Cryptek Labs: Augmenting Human Intelligence with Innovation in Big Data Analytics

Organisations all around the globe have started adopting optimised technologies for the ideal use of resources to pave the way for growth and success. The whole network working in a digital savvy ecosystem has one core thing – that is data. The goldmine of data gives birth to the transformation of industries with the power of big data analytics.

The data generally acquired by organizations are quite complex and need advanced technology for its processing instead of conventional ones. As a result, organisations are encompassing big data analytics techniques to synthesize large volume of data rather than depending upon trial and error methods. There are several ways in which companies at different scale are inculcating the system of big data to obtain the best potential outcomes. Big data in itself is a vast subject to explore. Real-time data analysis, predictive data analysis, usage of emotional AI and sentiment analysis are a few specimens driving innovative disruption of companies in the new-age market. Cryptek Labs is one such organisation that believes in bleeding edge technologies for blue sky results.

Cryptek Labs is a data-driven performance marketing agency. The company uses predictive behavioral targeting and real-time voice sentiment analysis to identify and acquire new customers for its clients. The company believes data is the key to create meaningful interactions at scale between consumers and the companies they love. Cryptek Labs core service offerings include:

1. Affective Computing (Behavioral and Emotion AI): Real-time voice sentiment analysis deriving human behavioral informatics from speech and language.
2. Predictive behavioral targeting utilizing big data for customer modeling, targeting and analytics.
3. Real-time deep neural traffic-management system.

Getting Big Impact from Personalised Data

Traditional marketing has been 'talking at people', and not always at the right people. Much of digital marketing hasn't made meaningful improvements on this – it simply introduced a new channel for indiscriminately blanketed ads. The company set out to be able to target the right people, in the right place, at the right time, sending them to the best-performing sales rep, and then speaking to them in the right language. Each step of this process is achieved through various aspects of their proprietary and patent-pending technology. The benefits of this include: saving companies money with more targeted prospects, closing more leads through speed to contact and skills-based routing, and making brands more personable by speaking to targeted customers in a language conducive to both their mood and personality type.

The Co-founders of Cryptek Labs have been active tech enthusiasts and contributors since the pioneering phase and growth phase that started the digital era. Both of them have memories of managing active bulletin board systems followed by the explosion of consumer interest, the mainstream adoption of the World Wide Web, and T-carrier connectivity in the 90s. Since then, they have continued to see the vast potential of disruptive technologies. The ethos of everything the company does is based on how these technologies can provide results.

With that in mind, Cryptek Labs core beliefs are:

1. Nothing is impossible; only improbable.
2. The limits of possibility are defined by time and resource allocation.
3. The company doesn't believe in magic, but creates it.

Data is now used to define a project or goal as opposed to simply analyzing the results of an initiative. While consumers are given more choice, targeted analytics is fundamental to survival and businesses need to take heed if they want to remain competitive.

The Visionary Leader

Kyle Barker, Co-founder and CEO of Cryptek Labs has recognized that in this fast-paced industry, innovation and agility to respond to new opportunities is critical in driving growth. His vision is to take big data to the next level, adding the human element through means such as affective computing, and working with businesses to ensure data is understood as a key driver of results. He takes a bullish stance on the positive impact of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to antiquated processes. He also sees the power technology has for social good while advocating for privacy rights, especially through blockchain technologies. For instance, predictive behavioral targeting and real-time voice sentiment analysis are often viewed in direct opposition to customer privacy. As a data privacy advocate himself, he envisions a world where advertising, which isn't going anywhere, can be harnessed by the consumer. People should be able to choose what data they share with advertisers, and in turn, they should be directly compensated instead of centralized tech giants, he believes.

Unique Solutions Contributing to Big Data Industry

Through generative adversarial networks, natural language processing (NLP), and affective computing, machine learning is advancing to true intelligence, creativity and perhaps even consciousness. Cryptek Labs is working in the affective computing space, to bridge human intelligence with machine intelligence in order to benefit its clients and society at large. These technologies augment human experience and wisdom in new ways. One of the sectors the company is most interested in contributing to is smart cities initiatives through a real-time traffic management neural network system. Optimizing traffic flows has a few key benefits for communities: The first is a reduction of travel time for motorists. The second improvement is the reduction of idle time at red lights, which lowers pollution. The third is the ability to re-route traffic for emergency vehicles in the case of a major incident. Some traffic management systems analyze traffic patterns and problems and provide suggestions for the city to implement at a later time. In contrast, Cryptek's holistic, adaptive traffic management system acts in real-time through a hierarchy of artificial intelligence algorithms to respond to the needs at hand.

The Thrust Towards Innovation

Innovation is at the core of what the company does and is a continual, iterative and collaborative process. The company works to foster a culture of innovation for the people so that they can apply it to systemic processes and elicit combined insight from customers and employees alike. Cryptek Labs has evolved from a one-dimensional big data analytics company to a holistic system focused on results whether through predictive behavioural targeting, affective computing via voice intonation analysis or neural AI traffic management.

Balancing Present-Future with Disruptive Technologies

Kyle said in looking toward the next decade, the future is all around quantum computing. With its processing power, quantum computing will take everything to the next level. Some fundamental chokeholds for big data will continue to be storage, streaming and processing, in addition to privacy, regulation and security. Soon the Internet of things (IOT) and big data could be combined for the purpose of knowledge discovery – – not just amassing data points but making sense of them and making smart decisions based on them.

From Actions to Achievements

Cryptek Labs has been awarded the Western Economic Diversification Canada Grant to develop a SAAS with an integrated app for the automotive industry and is currently short listed as a top 50 company in innovative internet usage. The company's clients have been very happy with the level of precision, and the decreased cost of marketing through the technology. A strong selling feature for the company's technology is that it can add supplemental revenues without cannibalizing existing marketing efforts. One of Cryptek's higher education clients noted, "in practical terms, these efforts resulted in thousands of site visits and a huge influx of prospective student applications." Another client marveled at the results of the application of the company's leading-edge technology as "the fastest growing program in the longstanding history of the company."

Overcoming the Obstructions

Cryptek has gone through an iterative process of wins and losses in designing the ideal technological assemblages to meet its clients' needs. The company values long-term success of each client and partnership, going as far as sacrificing profits in the short term in order to build and optimize a program or project. An ongoing challenge, with data growing faster than computation, is managing data hygiene at greater scales. Another challenge Cryptek faces in developing customer models is the complexity of unstructured big data such as certain text, voice, and video files, and how it informs the learning algorithms and the holistic system employed. With data growing faster than computation, an ongoing challenge the company faces is managing data hygiene at greater scales. As they develop more comprehensive customer models that include complex unstructured data such as text, voice, and video files; data hygiene is imperative as this data is used to inform learning algorithms and the holistic system being employed.

A Road Map to Futuristic Data Capabilities

Kyle believes all the advancements in big data and predictive analytics won't live up to their full potential unless the professionals further develop the intelligence of prescriptive analytics, the "what should I do next?" piece. "We provide prescriptive analytics for our clients, but the ongoing analytical development and automation of this process will replace the need for human decision-making in order to allow any business, small or large, to target their ideal future customer, personalize content, and shape conversations in real-time so that it drives desired business outcomes" he said.

The continual evolution of AI will play a significant role in this maturation as deep learning relies on big data analytics. This will help manage the ever-increasing big data effectively and further extract value from it that will enable companies to leverage those nuanced insights. "Advancements in affective computing, and more imperatively Emotional Intelligence (EQ) in the technology, will contribute to the systemic learning and interpretation of human emotion. This allows human interactions to be deeper and more meaningful. Identifying customers' moods and improving upon real-time self-reporting mechanisms will enable marketers to ascertain whether a certain ad resonated with people (and which type of person it resonates best with), or whether it was offensive or ineffective." Kyle added.