How We Can Help
Your company has probably accumulated masses of data in the course of its business. What we do is help you understand it better.
Traditional approaches to data processing will only take your company part of the way along a journey to fully exploiting the intelligence buried in that data.
There are several problems to overcome. You have a lot of data; it's complex and the interrelationships aren't always clear. Perhaps some of the data is in the form of unstructured text, or perhaps it's incomplete and requires significant augmentation.
Sometimes, even when the relationships between data items is clear, the sheer volume and complexity of those relationships seems to be an intractable problem.
The good news is that there are technologies that allow us to identify and overcome these problems; below are some brief descriptions of a few of these. The sidebar links to more in-depth information about these technologies and the related services offered by Torchtech.
Big Data
Big Data is a term that has accumulated many meanings over the last 30 years, and several "V" words have been used to characterise it: Volume, Variety, Velocity and Value are among the most significant.
Volume
Naturally, people often equate Big Data with data volume, either in the form of large individual files or vast quantities of data in multiple file or streaming form.
However, now that data sources are more complex and comprehensive, structured data may include thousands, if not millions of columns. Unstructured data could be entire corpora of information.
Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence
Both Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have significant roles to play in deriving insight and business intelligence from data.
ML
Largely based on statistical techniques, ML has been with us since 1959, and underpins a wide range of technologies such as Handwriting Recognition to Credit Card Fraud Detection. Each year, advances are made which can be used to improve business performance.
ML isn't restricted to "conventional" data: it is used in language tasks, such as speech recognition, and image processing that is vital to autonomous vehicle control.
AI
An AI system is one that performs tasks that would normally require human intelligence. Typically, an AI system has a set of goals which it will try to achieve by monitoring its environment and performing actions that affect that environment.
In some ways, an AI system is like a pet: it learns good behaviour by being given rewards, which might be immediately associated with an action of might be the result of a long sequence of actions.
Quantum Computing
Many people either haven't heard of Quantum Computing (QC) or believe it's just Science Fiction.
Not only is it real, but companies in a range of industries are already experimenting with emerging QC solutions to assess what future competitive advantage could be achieved using QC.
Now and the Future
Right now companies, from banking to auto manufacture, are experimenting with QC. There are machines which support limited forms of QC that can be used to solve optimisation problems, such as optimal route planning.
Meanwhile IBM, Google and others are busy manufacturing quantum chips that they intend to provide as part of QC systems, and they see this as a major opportunity to extend what current computers can do.