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Advice from three Taiwanese data science entrepreneurs who made it to international
Three Taiwanese entrepreneurs who have made their data science businesses international recently shared their journey and tips on a Meet event.
Adms Chung set up Mobagel in Silicon Valley and Taiwan. He and his team developed an AI engine, Decanter AI, that empowers businesses to take on an AI journey. Gartner Report has included the company in its Top 10 Strategic Tech Trends for 2020.
Sonic Wang founded IoT solution provider Fox-tech to help manufacturing businesses monitor, track, and improve their operation. The company has clients across 24 countries in the world.
Dan Chiao has over 20 years of startup experience. He founded Fliptop which was later acquired by LinkedIn. Unsatisfied with LinkedIn’s company culture, he left his head engineer position and founded Kettle, which formed a merger with bettr.me in 2020.
Add a personalized touch
Adms Chung, founder and CEO of Mobagel, cited the increasing business model focus on data as an opportunity for data scientists.
“The old business model relies on talent. If you have good teams, systems, and skill sets, your company will likely be successful. Nowadays, we rely on data because most things can be presented in data,” said Adms Chung, founder and CEO of Mobagel.
Nevertheless, he said businesses set a very high bar for AI adoption.
“They expect AI’s accuracy rate to reach 90-100%, but it is unreasonable because many top talents in their businesses cannot achieve that as well,” Chung said.
In light of this, Mobagel designed an automated machine learning (AutoML) system called Decanter AI to help businesses identify whether they should adopt AI or not and build AI-driven data solutions.
At the initial stage, Mobagel defines business propositions, pain points, assessment criteria, AI methodology to help businesses understand their problem, set goals and design a practical solution.
The solutions for corporates usually focus on customer service functions such as enhancing customer support and introducing chatbots and production-related matters such as integrating the supply chain and increasing efficiency.
Communication is key and get mentally ready to accommodate clients
Founded in 2016, IoT solution provider Fox-tech's clients include specialty crop and livestock farms, cold or dry warehouses, logistics, international hypermarkets, and central kitchens.
"Different businesses have different brand positionings. Some chase market trends and some emphasize brand heritage. Most of the time, we have to accommodate them and show them how they can adopt IoT without changing the backbone of their business," Sonic Wang, CEO of Fox-tech, said.
"Communication is an art," he added.
Fox-tech's main product Temphawk is a temperature and humidity sensor system and a data analytics platform. For example, in the past, for a small-scale pig farm, farmers had to wake up at 4 am every morning to check if the piglets were frozen to death and went back at 2 pm to check if the mother pig had too high body temperature. Temphawk allows farmers to monitor the environment in real-time; the early warning mechanism helps them better manage the environment's temperature.
Data science and privacy does not have to be at odds
When Dan Chiao left Linkedin and founded AI assistant provider Kettle in 2015, he wanted to quantify all data on digital tools and develop an AI tool that can automatically detect repeated questions asked by employees and send out employers’ previous responses. Although both employers and employees appreciate the concept, they are dubious about privacy. In fact, according to a research, while the majority of employees (92%) are willing to provide work-related data, over half of them are also worried about data misuse or breach. If their employers use their personal data without their consent, they will reconsider working for the same company.
Kettle announced a merger with an employee sentiment analysis platform called bettr.me. It analyzes how employees feel towards a particular task, their team, and colleagues. With an understanding that the data collected is very sensitive, they have set five principles to safeguard user privacy:
1. Transparency of data collection — Employees can decide which data is visible or hidden to their employers.
2. Broader analysis — Instead of singling out a specific employee who has not been productive, the platform offers employers analysis based on a group with at least five employees. This can encourage employees to submit more honest data.
3. A focus on change — Since different people have their scale to measure their mood, the platform focuses on an employee's emotional journey instead of how high or how low they rate their emotion.
4. Employee-exclusive data analysis — Many platforms send data analysis to the employers for intervention, causing discomfort to some employees. So bettr.me sends information and advice straight to the employee.
5. Data protection first!
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