Spotlight on INNOVATION FACTORI Kuala Lumpur
Opened in 2022, INNOVATION FACTORI Kuala Lumpur is a hub for digital transformation in the Asia-Pacific region. We spoke to Daiye Zheng, INNOVATION FACTORI Kuala Lumpur manager, who leads a dynamic team of domain data and AI experts, on how she and her team are making digital promise a reality.
Could you tell us a bit more about INNOVATION FACTORI Kuala Lumpur and the region-specific challenges you tackle?
We cover a very broad market so, the key challenge for us is the huge diversity in terms of digital maturity across the region. Beyond levels of digital maturity our customers also differ a lot in their size and the areas they would like to work with us in, for instance we have customers working in traditional oil and gas, and in areas like geothermal energy, and mining.
We’re also quite early in our journey, having been open just over a year, it’s a very energetic team with I have to say lots of new ideas, so it’s great to work with them, and to work closely with people on the ground in the region.
Besides delivering projects for and with customers, we are also doing some of our own innovative research. As a kind of self-development initiative, each member of the team gets one day of the week on average that they can use to pick a relevant or trending topic and investigate it themselves. As a result of this we have done quite a lot of work on the GenAI side, and having built this greater depth of understanding we can show our customers the real potential of technologies that may otherwise seem just like a new trend to them. This means that they see the vision, they see the future, and we can invest in new transformative ideas together.
Can you talk about a project with a customer designed to advance their digital journey?
We’ve recently had success in two separate, but connected, projects with one of our largest customer looking to implement the OSDU® Technical Standard through our Data and AI platform. They are one of our most advanced customers in terms of how they view their data strategy and their ambitious cloud vision, which includes moving everything to the cloud, starting with subsurface data. This was an enormous project that involved many terabytes of data and over 20 million records. We deployed our smart data tools, using AI for continuous validation to ensure the quality and completeness of the data during migration.
With the same customer we then began a smart data maturation project, for the data that had been migrated to the Data and AI platform and stored in the OSDU® Technical Standard format. We combined an automated workflow using Dataiku with machine learning (ML) enabled data extraction and prediction. Without our smart data tools, it would have been a very time consuming and error prone process that would require manually filling gaps in reports, but in this case our ML model enabled us to enrich the data and fill missing attributes automatically through accurate data extraction from tens of thousands of reports.
In what ways does your center engage with the local community and educational institutions?
We work closely with local universities including the University of Malaya, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP), and others. We also take part in and run local events, like our machine learning competition, which is very beneficial for all sides as it fosters connection with the local energy community, and in the case of the machine learning competition we also identified two local interns that have worked with us in the last year. They were able to be involved with and help us work on some production related Data and AI platform use cases involving our partners from Cognite, it’s been very successful so far and we intend to continue this mode of working this year.
What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in the industry going forward?
I think if you look across the whole industry, not necessarily just Asia, although digital maturity is not the same, I see almost all companies actively trying to do something to improve it. Our larger customers already have big data scientist teams, and even our less digitally mature customers are starting to engage local industry players and talking about improving their capabilities. So, what I see as the biggest challenge for the future of digital is not ability or interest, it’s in operationalizing solutions fully. That is where I see the strength of INNOVATION FACTORI, we can not only help you to explore new ideas and concepts that solve domain challenges, but we can help you to truly scale and operationalize these custom-built solutions and maintain them over the long term.
