In 2019, the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution was created in Medellin, a space focused on the generation of knowledge linked to emerging technologies for Latin America in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (policies and regulatory framework), IOT and Blockchain, among others. Medellin is today the only Latin American city with a center of these characteristics, together with San Francisco, Tokyo and Beijing. In this context, the Pyxis Medellin headquarters is a great hotbed of innovation for the entire ecosystem.
The Center is located in Ruta N, the co-work that saw the birth of our first headquarters outside the Uruguayan territory. The first home of Pyxis Colombia, an operational office that serves clients from all over the region and the world. Today, Medellín is the second largest office in the country, with a team of 32 Pyxians that occupy the entire 7th floor of Torre Scaglia. It also has the capacity to double the number of members.
The first example of this hotbed of innovation and new opportunities is Idatha, a business unit focused on Machine Learning and Machine Learning solutions. The first objective is to promote synergies and grow the team, taking advantage of the power of Medellin as a reference center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
We spoke with Sebastian Garcia, Co Founder of Idatha, to delve into these projects and the prospects for synergies and team between Idatha and Medellin.
“The challenge is how, from Pyxis, we can approach to be able to collaborate in everything related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is one of the objectives for 2020. On the one hand, we are strengthening the team in Medellín. We already have the first Colombian member of Idatha, Edwin Badillo, and in the coming months Jonatan Aguirre will travel from Uruguay to start empowering our team,” says Sebastián.
Like the other centers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Medellin seeks to promote spaces of “trust and knowledge exchange for global cooperation,” according to the Agency for Cooperation and Investment of Medellin (ACI). It is committed to innovation and research, generating synergies between industry and academia. It also seeks to generate regulatory frameworks for different industries and countries. Ultimately, the mission of these centers is to ensure that “the benefits of the current era impact all of humanity,” adds the ICA.
“We are doing a lot of work locally, but the fact that there is a Center dedicated to the 4th Industrial Revolution to digitally transform industries makes Medellin the ideal place to bring the experiences we already have. Both to contribute our grain of sand and to find new opportunities. In addition, it is important to be close to the regulations that are beginning to be established for this and, on the other hand, to be alert about the state of the art of technologies”, Sebastian says.
Idatha’s objective in Medellín is to start to make a stronger foothold in a city that today has become a pioneer in technological research and innovation. Taking advantage of the characteristics of the cities chosen to host the Centers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: investment in science, technology and innovation, fluid relationship between the public, private and academic sectors, human talent qualified in technological issues, and government commitment to leverage industry with technological advances.
In this context, one of Jonatan Aguirre’s “main challenges” in Medellín will be to unite the Montevideo team with Medellín. “Also to start generating a critical mass,” says Sebastián. In this sense, he adds that fostering the link with the Colombian academia is very important, both with the EAFIT University and the University of Antioquia, where “we may be giving some courses in the coming months”.
The truth is that exchanges between Uruguay and Medellín are becoming more and more frequent at Pyxis. Both for members from Colombia who come to the Uruguayan office for work experience, and for Uruguayans who go to Medellin.
Last year Sebastián García traveled with Martín Nari and Anna Hakobyan and Danny Bincovich from Pyxis USA to visit the team, fostering the synergy between both offices. They also took the opportunity to deepen synergies with Ruta N.
So far this year, María Fernanda Sánchez traveled to Montevideo and, in turn, Benjamín Machín and Matías Zanolli participated in PyCon Medellín together with Edwin Badillo. During the Pycon, Benjamín and Matías generated several Lunch&Learn sessions on Machine Learning and GrayMeta.
The answers to the industrial revolution
Idatha works applying different technologies to respond to the challenges of Industries 4.0. These are cases in which it is as important to know about technology as to deepen and understand each business model. Idatha’s knowledge is enhanced by Pyxis’ Industry vertical, led by Javier Regusci and Martín Nari. Idatha works as the “technological arm” of the Industry vertical.
In this sense, Idatha has experience working for some of the most important industrial plants in Uruguay. Its real use cases demonstrate that technology applied to the reality and processes of each production model promotes optimization and cost reduction along the entire production chain.
For example, by capturing images with a surveillance camera, a machine learning system was implemented to check the load of the trucks. In this way, it was possible to optimize the loading of each vehicle to ensure that there was no idle capacity. By announcing this measure, alerting about the implementation of a penalty system, suppliers started to optimize loadings from the early stages of the project.
“It was a project that paid for itself. The company recovered the investment quickly. It is a great example of projects that directly affect the plant’s production model and logistics,” Sebastian states.
Another Machine Learning application was performed at the level of an industrial plant in which virtual sensors were implanted in the boilers to infer the quality of the final product of the industry, so that the chemical process could be adapted to improve the product before it left the factory.
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