Swaminathan Ganesan
Co-Founder
The Artificial Intelligence start-up is thriving in India with new avenues opening up, witnessing novel applications of AI in different fields. The combination of industry, government and academia has created a beneficial environment for the start-ups to innovate and come up with solutions that can leverage AI to improve processes in various industry segments. By combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms, and by recognizing patterns in the data, AI allows software to learn automatically, which makes it possible for AI based systems to learn from experience, adapt to new inputs and perform human-like tasks.
Smartail is an AI based EdTech start-up focusing on building solutions using technologies such as NLP, OCR, Deep learning and solving some of niche pain point in education segment. The outcome of the solutions is to empower the education fraternity with overall quality improvement and employability. CIO Insider engage in an exclusive interaction with Swaminathan Ganesan, a solution based technology specialist leading the company through the transformation that is defining a new era in education industry with AI.
In conversation with Swaminathan Ganesan and Aslam Sherieff, Co-Founders, Smartail
AI is continuing its penetration and brings in a lot of benefits to various fields, including education. As an AI expert within the EdTech industry, tell us about the portfolio of solutions offered by Smartail. Also, walk us through the technology framework, capabilities and in-house talent behind your solutions?
There is a universal acceptance among educators that AI is important for their future. Smartail’s flagship product “DeepGrade” is AI learning and grading platform which has the potential to change the way teachers teach and students learn, helping maximize student success and prepare them for the future. Our AI platform has the power to transform how the education system operates, heighten the competitiveness of institutions,
empower, upskill teachers and learners. The product is a perfect market fit and has been introduced to academicians, principals, institution correspondents, chairman and EdTech players. Approximately 98% feel that DeepGrade AI platform would be instrumental to their institution’s competitiveness within the next three to five years, with almost 80% calling it a “game-changer.”
Aslam Sherieff, Co-Founder
Currently, the flagship product DeepGrade AI Platform is in early adoption stage and it continues to increase its adoption presence as we continue to work on innovation front. The solution is built using cutting edge technology such as AI, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision and handwritten pattern recognition. With an exceptionally talented and passionate team with right mix comprising of product head, specialist, business strategist, strong academic advisors who diligently work with business and user experience teams to understand the expectations from field and built our never seen before grading workflows uniquely from scratch.
Our AI platform has the power to transform how the education system operates, heighten the competitiveness of institutions, empower, and upskill teachers and learners
feedbacks, insights, and granular data points. It is a mirror, which gives accurate real learning gap and provides clear, measurable outcome.
Is there any specific challenging story of your implementations that has earned an exceptional reputation for the company?
Smartail has deployed DeepGrade in one of the schools in rural segments in Tamil Nadu, where there were challenges in terms of bandwidth and network connectivity. We incorporated proprietary compression techniques and various innovative solutions. We initially kicked off as exam paper grading solution but due to the advent of Covid-19, the schools threw up a challenge before us where we had to extract the handwritten manuscripts of students which were photographed, submitted and graded by AI. This is a major milestone which we take lot of pride to have solved. The home-work and class-work of students could now be graded using DeepGrade even during the pandemic scenario as well as post pandemic scenario. This is even more beneficial as the work is AI graded rather than the mundane activity of correction. We having solved this have created a great reputation as a solution for both during COVID-19 and post pandemic scenario.
Dr. P. Ravi, Strategic Advisor
Proceeding ahead, what are the opportunities that you envision and what are your future plans for your AI engine?
Smartail aims to providing AI solutions to different sectors. OCR, NLP and Deep Learning models can easily be extended to other domains and various other applications as well. We are focusing on to be the platform which can provide AI capability for extraction and analysis of data in various domains by providing API calls to serve each function. Also, Smartail aims to be the one-stop collaborating, learning, grading and hiring platform powered by AI in the education sector. We are keenly looking forward to be the platform which can provide AI capability for extraction and analysis of data in various domains by providing API calls to serve each function. We started with Education as the key sector, but we are also looking at other sectors which could benefit from the solutions that we are working on.