks involved in our business and even how the technology itself works.” – Andreas Greilhuber

2018 Anyline World Tour: Barcelona Mobile World Congress 2018

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Barcelona. Having an early – I mean a real early morning – flight, I will arrive 8ish. On my agenda various meetings with Samsung, IBM, ABBYY, microblink and many others until Tuesday evening.

Beside the augmented and virtual reality events Barcelona MWC is the place to be for a mobile OCR company like anyline.com

This year we have had already industry focused events for utilities and police in Essen, Berlin and Frankfurt. After this week in Barcelona we are starting the preparation of events for SAP in Austria and Florida. Continued by an MRO event to promote our serial number scanner with season final and highlight at Oracle in California.

Our products for meter reading, passport and license plate scanning are now underpinned by an universal serial number scanner.

A derivate if our serial number scanner – the vehicle identification number scanner – was presented to the world at the ai inside summit in Vienna.

Recently we delivered our first european driving license scanner (w/o MRZ) to Ministry of Interior for all police officers in Austria. The promising POC with an German Automotive OEM will demonstrate our business value in the core of the automotive value chain. Automotive industry will even more globalise our footprint in the mobile world.

With our machine readable zone product we are with United Nations, Australia, Global Blue (tax refund) and soon in Indonesia.

We convinced e.On, Vattenfal, Siemens, Tieto. With these partners we are #1 in Utilities with our mobile OCR meter reading product. We are Minimising risk in the Smart Meter Rollout, reducing churn and first and foremost simplifying the metering.

The high volume scanning use case digital interactive marketing with The Sun, Red Bull, Karlsberg and Landskron is a case for the business value we are generating in loyalty programmes.

So I have enough story telling raw material for my partners in Barcelona 🙂

Huge Potential in Your Pocket – How Smartphones Can Be Used to Make Police Work More Efficient

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Scanner_q_Anyline

You don’t need atypical or cost intensive technology to scan and process passports, IDs, license plates and fingerprints. Every mobile device, whether it’s a smartphone or tablet can perform these functions.

Smartphones have been available and affordable in various forms for more than 10 years. More than 4 billion people carry these devices on a daily basis. The potential uses for these devices varies greatly across age ranges however. And how are smartphones used in the workplace?

How can a smartphone be used meaningfully in police work?

Although smartphone cameras are always improving, they have one disadvantage that the person behind the lense does not: they can neither read or comprehend text. It’s with this deficit that the Viennese technology company Anyline can help. At the moment, they’re one of the most successful startups to be founded in Austria. Anyline uses the camera of a smartphone to read, interpret and process visual information.

Anyline is simple to integrate, as a software development kit (SDK), in an app and then install on your smartphone and gives your device the ability to read. No High-End Server is required and all processing is performed on device for security reasons. For police officers in action, this creates a completely new spectrum of situations that can be assessed with a security perspective in real-time.

Questions such as:

  • Is this license plate wanted for search?
  • Has this vehicle been registered as stolen?
  • Has this identification been stolen?
  • Is this passport flagged in the Schengen Area?
  • Has this European driver’s license been examined before?
  • What does Europol think of an identification?

… can all be answered quickly, without radio signal or contact with headquarters. All this information comes from the smartphone you carry with you anyway.

Anyline helps to automate processes in the daily work of police and can be used to reduce the amount of complex documentation that they’re required to fill out. This reduction in data entry means that police have more time to focus on active police work as well. The subjective sense of security that the public has can therefore be increased without increased personnel cost for taxpayers to consider.

Anyline offers products that can read passports and IDs that contain Machine-Readable-Zones. Through the help of artificial intelligence, other types of ID such as European drivers licenses can be learned and added to the range of scan targets of the smartphones. Further forms of ID, such as gun licenses, can be trained at any time, without complication.

We are delighted, that the Austrian Minister for the Interior will be speaking at the European Police Congress regarding his experiences with smartphone technology in policing.

From Passports to Drivers Licenses and Finally to Fingerprints

Anyline is supported by the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) in its efforts to bring fingerprint scanning to standard smartphone cameras.

Anyline has invited the AIT to the European Police Congress and will present this fingerprint scanning technology to interested parties at the Innovation Centre.

You will find Anyline at Stand C/17 at the European Police Congress.

Some of the products mentioned will be demonstrated at the stand.

  • Machine-Readable-Zone vs. European Drivers License
  • The Challenges of Scanning License Plates
  • The Austrian Minister for the Interior: Smartphones in Police Work
  • Austrian Institute of Technology: Fingerprint Scanning With Your Smartphone Camera

You can reserve a time for an individual consultation on smartphones in police work by clicking on the following link and selecting your availability: www.anyline.com/BerlinKonferenz

You can also see the times for all planned product demonstrations on this page.

For more information visit us online at anyline.com

Police Officer’s Augmented Intelligence

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Gathering data for reports and logging it for future reference takes up a large amount of police time. This time could be better spent on active police work rather than administrative tasks. On top of that, these processes can be inaccurate. The payoff for time intensive tasks should be perfect results. 

In February 2018 there is the European Police Congress in Berlin. I will participate and  I am invited for a panel discussion. Topic of this panel discussion will be Safety Network – Mobile Working, Apps & Co – chaired by Karl O. Feger, Saxony State Ministry of the Interior. Introduction will be done by Marco Hauprich, Senior Vice President, Digital Labs, Deutsche Post AG. On the panel we have Michael Jokisch, Federal Police Central Office, Michael Meyer-Schaudwet, Deutsche Telekom Healthcare and Security Solutions GmbH, Jürgen Schmitt*, Inspector of the police, Ministry of the Interior and Sports Rhineland-Palatinate. I am looking forward to present Anyline.com Solutions and Point of View how Police Officer’s daily work can be improved with augmented intelligence. I will share what we have learned so far, from our work with Ministry of Interior in Austria, where more Police Officer’s will be equipped with iPhones and iPads. This equipment is augmented with Anyline’s Computervision and artificial intelligence products to improve and simplify human date entry.

Scanner_q_AnylineUnfortunately, even the best human data entry has been found to contain errors. Logging report data is also slow and, when you consider the work hours required by most data entry processes, expensive. Surprisingly, police forces and private companies persevere with human data entry, despite its well-known drawbacks.

The reasons people make errors during data entry are simple. Any time a person is required to repeatedly record codes and numbers, they will make mistakes. Fatigue and environmental factors make it almost impossible for humans to create perfect data records. Fatigue can lead to complacency when double-checking recorded results. Environmental factors such as light, weather, and location can increase the difficulty of gathering data, which increases the chance of error.

Negative effects not always directly obvious

The negative effects of collecting false data aren’t always immediately obvious. From a police perspective, inaccurate data hurts the chances of securing successful convictions against offenders. On the other side of that coin, inaccurate data could cause police to pursue wrongful convictions. In both cases, inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to wasted police time. This wasted time can end up costing police forces a significant amount of money and resources.

Anyline offers a solution to this problem without requiring police officers to undergo extensive training or carry extra equipment. Our technology turns your smartphone into a perfect scanning device. It works without an internet connection and can record ID numbers and license plates 20 times faster than a human. For a long time, police officers have recorded license plates with a pen and paper. While the simplicity of this approach may seem foolproof, it creates a unique set of challenges for on-duty police officers.

No interruption

For one, it requires a police officer to dedicate his attention to a single point of information for around 30 seconds. In this time, it is impossible to be aware of safety threats or prevent further crimes from being committed in the area. With instant scanning from Anyline, a police officer can point his smartphone at offending license plates and continue to be of service. This ensures that the license plate is perfectly recorded while the police officer remains safe and active.

The mobile scanning of license plates also means you can instantly create a digital record of the license plate. This saves time as police officers do not need to spend time on manual data entry once they return to their station. Instead, they can upload the results of their scans directly to their station database.

The net benefit of this type of scanning is huge when you realize how much time it will save. The ability to upload scan data to a dedicated backend automates a process that has been completed by hand since the start of modern policing. License plate scanning with Anyline also makes sure all administrative follow-up is accurate and supported by correct data.

Anyline offers similar technology for scanning passports and IDs that include a machine-readable zone. IDs and passports can be scanned and digitized just as quickly as license plates. Even better, the data points included in the MRZ such as name, date of birth, gender, nation of birth and more can be extracted in order to create a full profile of an individual based on their ID information.

Almost all codes can be scanned

Scanning with Anyline is also secure. Our mobile OCR technology processes all scan information on your smartphone. This means none of your scan data is sent through the cloud during processing. Scan data can be kept on an officer’s device until they are certain they have a secure connection and then uploaded to the appropriate backend system.

With Anyline, the mobile scanning of almost all codes is possible. We currently support the scanning of passports, IDs, EU license plates and EU drivers’ licenses. Our technology works on both Android and iOS devices and works through a simple, point-and-scan mobile app.

enlite.ai – The Austrian AI Landscape

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I have to congratulate the guys from enlite.ai for the good work they did in their last article about the Austrian AI landscape.

Based on more than 100 expert interviews, desk research and industry events, they created the first Austrian AI Landscape, covering startups, corporates and accelerators as well as research- and educational institutions.

20171030_AI_Landscape_Austria_v1

I am happy that they see anyline.com as player in the field of AI – and of course we are. With the early adoption of google tensor flow and its application in our field of mobile OCR. By doing so we were able reduce significantly improve the time2market of new products and reducing the need of real-world training data.

Recently I had my first contacts with AIT and their work – I am really impressed, what they are doing in combining AI, Data Science with the blockchain.

Of course they had to mention Sepp Hochreiter from JKU who published his seminal work on long short-term memory, which forms the basis for automated translation systems we use every day. With his support in September we had a tremendous ‘Mega.AI.Meetup‘ at WU Wien with participation from facebook and google.

There is AI in Austria, however we have to talk more about it and the achievements.