CactusSoft: Empowering Businesses with Innovative Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the cutting-edge of innovation. From driverless cars to detection of life-threatening diseases, AI is leveraged in almost every part of the business. We interviewed Yan Oreschenkov, CTO; and Nikita Krylov, Machine Learning Engineer at CactusSoft to understand how the disruptive technology is accelerating the pace of innovation and how the company develops solutions to help enterprises increase the adoption and progression of AI.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers.        

CactusSoft is a Belgian–Belarusian full-cycle software development company passionate about building enterprise solutions, and web and mobile applications that work, make sense and help people.

It has strong expertise in the development, customization and integration of complex custom solutions in IoT, Smart City, Blockchain, Fintech and Healthcare domains. Its offerings cover all stages of the complete software product lifecycle, from business analysis, design, and prototyping to software development, testing, integration, quality assurance, and post-project maintenance and support.

CactusSoft has gained 12 years' experience in delivering uniquely built solutions to customers across the US and Europe.

Tell us how your company is contributing to the nation's AI industry and how the company is benefiting its clients.

Today, it's too early to estimate the importance of AI, but even now we see the great results that it has achieved: digital assistants in the workplace, processing of a vast amount of data, autopilot cars, IoT-connected devices, diagnostics of dangerous illnesses, automatization of all routine work, online shopping with recommended goods for each customer, etc. People often argue about whether AI brings us more advantages or problems, but it is difficult to deny that it can solve problems that a person can't. Let's take healthcare.

The domain of medicine is one of the newest for our company. During the last three years, we have been practicing software development for healthcare projects.

For example, our developers took part in building algorithms that can detect pneumonia or some anomalies in medical images. Such solutions reduce the risk of human mistakes and save time for immediate treatment. A photoplethysmogram was another interesting method with which our team had worked. It makes it possible to analyze electrocardiographs using a pulse oximeter, which illuminates the skin and measure changes in light absorption. CactusSoft also helped to create a smart management system for hospitals and build a solution for an organization of non-emergency medical transport.

There are a few reasons for increasing the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, we think.

Firstly, we see that the digital healthcare revolution started a few years ago. People have become keen on sport, a healthy way of life and tech things that enhance their abilities. It's a positive philosophy, which is now followed by all kinds of producers of goods and services. IoT-connected devices and wearables are progressing faster than we can imagine, and all these things are being made with the help of technology.

Secondly, medical and social organizations have been faced with the problem of big data and management systems. People want to spend less time and money to get an appointment with their doctor. Technology makes it possible to get an appointment and pay for it directly from home.

Thirdly, the year 2018 has become a crucial point at the start of the privacy and data security era. AI and blockchain technologies must make a great contribution to the digital health market.

We understand the importance of digital healthcare solutions and try to be progressive in this field. We are glad to develop healthcare projects, as their development makes sense not only for our customers but for normal people, for future generations, if you like.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future?

Of course, almost all businesses and solutions have operations to improve and problems to solve – so implementing AI technologies definitely can help. Our plan at CactusSoft is to develop our experience in machine learning and to implement it in projects that really need it. All kinds of predictions, taking advice and recommendations, classifications – all these functions can be done with the help of Artificial Intelligence. For our company, the priority sectors to develop are Healthcare, Fintech and IoT. We believe that these industries will progress a lot due to the growth of new challenges that AI can solve.

What are some of the challenges faced by your company today?

We can confidently talk about three main challenges while considering AI development in our company.

The first one is customers' lack of knowledge. Often, they don't understand what AI is, let alone how it can help them to enhance their business. We think that this problem is temporary. There was the same situation with blockchain a year ago, but now people know that one of the main functions that blockchain systems provide is integrity for data.

The second problem is a lack of resources. Now the demand for high-quality specialists exceeds their availability, so it's really difficult to find the right specialist who is available soon. Besides, AI is developing so fast and has made engineers constantly update their skills.

The third challenge is the lack of data. In many cases, a customer wants to create an AI project or option, but doesn't have enough data for model learning. The quality of this data is also very significant. You can't engineer an algorithm that works correctly if it has been built on the wrong data. The process of collecting high-quality data is very time-consuming and customers should understand this beforehand. Certainly, it depends on the project, as for some of them you can get data from open sources.

Do you also feel that finding the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

Fully agree. Machine learning engineers should be excellent at abstraction and maths and it goes without saying that they must be very good at programming. Machine learning is a complex but very interesting specialization, and only those who are fully involved in this domain can get satisfaction from this job.

What are the predictions and the promises of artificial Intelligence and machine learning

As we said above, we believe that AI development will absolutely change the world and create many useful solutions for mankind. There is no area where AI is not required. Especially, it concerns routine processes and processes where you can't write one algorithm for all the cases. Tasks that don't have an exact solution may be solved with the help of machine learning. Driving a car is the simplest example of solving the routine challenge. Even if you take into consideration the fact that self-driving cars make mistakes, we won't deny that the future is behind them.