2020 was no doubt a challenging year for the world, but in spite of the adversities, we achieved some fantastic things. From continuing to make AI more accessible to our user base by launching over 20 new product features, to customers building some pretty amazing things on the platform, 2020 has been a unique year, to say the least.

We are on a mission to make AI more accessible to everyone and going by this metric 2020 has been our best year yet. More people than ever are using the Peltarion Platform to get started with their AI ideas or to turn them into a viable product.

More people than ever are using the Peltarion Platform to get started with their AI ideas or to turn them into a viable product.

From new healthcare products that use AI in the background, over companies using AI to remove tedious work reviewing thousands of RFPs, to individual users creating amazing applications like translating sign language into text in emergency situations. We're blown away by the ever growing list of ideas and applications from our community.

A lot of things happened in the background that got us to this point, so we thought it would be fun to look back at some of the highlights of our year and share with you what we were up to. Enjoy!

01/ The year of Natural Language Processing

Without a doubt, NLP (or Natural Language Processing) was front and center for us this year and at the heart of our efforts was the implementation and launch of Multilingual BERT on the Peltarion Platform, a model able to work in over 100 languages.

This implementation represents a true step change in the NLP capabilities of the Peltarion Platform, since users are no longer restricted to AI language models that don’t perform well or at all in their language. Now any market, including the ones with small speaker bases like us here in Sweden, can take advantage of a state-of-the-art model to tell powerful stories.

The best part? If you have the data, you can train one of these models with just a couple of clicks. No need to worry about dealing with AI theory, software bugs or getting / managing the hardware to run and deploy the model on. Everything is already taken care of for you. We're proud that our BERT implementations are making AI accessible to more people than ever before!

Now virtually every market and any person can benefit from the NLP revolution.

More than just technology

We have put a lot of work outside of the platform in creating content to guide our users on their NLP journey: non-technical intros, technical explanations, demos, video tutorials, thought leadership pieces, customer stories and more.

We've put together this handy blog post to host all our NLP content in a single place and make it easier for you to explore and get started on your journey: Our NLP content collection.

More to come

NLP has been and will continue to be a big focus point for us during 2021, so stay tuned for more product updates, more content and more NLP possibilities coming your way, all at your fingertips with only a few clicks.

02/ New product features

We're constantly updating the Peltarion Platform: from easier ways to upload your data and preprocessing it, to new premade / pretrained models, etc. our Product Team is constantly pushing the boundaries to make AI more accessible to all.

Here's a short selection of some of our favorite features from this year.

More versatile than ever

Another big focus for us this year, was to make it easier for our users to integrate the Peltarion-built models into their operations. With that in mind we launched a number of integrations to accomplish anything from uploading data to the platform, to building business tools and commercial applications.

Operationalizing AI has never been this easy! This is truly a unique benefit that only the Peltarion Platform is able to deliver on the market right now. So don't hesitate and try them out for yourself!

03/ Customer stories

We’re more inspired than ever by our incredible customers and we are keen to share a glimpse into what they are working on and how they’re doing it.

Here are our favorite customer stories of 2020. Explore how they have successfully navigated their journey from idea to AI project with the Peltarion Platform and Servies.

Peltarion makes the process easier. We can focus on data rather than the mechanics of models

Simon Grant, CEO / Scibase

04/ Collaborations and research

From the Swedish central bank to the Research Institutes of Sweden, from Covid-19 to Sustainability projects, our goal with our research and collaborations is to live up to our vision of making AI more accessible to everyone by using our expertise to help tackle barriers standing in the way of others of reaping the benefits of the technology.

Here’s a selection of the projects we have been working on during 2020:

Going beyond individual projects, we are fortunate enough to be able to be part of and contribute to nationwide AI initiatives, as well as international events:

  • AI Agenda - Peltarion has been part of this large project since the start, building up reports and suggestions for the Swedish government on how to make the best use of AI (also now being exported to EU Parliament etc). Peltarion was one out of 6 - 7 organizations that were selected to speak in the Swedish Parliament in an official AI hearing and has been part of an EU Parliament roundtable.
  • AI Sweden - Peltarion is a founding partner, part of the steering committee. AI Sweden has funding from Vinnova (the government) with 100+ MSEK and is coordinating the AI efforts in Sweden
  • Vinnova - Peltarion is a formal reviewer for Vinnova for all AI-related projects.
  • Reviewers - Members of the Peltarion data science team have been formal reviewers for some of the top AI conferences in the world, e.g. ICML and ICLR.
  • Speakers - Peltarion is always a coveted speaker and has taken part in several conferences including Linneaus big data conference, the RedEye AI day, BreakIt 2020, EIT Summer School and many more.
  • Organizers - Peltarion was part of creating a new workshop called "Software Engineering for AI", to be part of the ICSE conference next year and Peltarion is part of the program committee.

05/ Your favorite blog posts

In 2020, we posted close to 100 blog posts! Here is a selection of the most viewed and most liked by you our audience.

06/ Why we do what we do - Closing thoughts from our CEO

We believe that AI is a transformative technology that has the immense potential of advancing humankind. For that to happen the technology must be made usable and affordable for all - not only the big and powerful.

The change the world faces as the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) progresses has no equivalent in contemporary history. The fundamental impact that AI will have and is starting to have is nothing short of mind-blowing. The potential good for fighting illness, poverty and environmental damage is nearly limitless.

However, in the real world things are not looking as good. Today practical, operational use of modern AI at scale is limited to the big tech giants and a few super unicorns. There is a major and increasing gap between the global tech companies on one side and regular companies, start-ups and individuals on the other side. To change this, first, the technology must be made usable and affordable for all - not only the big and powerful. Second, more people need to understand AI in order to understand the implications it has for society at large. We try to help a bit with the second, but Peltarion’s focus is on the first.

Any solution that looks to dramatically change the cost and complexity of building and maintaining AI systems must rest on three basic pillars:

  • Ease of use - You don’t have to be an AI superstar to use it. A developer or engineer should be able to use it.
  • Power - The solution must support custom data, mixes of data types as well as taking advantage of the AI technology developed in the past years.
  • Commercial/industrial grade - Building an AI model is the easy bit. Being able to deploy and maintain an AI system, especially for mission-critical systems is the hard part. It is also the most important part.

There are AI platforms on the market, each checking one of the points above. Our ambition is to build one that checks all the points.

In 2020 the democratization of AI  has taken great leaps. Not only the exponentially increasing number of users on our platform, but the strong advances of the no-code movement, and the genuine interests of companies of getting AI as a core part across all business areas.  I expect even more progress in 2021.

It is a journey that we invite everyone to join! We are looking forward to continuing to be inspired in 2021 by the amazing and powerful AI solutions that our users are creating and which are continually advancing humankind.

  • Reynaldo Boulogne

    Reynaldo Boulogne

    With over 15 years of experience, Reynaldo has worked within the intersection of business and technology across multiple sectors, most recently at Klarna and Spotify. He is passionate about innovation, leadership, and building things from scratch. Reynaldo is also a former Vice-chairman of the Stockholm based AI forum, Stockholm AI.

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