The Economic Times - Bangalore, 3/13/2020 Cropped page Page: 13

Zoom Sharessee a SpikeVirtual meetings app Zoom is also seeing an unprecedented in-crease in usage as shares of the company also see a rapid rise with executives from Chinese

fi rms collaborating from home with usage from

China growing. The chief fi nancial offi -cer of the company, Kelly Steckelberg said that the adop-

tion of the app has signifi cantly risen. The com-

pany has lifted the 40-minute time limit on the app for users in China and has been extending the service to education insti-tutions in the US on request.

Companies developing and selling surveillance technology such as Videonetics Technology, UncannyVision Solutions,

Staqu Technologies, FaceTagr and Innefu Labs have seen their busi-ness boom in the country, as police and private firms increasingly use it to identify criminals, missing per-sons, dead bodies, non-compliant factory workers or people about to commit crimes.

Surveillance technology includes facial recognition, voice recognition and action recognition and helps law enforcers nab miscreants or companies to warn workers who are not following safety protocols at factories.

In short, with people being watched at airports, traffic signals, offices, factories and even at their own apartment buildings, law en-forcers and companies are raising the efficiency quotient, although this comes at the cost of individual privacy.

In India, the government looks at surveillance technology as a way to complement its understaffed police force and outdated military, in the process increasing use cases. Some states have also gone a step ahead, using software tools to mine data on social media to check potential threats to law and order.

Indian startups in the surveil-lance tech space, which compete with US-based Verint Systems and Japan’s NEC Corp, are pitching the technology as a means to modernize law enforcement techniques and reduce manpower at companies.

Despite privacy concerns and the lack of a personal data protec-tion law, India’s facial recognition market is expected to grow six-fold by 2024 to $4.3 billion, nearly on par with China, according o estimates by TechSci Research, a manage-ment consulting firm.

“After architecting the first web-cam at Intel in the 1990s, I realised

that video was going to become a dataset soon, like text,” said Tinku Acharya, founder and managing director of Videonetics Technology. “Computing and communication are evolving and they are converg-ing. Visual computing is the fu-ture,” he added.

Videonetics’ traffic management product detects cars jumping red lights, over-speeding, and whether drivers are not wearing seat belts or talking on their mobile phones. It also detects if riders are not using helmets and how many are astride each bike or scooter.

Its key feature is reading vehicle number plates in order to flag them to traffic police. Videonetics has supplied its surveillance products to more than 80 airports, 130 cities and

100 large enterprises. Its technology moni-tors 10,000 traffic lanes and has con-nected 100,000 camer-as, it said. Detecting and reading number plates in India is no easy feat.

A lack of standards means owners have the liberty to crea-tively use fonts, col-ours and paints. So, detecting the number

accurately helps police identify the vehicle and owner immediately.

“Number plates are like facial recognition for cars,” said Ranjith Parakkal, CEO at UncannyVision Solutions, a Bengaluru-based com-pany that sells number plate detec-tion products in India as well as the United States. “In India, numbers are difficult to understand… (and) you can make your own plate with different fonts and colours. In the US, there are a few thousand varie-ties, but it is easy because we have been trained on Indian data.”

UncannyVision works with private parking companies in the United States as well as building

security app MyGate in India, apart from state governments in Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

UncannyVision, Videonetics and Staqu also sell video analytics products that detect ‘suspicious’ or problematic actions.

The camera does not reveal the person’s identity but warns law en-forcement or factory supervisors of alarming actions or those not in line with company policy, such as fights among workers or unusual activity inside ATMs. “Our video analytics product can identify violence, can identify if there is a sudden increase in crowd at someplace at an unusual hour. It can also detect intrusions,” said Atul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Staqu Technologies, which has placed 3,000 smart cameras across prisons in Uttar Pradesh and digit-ised criminal records across seven North Indian states.

Competitor FaceTagr has in-stalled an app on smartphones of 22,000 police officers in South India, who use it to take photographs of suspects in order to check if they have a criminal record

Staqu and Innefu Labs use ad-vanced deep learning algorithms to identify crime hotspots, do gang link and predictive crime analysis to manage potential threats or solve crimes. Innefu Labs also works with governments to monitor web-sites, social media platforms, blogs, news site, forums and open source databases to identify threats.

Surveillance technology, especial-ly facial recognition, raises quite a few privacy issues.

Governments and privacy experts point out their topmost concern revolves around its level of accuracy and the risk that innocent persons would be arrested or that it would end up targeting certain classes of people due to poor input data.

“The widespread adoption of facial recognition technologies by the pub-lic and private sectors, without any

meaningful debate or regula-tion, raises a number of con-cerns,” research firm Data Governance Network said in paper on facial recognition technology. “These concerns revolve around issues of transparency, privacy and civil liberties, accuracy and effectiveness, and evidence of biased outcomes,” it said.

To be sure, many of the startups mentioned earlier in the story are creating their own databases of brown faces to increase accuracy levels in detec-tion.

Videonetics said it had created exclusive data of 1 million faces from India and Bangladesh, while Staqu has mined data of celebrities and politicians from the internet to train its own datasets.

“Foreign databases are not successful with brown faces. So, we de-veloped our own,” said Acharya of Videonetics. “Given reasonable qual-ity of data, we are getting 90% + accuracy in natu-ral and outdoor video,” he added. The company has also used the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems to train its algorithm.

Staqu’s Rai said the company has collated im-ages data of celebrities and politicians from television series, news reports and movies. “Every state has 3,000-4,000 celebrities. (We) collected images from the internet and trained our datasets on them.”

Megha.Mandavia@timesgroup.com

NEW TECHNOLOGY FRONTIERS Surveillance tech is changing the contours of law enforcement and private enterprises, with startups in the space seeing their businesses boom, reports Megha Mandavia

FIGHT AGAINST THE VIRUS

A Tech Eye in the Sky

India Inc Leads in Moving Apps On-Premise from Cloud

of Indian enterprises are moving or planning to move public apps back on-premise, ac-cording to a new study by enterprise cloud computing fi rm Nutanix. This is far higher

than the global average of 73%. The second edition of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, compiled by Vanson Bourne fi nds that enterprises are going through a period of adjustment as their experience with public cloud matures, with many realising that public cloud is not the single solution to their cloud strategy. “Indian enterprises are seeing hybrid cloud as the ideal IT environment that provides this choice,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix. “As more Indian enterprises move away from legacy IT systems and adopt cloud architecture, the re-allocation of staff and resources, so they can keep pace with emerging technologies, will become a priority.” The study was conducted across 2,650 global IT decision-makers about where they’re running their business.

— Priyanka.Sangani@timesgroup.com

KEY TAKEAWAYS

VIDEO CONFERENCING SEES A BOOM

42%of enterprises plan to shift the majority of their IT deployments to hybrid cloud, lower than the global average of 51.74%

97%Indian IT professionals said that hybrid cloud represents the ideal IT operating model

However, only

13%said they envision their workloads distributed across multiple clouds

India relies less on traditional data centres than both APJ and the global average.

Only 42% of Indian respondents reported current usage of traditional data centre deployments as against 52 in APJ, 57% globally

India is enthusiastic about hybrid cloud even though its lagging its peers.Indian enterprises plan to shift the majority of their IT deployments to hybrid cloud (42%) within the next 3-5 years

91%

While 46% ofIndian enterprises envision all of their workloads in the public cloud, 38% prefer all workloads running in a private cloud

Lack of internal IT skills and retaining qualified IT staff are both real concerns for Indian enterprises. 97% said that they are investing in reskilling their IT teams to keep pace with emerging technologies, against 90.94% globally

Tools that Let You Work, Study from Home

Webex registers traffi c boomCisco owned-Webex which makes video-conferencing applications has seen a spike in traffi c since the spread of the Coronavirus with companies asking employees to work from home. Sri Srinivasan, senior vice president and general manager for the Team Collaboration Group at Cisco, said the company saw a 22-times increase in traffi c to Webex from Japan, Singapore, and South Korea after the Lunar New Year celebrations in China.

Zoho builds Remote CRM Tool Suite The cloud-based application maker said it has released a suite of products that allow remote working. The com-pany has packaged eleven of its tools including those used for word pro-cessing, making presen-tations, spreadsheets and project manage-ment tools - the suite is meant to target smaller companies and startups which have not invested in remote working tools and which may want an alternative from Google and Microsoft’s products.

Google Extends Advanced Tools from G-SuiteGoogle’s CEO Sundar Pichai said earlier this month that the company would give free access to “advanced” G Suite features that allow businesses and schools to connect to employees and students from home. Some of these advanced features include live-streaming facilities with up to 250 participants. The feature will be free for businesses and schools till July 1, he said. While Google is yet to make it mandatory to work from home in In-dia, the internet fi rm has allowed over 100,000 people in US and Europe to do remote working using its hangouts to collaborate with colleagues.

Contributing to social distancing if you

are able to, helps the overall community spread and most importantly, will help offset the peak loads through critical healthcare systems and also saves it for people in

need. (based on expert advice)SUNDAR PICHAI

Microsoft Teams Expects More Live Document Collaboration,

File StorageThe Microsoft Teams platform used for workplace chat, video meeting and fi le storage is also seeing higher usage. The company expects live

document collaborations to in-crease among its enterprise clients due to the spread of the pandemic

and is now offering an upgrade on fi le storage. Earlier, the free Teams app

had limits on fi le storage and the ability to record meetings, which have been lifted off since March 10 allowing a free six-month trial of the more

adavnced version of the app.

Cloud Telephony Allows Home-based Mobile Call CentresHyderabad-head-quartered cloud telephony com-pany, Ozonetel has started offering the option to its clients to switch their call centres into work-from home models without letting prospective customers know that the call is being taken from home. It offers an ‘offl ine mode’ option which allows

call centre agents and sales personnel to route calls to their mobile phones instead of them taking calls via desktop.

AR Startup Magic Leap to Explorea Sale

Bloomberg

Magic Leap, the startup that raised more than $2 bil-lion to build an augmented-reality device, is exploring options including a sale, ac-cording to people familiar with the matter.

The Plantation, Florida-based company is working with an adviser to consider strategic options that could also include forming a partnership or selling a significant stake ahead of a potential listing, said the people. Magic Leap could fetch more than $10 billion if it pursues a sale, the peo-ple said, asking not to be identified because the infor-mation is private.

Tech companies have been placing bets on the promise of augmented-reality prod-ucts, which have also found uses in healthcare and other industries.

Magic Leap, which counts Alphabet’s Google and Alibaba Group Holding among its largest investors, is gauging potential inter-est from large tech compa-nies including Facebook and J&J, the people said.

An initial meeting be-tween Facebook and Magic Leap never progressed to deal talks. In addition to Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon have all been investing in augmented reality with their own divi-sions, said, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst. AR hardware may be limit-ed to enterprise uses for the next several years, he said.

Apps powered by artificial intel-ligence are helping people screen themselves for the Novel corona-virus, reducing the pressure on healthcare institutions and warn-ing those at high risk of developing the infection across the world and also in India.

Two Indian-origin researchers, one in Australia and the other in the US, have led their teams to de-velop Covid-19 specific risk checker apps to counter the fear and confu-sion surrounding the infection, de-clared a pandemic by the WHO.

While Abhi Bhatia, cofounder of Medius Health, an AI digital health company in Australia, launched his platform on March 4, Arni SR Srinivasa Rao from Augusta University in the US and his team will be doing so soon. The apps can be used to reach someone really early on, educate the public, deliver accurate information relevant to

their symptoms and quell the fears of people.

Globally, health tech startups with medical chat bots are scram-bling to update their algorithms to screen people and advise whether they should be evaluated for the infection. But apps that enable at-home risk assessments in just about a minute are making an entry in India too.

Individuals have to fill in a de-tailed questionnaire and AI then uses an algorithm to rapidly assess their information, send a risk as-sessment -- no risk, minimal risk, moderate or high risk -- and alert the nearest facility that a health check is likely needed. The biggest problem with epidemics in general is the massive supply and demand mismatch, noted Bhatia. A huge demand for healthcare institutions and not enough to cater to it.

Medius Health, he said, de-veloped Quro, a risk assess-ment tool for Covid-19, which has so far infected over 70 people in India. “The do-it-yourself web app tool pre-sents the user with questions

related to prevalent symptoms and risk factors in accordance with WHO protocols and guidelines,” Bhatia said over the phone. The tool helps to understand the patient’s symptoms and determine the coro-navirus risk, thereby educating the public on the virus and collecting data for healthcare officials for early intervention, he said.

“Given the size of the populace in India and the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus, we received more than 4,000 hits within 24 hours of rolling out the tool in India,” Bhatia said. “Our AI system is also con-tinuously collating this data to help the Health ministry understand the magnitude of fear amongst peo-ple as well as steer potential high risk cases towards early detection and timely medical intervention to prevent it from spreading further,”

he added.There were 64,843 hits on

the risk assessment app till Thursday. From India, there were 28,700 hits. The number of risk assessments is growing at 32% daily.

Rao, from the Augusta University, and his team said

their app can help direct those deemed at risk to the nearest defini-tive testing facility.

The soon-to-be-launched app will help provide local and public health officials with real time informa-tion on emerging demographics of those most at risk for the infection so they can better target preven-tion and treatment initiatives, ac-cording to a study published in the journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.

“We wanted to help identify people who are at high risk for coronavi-rus, help expedite their access to screening and to medical care and reduce spread of this infectious dis-ease,” said Rao.

The app asks individuals where they live as well as other details like gender, age and race, in addition to recent contact with an individual known to have coronavirus.

It also asks users about areas they have travelled to, the researchers said. The app enquires about com-mon symptoms of infection and their duration, including fever, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, sputum production, headache, diar-rhoea and pneumonia. — PTI

Two Indian-origin researchers, one in Australia and the other in the US, are developing risk checker apps

Companies, globally and in India, are encouraging employees to work from home and reduce face to face interaction till the Covid-19 pandemic is reduced and life turns normal. The fi rst to adopt these were large technology companies who have invested in tools that allow remote working, but Indian fi rms are also using the opportunity to use these tools to allow employees work from home, reports Anandi Chandrasekhar

Apps, Artificial Intelligence to Help Tackle ScareWe wanted to help identify people who are at high

risk...help expedite their access to screening and to medical careSR SRINIVASA RAOAugusta University, US

After architecting the

fi rst webcam at Intel in the 1990s, I realised that video was going to become a dataset soon, like texts. Visual computing is the futureTINKU ACHARYAManaging Director,

Videonetics Technology

Our video analytics product can identify

violence, can identify if there is a sudden increase in crowd at some place at an unusual hour. It can also detect intrusionsATUL RAI CEO, Staqu Technologies

ILLUSTRATION: ANIRBAN BORA

Surveillance technology includes fa-cial recogni-tion, voice recognition and action recognition

...In India, you can make your

own plate with dif-ferent fonts & co-lours. In the US, there’re a few thou-sand varieties, but it is easy because we have been trained on Indian dataRANJITH PARAKKALCEO, UncannyVisionSolutions

13�THE ECONOMIC TIMES | BENGALURU | FRIDAY | 13 MARCH 2020 | WWW.ECONOMICTIMES .COM

Disruption: Technology

CCI NG 3.7 Product: ETBangaloreBS PubDate: 13-03-2020 Zone: Bangalore Edition: 1 Page: ETBGNP13 User: suresh.kumar Time: 03-12-2020 23:13 Color: CMYK