Winner of Future Energy Hack at EXPO 2020 in Dubai
When Siemens held their MindSphere® Future Energy Hack, part of the Future World Series, at Expo 2020 in Dubai on November 28 – December 1, Ekkono was one of four innovative companies that were chosen by Siemens to create future-proof smart city solutions through the power of IoT and MindSphere. Ekkono wowed the Siemens jury with the incremental learning solution for a smart and energy-efficient indoor climate controller and was announced winner at the end of the hackathon. Besides the honorful first price, Ekkono’s has proven once again that the software can be integrated with a platform such as Siemens MindSphere, where Ekkono Edge Intelligence serves as an important add-on to a comprehensive solution.
Smarter IoT Solutions for a Sustainable World
Siemens MindSphere® is an industrial IoT-as-a-service solution that uses advanced analytics and AI to power IoT solutions from the edge to the cloud. With MindSphere, users can ingest and visualize immediate real-time data and analytics results in one centralized location with no development required to unleash digital potential. To further explore the capabilities of MindSphere, Siemens organizes hackathons on different themes under the umbrella “MindSphere Future World Series”. The main purpose is to bring together people who want to contribute to making the world smarter, more livable and sustainable; Innovative pioneer technology companies that come up with new solutions that fit into the Siemens MindSphere system. At Expo 2020 Dubai, Siemens created a blueprint for future smart cities to find viable solutions to crucial sustainability issues. Ekkono pitched earlier in the fall to be a part of the hackathon in Dubai and was chosen as one of four innovative companies to participate.
“Winning Siemens Future Energy Hack is huge. Not that we win another award, but that we prove that we can integrate our solution into a system like MindSphere. We provide a niched functionality, namely the one to scale down machine learning to run on all kinds of devices, at the edge of the network, and then continue to process data and learn super-local conditions, in real-time. Most customers already work with solution providers like Siemens, and to prove that we can plug in our cutting-edge technology and make their solution even better and more unique, is very satisfying. I am so proud of both our team and our product. We managed to showcase a unique solution in a very short time here in Dubai, and obviously the Siemens jury was impressed with it as well” says Jon Lindén, CEO Ekkono.
Automated HVAC Solution with Edge Machine Learning
Ekkono’s team in Dubai, CTO Rikard König, Machine Learning Engineer Tomas Heed, and CEO Jon Lindén, spent four days working on the solution; A building automation solution to Siemens MindSphere IoT platform. More specifically, demonstrates how implementing Ekkono, using incremental machine learning, can self-learn the normal condition, predict a behavior, detect deviations, and re-train to new conditions. The final solution demonstrates how Ekkono’s edge machine learning software complements MindSphere with incremental learning, individual learning, and HD learning – at the edge – and how Siemens complements Ekkono by providing the whole solution through MindSphere to build comprehensive maintenance and optimization solutions
“We know what our software can do to optimize products to be more energy-efficient, by constantly learning and running at their very best conditions. We have said from the very beginning that we make connected things smart, and we have proven it once again. Seeing mine and my colleagues’ research become a product that large corporations see true market potential in, means that we do something very right. Edge Computing has been a rising star in the field of AI for a while now, but what we at Ekkono do, real learning, and not just inference at the edge, is groundbreaking. We are very thankful that Siemens believes in us and let us prove it under live conditions at their MindSphere Future World Series” says Rikard König, CTO Ekkono.
Back to Expo 2020 Dubai in 2022
Expo 2020 Dubai ends in March 2022, and Siemens have invited Ekkono to showcase an extended demo of the hackathon solution at their final MindSphere Future World Series event in the Al Wasl Dome.
Other participating companies in the hackathon were:
Talos IoT from the US has developed an interactive dashboard on MindSphere which monitors real-time data, and makes predictions for HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) units that activate maintenance where required.
Pandata Tech from the US offers an AI and data solution through MindSphere, which provides businesses and federal organizations the information they need to make key decisions in daily operations and planning.
Koolboks based in Paris, France but mainly operating in Nigeria uses MindSphere to manage and monitor energy-efficient solar-powered cooling systems, enabling more affordable access to clean refrigeration.
