Sharing our Story on Machine Learning at GCC Meetup Philippines

Symph has always prided itself in its drive to explore new technologies to better serve its clients so when we were invited to share about our expertise in machine learning at the Google Cloud Connect Meetup in the Google Philippines office last Monday, we were ecstatic.

A Google Cloud Partner is a company endorsed by Google who can leverage Google’s technology to better develop their product or service; Symph became a partner in 2010, when we enabled businesses to use G Suite to transform their office and email workflows. We were invited to talk about one of our projects in the Philippines that involved machine learning using TensorFlow.

The project was the Geostore, a platform that was designed to monitor roadwork projects funded by the government. It acts as a central repository for all information collected during the road implementation and audit process allowing agencies to better manage the data and allowing the public to access this information in the future.

The machine learning aspect of the project involved the information being collected for the Geostore. Since the agencies were getting thousands of datasets of the details and, more importantly, pictures of the roadwork projects they were auditing, they didn’t have an efficient way to sort through all the photos of the roads. To give some perspective, one roadwork project could have as many as a thousand photos so imagine the thousands of projects, and consequently the millions of images, that they have to sort through and classify. Applying machine learning into the system enabled us to better sort and classify these images of the roads into which type of road surface the road in the image belonged to… or if there’s even a road at all.

“Google Cloud Connect* is the official online community for G Suite administrators. Google Cloud Connect enables administrators to get critical, real-time updates about G Suite, see what other G Suite customers are experiencing when it matters most, and share best practices.”*

We got to share our story with the other Google Cloud Partners at the meetup. Not only were there other Partners, but also IT Managers of companies in the Philippines that use the Google Cloud Platform. We were humbled by the opportunity.

{{IMG:https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/67ca96d09e7c183c26e5543f/67cab4644fa0fb094186efd0_634fd398cf993dd75110d10a_Screen%2520Shot%25202022-10-19%2520at%25206.37.25%2520PM.png||Albert (left) and Dave (right) telling our story

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There are actually machine learning opportunities in a wide variety of industries. In our use case, it actually came about because our team did not like manually clicking through to classify the road images and they knew machine learning could do it much more efficiently. A few sample use cases that we thought of related to image processing with machine learning: categorizing if an image is inappropriate, categorizing the type of crops/agriculture in satellite imagery, healthcare diagnosis of image based laboratories, quality control of agriculture, or detection of spoilage based on camera images in supermarkets. These are just some ideas off the top of our head, and the opportunity with machine learning is that it could be applied to so many other areas.

We’re glad that we got to share our applications of this technology and thankful to the GCP community for having us at their Google Cloud Connect meetup. We hope to continue innovating and applying these technologies so we may have a bigger hand at making the world a better place.

If you have any ideas that you think would benefit from this technology and would like to work with us, please send us an e-mail at info@sym.ph. We’d be happy to chat with you.