R3plica

Meet Vivek Menon M

Ai and IoT Developer @ Allianze Infosoft

Ernakulam, Kerala, India

Vivek Menon M is a cybernaut with experience in IoT and AI domain outfitted with B. Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering.

He has a Postgraduate Diploma in Electronic Product Design and Manufacturing.

Vivek is a fervent learner and voracious reader who possesses the strong adaptability to upgrade, blend and upswing professionally with new technologies and domains.

How did you first learn about artificial intelligence?

It was during my PG diploma I began to learn about instrumental technologies in Industry 4.0.

My initial interest and inclination were towards IoT as a lot of hardware designing is involved in it and being an Electronics Engineer it was more associated with my domain.

But when I explored more I realized that even though AI and IoT are independent technologies they will become an explosive cocktail if they become interdependent.

The IoT improves the value of AI by allowing real-time connectivity, signaling and data exchange.

AI boosts the capabilities of the IoT by applying machine learning to improve decision making.

How did you become an AI developer?

When I kick-started my career as an IoT Developer in Symptoms I was assigned to product development, where we were developing a product which was based on both IoT and AI, so I got a good exposure in AI domain in that process and learned a lot of things do’s and don’ts and plenty of aspects in AI.

I started to read blogs related to AI participated in expos and meetups, delivered talks for students, stayed updated with the changes happening dynamically in AI.

I always kept my eyes and ears open to stay up to date in AI else we cannot survive as a developer because AI is still in its nascent stage and change is very dynamic.

Could you define AI and what will be the impact on society?

AI is an “umbrella term” for a branch of computer science focused on creating machines capable of thinking and learning.

Many people have the misconception that AI is all about robots doing jobs instead of humans.

This is not true, AI is supposed to alleviate the complex tasks.

It can perform predictions and insights from given data sets which could help to tweak the business revenues.

Not only in business but also in many aspects of societies such as Healthcare, Weather, Agriculture, etc. Insights hidden in data and forecasting the parameters can bring a lot of improvements in these sectors.

These capabilities are accomplished via a collection of computer algorithms that use mathematics and logic to perform the AI’s assigned task.

So although our most famous science fiction books and movies tend to portray AI in the form of human-like robots, AI is simply computer code running in software.

How Artificial Intelligence could Fight the spread of a Deadly Outbreak?

Recently I came across an article related to a company called BluDots which predicted the corona outbreak.

In that article Kamran Khan, an infectious disease physician and BlueDot’s founder and CEO explained in an interview how the company’s early-warning system uses artificial intelligence, including natural-language processing and machine learning, to track over 100 infectious diseases by analyzing about 100,000 articles in 65 languages every day.

That data helps the company know when to notify its clients about the potential presence and spread of an infectious disease.

Other data, like traveler itinerary information and flight paths, can help give the company additional hints about how a disease will likely spread.

For instance, earlier this month, BlueDot researchers predicted other cities in Asia where the coronavirus would show up after it appeared in mainland China.

A similar approach can be adapted to monitor and predict such deadly outbreaks.

Such predictions can save millions of lives.

What advice would you give to a student in the field of AI?

Don’t jump directly into complex stuff without knowing how it works because you will end up banging your head on the wall.

Learn from scratch, try to understand the maths and other logics behind the algorithms and neural networks.

Get an understanding of statistics and probability, learn python, get your hands dirty, familiarise with the necessary libraries and modules , make coding your habit, be a voracious reader and avid learner technical advancement and professional growth and other advancements will happen in course of time.

Do you have any AI projects that want to share the experience with us?

Right now I am working in a company called Allianze Infosoft a sister entity of Allianze BPO International, here we are developing products and solutions for schools and offices to improve the security aspects, apart from that we are developing our own patented solutions which are still under progress.

We are also into chatbot development, image processing, and most projects are based on object detection and classification