When we entered the age of mobile banking in 2010, the volume of bank data grew tremendously. Traditional computer systems would be less efficient at processing those data and banks had to find solutions. That was also the era of the growing popularity of AI and its applications. Many banks decided to try that promising technology by hiring skillful AI companies to do the job. SIMPLELOGIQ was one of those, a company created by a team of engineers based in Denver, Colorado.
The use of AI in the banking industry would bring an increase of about 8% in revenue and 10% in reduction of costs. Indeed, it is used to anticipate the habits of customers, to determine their ability to repay their credit, etc. It helps define the credit limits, the suitable interest rates, the nature of the financial instrument offered to clients, among others. In their internal operations, banks use AI to forecast their liquidity level and ensure that they will not violate applicable regulations.
Observing the banking environment and data for years, engineers realized that people pay great attention to their loans for business, by putting all kinds of sophisticated tools to follow their investment; but they would not do the same thing for education. A situation that is surprising as education is an important source of loans. Americans owed about $1.5 trillion in student loans in 2019 more than two times what they owed a decade earlier. SIMPLELOGIQ then thought it would be great if people could see the investment in education the same way as they see an investment in a business; meaning, it had to be followed up, analyzed and predicted. That is the idea behind the creation of Anaris AI, a multi-purpose artificial intelligence designed for the processing of data of student interactions. Initially Anaris AI was built to let parents discover how much time they invest in paying attention to their children’s performances, and compare it to the results of those.
As more companies were settling in Denver causing a speed up in most parents daily routine, they had less time to pay attention to what their kids do at school. They would stick to dropping their children at school in the morning and picking them after. At times, parents would visit the school platform or application to see if there’s anything new. SIMPLELOGIQ thought there were 4 major problems with this approach:
- Schools didn’t all have the same applications, resulting in a parent sometimes having multiple applications for all his kids if they are attending different schools; each of those applications having different philosophy and UI.
- All school applications would give information on what actually already happened but absolutely nothing on what may happen, something that was really embarrassing for data engineers always seeking to predict.
- The time to make the information available to parents was too long as it had to move from the teacher to the school administration, then get processed and saved into the system before parents have access to. That was especially true for discipline information.
- The applications gave no clue to parent of how much time he invests in paying attention to what his kids do and the impact of that in their success.
The first version of Anaris AI was tested in 2016 and showed quite satisfying results. Parents were so happy to see in figures how much they care about their kids rather than just having an idea. It became easier to follow them all from one single platform, and more important, it was based on one single philosophy no matter the school. Not only they could see results of their kids, but they could see their results as parents and how they compare to other parents at school, or in the country.
SIMPLELOGIQ did’nt stop there, they decided to push things forward by trying to use data to predict something more complex; the risks children are exposed to, based on a certain number of environmental data, and they would use Machine Learning for that. The second release of Anaris AIin 2018 came in with those analysis that could predict the risks of drug consumption, premature pregnancy or violence; things very hard to imagine for parents. That second version were very criticized by parents at first, as results were sometimes very embarrassing, but turned out to be scaringly accurate at times. The journalist Edwin Peters of a local TV once said “Oh, finally we are sharing our data with a social media for our interests”.
Since then SIMPLELOGIQ has been improving his product and trying to test it in countries with totally different cultures on other continents. The objective is to come up with a universal social platform for helping students, teachers and parents collaborate for better results and more safety. They recently renamed it to Eska after a girl who got the highest ever registered statistics on the whole platform.