Cognitive Hub: the Operating System for the Workplace of the Future Artificial Intelligence series
Cognitive Hub September 2017 02 Operating systems for managing complexity We all have been taught the idea that the simpler, the better. Today, however, complexity plays a fundamental role in all our lives at home and at work: an effective orchestration of all of the data and resources at our fingertips promises to provide us with information that is more than ever immediate, accurate, coordinated and actionable. Although not fully realised, a form of this data orchestration has already happened. For many years after it was first invented the modern computer was only able to perform one task at a time. However, following the introduction of multi-tasking operating systems (OSs), computers have been able to manage and schedule a number of activities, improving their performances enormously on the basis of logical rules defined to optimise their resources. Today, the same kind of OSs are present in all the connected devices that are part of our digital and cyber physical worlds, becoming key entry points for the management of our businesses and lives. Nevertheless, to keep pace with the increasing complexity of our businesses and our everyday lives and to provide us with more sophisticated and intelligent support, the concept of OSs must evolve. They will need to be more adaptive and federated, as they cooperate with and learn from us and each other. At Konica Minolta we re exploring ways to develop an AI based operating system that will support us in managing complexity and benefit from it. There are several challenges to be overcome in order to achieve this new type of Cognitive operating system. The risk is that the current solutions focus only on AI algorithms and platforms for specific applications in the short term, while missing the bigger picture in the longer term. AI based OSs will need to act as cognitive/ai integrators and augment what will be a growing commoditisation of algorithms. A more holistic, longer term view of AI services will enable us to move from consuming information towards managing it by augmenting our intelligence and improving our decision-making processes. Such AI based OSs will emerge from systems that will learn from our own intuition and emotional intelligence. At Konica Minolta, we re exploring ways to develop a type of operating system that is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), that can orchestrate several OSs and that is capable of managing complexity to help people and organisations to derive greater benefit from their data and resources.
Cognitive Hub September 2017 03 Combining the two sides of AI Currently AI systems are typically divided into two types. First, those that fall into the one-to-one category focus on individuals including personal assistants that, for example, use Natural Language Understanding to provide basic solutions and services for the consumer mass-market. Second, there are customised high-scale AI platforms that have been developed for entire businesses and are mainly aimed at working on large data-sets for large-scale needs. Both of these types of systems were built predominantly to satisfy the requirements of cost, security and stability. Their ruling logic has had to suit everybody and the possibility of customising them to meet the needs of individuals is limited. How can we move away from the dichotomy of currently existing AI platforms? How can we move away from this cognitive trap to exploit the true potential of AI? The answer comes in the form of distributed operating system applications that occupy a middle ground. These systems can integrate and orchestrate AI services to enable better team working and collaboration among individuals, allowing small, medium and larger enterprises to access distributed intelligent edge devices seamlessly, interfacing with smartphones and tablets, and supporting enterprises in taking decisions that are more objectively based.
Dr Dennis Curry Konica Minolta Inc. 04 Seamlessly managing complexity in the workplace This is Cognitive Hub. Powered by Konica Minolta, Cognitive Hub provides an AI based operating system combined with cognitive capabilities to enable organisations to manage the ever-growing data and its complexity easily and seamlessly. Building on the success of Workplace Hub, which automates the management of IT and data services, Cognitive Hub will develop the management, orchestration and security of the workplace environment through Artificial and Distributed Intelligence. Individuals and teams will benefit from the natural, cognitive and practical user experiences that Cognitive Hub delivers. This will connect the cyber and virtual world with physical resources; it will connect information flowing through people, spaces and devices. We are designing the Cognitive Hub to learn and predict the needs of the user rather than to be based on self-defined logic from individual applications. As you switch between operational, tactical and strategic tasks, you ll be able to create, organise and browse information through a single-entry point. Cognitive Hub will improve the way in which you work, it will connect you with other individuals and it will support you in making better decisions Cognitive Hub will improve the way in which you work, it will connect you with other individuals and it will support you in making better decisions. Within the context of a working environment, where collaboration is often a critical element for successful execution, Cognitive Hub will learn about how people gather information, how they analyse its context, how they then take decisions and finally about how they perform actions all within a seamless process. In addition, the fundamentals of human communication including facial expression, gestures and speech will be integrated into Cognitive Hub through a truly multimodal interface offering wide flexibility and allowing the user to select how to execute particular function. To drive continuous improvement, these multimodal interfaces will be used to determine and learn the user s satisfaction with the system s performance. They will also improve security, since AI will empower malicious activities at a level of complexity unseen to date.
Cognitive Hub September 2017 05 Dr Dennis Curry Konica Minolta Inc. 06 Increasing the value for collaboration Meet Ada and discover some of the Cognitive Hub functionalities Ada is a marketing executive, working with several teams located in different cities. By tomorrow, her group has to put together a presentation for a new business pitch for a large multinational client. The pressure is on to win the account. Liaising with her distributed teams, Ada receives information from e-mail, text, through instant messaging and by phone. While her team is carefully examining the project s folders to identify important materials, Ada is searching online for useful facts and data. How can Ada and her team cope with this deluge of information to identify what is important and make the right decisions, keeping a healthy work-life balance? Cognitive Hub, as a distributed intelligence edge device, is working closely with Ada and her teams, supporting them in parsing the information, in suggesting solutions, facts and material that could be relevant for the project. Based on the way that Ada and her team work, Cognitive Hub has learnt to offer them a variety of options amongst which they will be able to make the final choices. Cognitive Business Analytics will derive insight from the data coming from Customer Relationship Management tools integrated with emails and other document to suggest which clients or partners should be contacted first to ensure their engagement Exploiting Natural Language Processing (NLP) and advanced semantic tools, Cognitive Content Search will parse information to meet the needs of the users with a seamless interface while Cognitive Meeting Execution will support them during the course of a meeting, automatically summarising discussions and results COGNITIVE HUB Intelligent Planning will support teams to organise meetings on the basis of real availability of people and resources, exploiting calendars and building management information With Intuitive Office Management, Cognitive Hub will support users in locating people, objects and other company assets, interacting with mobile and other cyber-physical system (CPS) devices to provide navigation and instructions. In the same time, Cognitive Hub will support the employees interactions with their office environment to improve their comfort and wellbeing
Cognitive Hub September 2017 07 Dr Dennis Curry Konica Minolta Inc. 08 At the core: Cognitive Hub ENVIRONMENT SENSING DATA ANALYTICS PLATFORM The hybrid architecture of Cognitive Hub will be deployed on the edge and the cloud and it reflects its ability to interact with external digital and physical worlds. MACHINE LEARNING PLATFORM Deploying and executing ML models on top of the hyperconvergence hybrid edge/cloud platform. Enabling ML re-training with specific customer datasets. ENVIRONMENT SENSING Monitoring workplace through IoT sensors and Cyber Physical Systems like Smart cameras. Bridging gap between physical world and digital world using IoT datalink technology like LoRa. INTERACTION MANAGER Interfacing with human complexity and robotics actuators and sensors. Data fusion and inference of user action with user intent interpretation. INTERACTION MANAGER COGNITIVE HUB AI based Operating System for the Workplace of the Future MACHINE LEARNING PLATFORM SEMANTIC PLATFORM As well as automatically orchestrating its different hardware and software resources to provide the support required in many varied and different contexts, Cognitive Hub will be able to manage interactions with other AI services through a distributed intelligence network. DATA ANALYTICS PLATFORM Collecting and processing time series data from infrastructure and IoT devices. Deploying and executing realtime and batch predictive and prescriptive analytics tasks to provide support for decision making. DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE NETWORK SEMANTIC SELF SEMANTIC PLATFORM Finding the meaning from unstructured data by taking any unstructured data and enriching (annotating) it with relevant structured and semistructured information to gain understanding of content and context of people, devices and spaces. Connecting with other Cognitive Hubs, public clouds and third party AI agents using Autonomous AI principles to external AI agents and services. User-centric digital representation of people, devices and spaces around us using a Semantic Enrichment and Linking Framework.
Cognitive Hub September 2017 09 A new model of security Cognitive Hub will use AI to produce a new model of security that is fluid and adaptive, balancing easy access to distributed services with the robust security required in the modern workplace. It is widely recognised that in the future cyber-attacks will be increasingly powered by AI, becoming impossible to predict, and very difficult to recognise, since AI viruses will learn from your working habits and idiosyncrasies. To combat this, Cognitive Hub will use AI to produce a new model of security that is fluid and adaptive, balancing easy access to distributed services with the need for security. It will protect users by integrating AI systems from third party vendors to automatically detect and avert any external or internal threats. This approach will also significantly reduce operational costs. For example, traditional firewalls, anti-virus and anti-malware solutions can be set up in combination with network behaviour analytical tools along with the use of anomaly detection and machine learning to understand the nature of threats quickly. Cognitive Hub s multi-modal human computer interfaces offer an extra layer of security with voice or face recognition.
Dr Dennis Curry Konica Minolta Inc. 10 Networks that mirror the human brain The digital cortex is a membrane in the physical world, composed of the network of people, devices and spaces 1 and it can be seen as an evolution from the current centralised cloud architecture towards a future, distributed-edge architecture. The digital cortex can be described as the implementation of artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions upon this distributed, yet federated, hybrid infrastructure. This is similar to the underlying connections between various regions of the brain. It will assist and augment the cognitive capabilities of users through advanced interaction, integration and contextualisation of resources. For many years we ve struggled to handle complex problems that are above and beyond the organisational constraints of systems operating independently from each other. However, these problems are now being addressed thanks to both the development of AI solutions embedded in this digital cortex as well as the integration of people with sensors and IoT devices on the edge. By developing the OSs of the future, Cognitive Hub combines all of these concepts in order to leverage AI to handle organisational complexity and actively encourage interoperability. The digital cortex is coordinated, collaborative and coherent, enabling rapid and agile decision-making for users through seamless and transparent information sharing. In support of its functionality and interoperability, the digital cortex will be characterised by the following three emerging factors. AI agents, also known as intelligent software objects, are distributed operating systems. They perceive their environment and autonomously attempt to reach their objectives through collaboration with other agents and observation of the results of these efforts. The digital cortex is coordinated, collaborative and coherent, enabling rapid and agile decision-making for users through seamless and transparent information sharing. Other kinds of distributed operating systems will be situated in the cloud or edge: an autonomous API identifies machine-understandable protocols, interprets which operations and functionalities an object is able to perform and enables unambiguous machine-tomachine interactions by expanding its range of compatibility and adjusting its capabilities. Contextual or situated cognitive computation consolidates relevant information about the situation, location, environment and identity of a user 2. As a result, the system can anticipate his or her requirements, provide information proactively and orchestrate services and resources by combining various forms of contextual awareness. These context relevant solutions integrate data, through the edge, together with AI capabilities to foster personalised, enhanced learning and problem solving. 2 The Future of Work, March 2017. http://bit.ly/the-future-of-work-kmle 2 Context-Aware Computing, Albrecht Schmidt, 2017. http://bit.ly/context-aware-computing
An umbrella project: sharing and learning Cognitive Hub is an umbrella project aimed at driving the development of a new and exciting platform. As an operating system it will orchestrate the physical and digital resources of the workplace of the future, to enable organisations to make more insightful business decisions. The development of this ambitious system is the next milestone in Konica Minolta s journey of transformation. The research that we carry out in our laboratories in Europe, Japan and the United States is bringing together the various elements and platforms that will form Cognitive Hub. Now, we re looking for early adopters, partners and leading technology players to join us on this exciting journey. In our next whitepapers, we ll share more details about the technologies, the case studies, the fields of application and the cooperation models of Cognitive Hub. If you re interested in driving this new technology forward then join us as we develop the Cognitive Hub and create the workplace of the future. research@konicaminolta.eu http://research.konicaminolta.eu/ Laboratory Europe Konica Minolta Inc. Konica Minolta Laboratory Europe - Konica Minolta Inc. 90 Chancery Lane, London, WC2A 1EU, United Kingdom All rights reserved.