TCS and Cornell Tech Launch Pace Port Innovation Hub in NYC | PCMag.com
Mumbai, India-based IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has opened “TCS Pace Port New York,” a new innovation hub in partnership with the Cornell Tech graduate school. The new hub is designed to help companies solve challenges by gaining business intelligence (BI) from data. Launched on June 27 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the TCS Pace Port NY hub is located at the Tata Innovation Center on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus in New York City. The hub is called “Pace Port” because Pace is the name for the TCS’s research, innovation, and digital transformation services.
The new hub will let TCS, a global IT services, consulting, and business solutions organization, work together with Cornell Tech and other companies to research, develop, and commercialize the latest technologies. Established companies as well as local startups in industries such as hospitality, life sciences, retail, and transportation will use the collaborative workspace to conduct research in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, advanced analytics, cybersecurity, and the Internet of Things (IoT). All TCS customers will have access to the TCS Pace Port NY hub.
The four aforementioned industries are the most disrupted today by innovation and digital transformation and are “sitting on a huge amount of data,” according to Pratik Pal, President and Global Head of Retail, Consumer Goods, Travel, Transportation, and Hospitality at TCS. The data Pal is referring to is consumer data in the form of images, text, video, and voice. Although Pal didn’t specify a number, this amount of data is likely in zettabytes (ZB). According to research firm IDC, the “Global Datasphere” will grow from approximately 40 ZB in 2019 to 175 ZB in 2025.
What does IDC mean by the “Global Datasphere?” In November 2018, IDC published its “The Digitization of the World: From Edge to Core” white paper. In it, IDC defines “three primary locations where digitization is happening and where digital content is created.” The first is the core (traditional and cloud datacenters), the second is the edge (enterprise-hardened infrastructure like cell towers and branch offices), and the third are endpoints (PCs, smartphones, and IoT devices). IDC calls the summation of all this data—whether it is created, captured, or replicated—the “Global Datasphere.”
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) opened the TCS Pace Port NY hub on June 27 at the Tata Innovation Center on NYC’s Roosevelt Island. (Image credit: TCS)
Bridging Academia and the Tech Industry
Robert Harrison is the Chairman of the Cornell University Board of Trustees. At the opening of the TCS Pace Port NY hub, Harrison said that, when the Tata Innovation Center first launched, it was called “The Bridge” to signify a partnership between academia and the corporate world. In December 2017 TCS invested $50 million in Cornell Tech to create the Tata Innovation Center. They have now expanded their partnership to open the TCS Pace Port hub within the Tata Innovation Center. Cornell Tech graduates and faculty will work alongside TCS and its customers to solve business problems using data.
“The key to that aspiration was our literally unabashed mission to come down from the ivory tower and do work with industry on real-world problems, real-world challenges,” Harrison said. “Fortunately, TCS and the Tata Group understood the power of that vision, and they decided to collaborate with Cornell as our full industry partner by investing in Cornell Tech.”
The TCS Pace Port NY hub will focus on helping customers as they undergo digital transformation, which involves using digital tech to solve business problems. The hub compromises an area to let customers showcase their progress during this digital transformation, a collaborative space called the “TCS COIN Accelerator.” It’s an agile workspace to explore business ideas in virtual environments to test real-world conditions and an academic research lab in which TCS will provide training on its Business 4.0 concept, which involves companies monetizing digital tech to create customer value.
The Tata Innovation Center, which houses the TCS Pace Port NY hub, first opened in 2017. (Image credit: TCS)
Solving Business Problems Using Data
“Our vision for these industries is, if you can infuse this huge amount of data into business processes across the entire value chain, then the unlocking of the business value becomes exponential,” Pal said. He sees the potential for business value in combining demographic data and consumer data with AI, machine learning (ML), and the IoT.
The facility will provide a collaborative space and research lab for startups and TCS customers to test business concepts under real-world conditions and showcase them at the center. In 2018, TCS launched the first Pace Port hub in Tokyo, and plans to open additional Pace Port hubs in the next two years in North America and other regions. However, as of now, the NYC location is the only Pace Port hub with an academia partnership.
TCS, along with Cornell Tech faculty and students, will work with companies to address challenges such as monitoring passenger loads on cruise ships and personalization of product preferences in retail. At the heart of the research at TCS Pace Port NY will be a TCS concept called “AlgoRetail.” AlgoRetail lets retailers use the data insights collected from text, images, voice, and video to solve business problems around price, real estate, and inventory problems such as shrinkage due to theft.
“We are bringing this whole curation of our own intellectual property, partner intellectual property, academic partnerships, and startup partnerships,” said Rajashree Ramakrishnan, Head of the Retail Solutions Group at TCS. “So we bring all of that together to help our customers use algorithms.”
Ramakrishnan said using AI lets companies draw on a larger data set than ever before. This data will come from call centers, products on the shelf, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and computer vision tech, which lets computers understand an image or video like people do.
TCS Senior Data Scientist Ryan Metz shows how retailers can use AI data to prevent theft and manage product inventory. (Image credit: PCMag)
Innovations in Hospitality, Retail, and Travel
In a presentation highlighting some of the early research that was started before the TCS Pace Port NY hub launched, Ryan Metz, Senior Data Scientist at TCS Pace Port NY, described TCS’s “Fraud Watch” application. Metz spoke about how the Fraud Watch app uses image recognition tech to detect a change in gait (that is, in how people walk) in a store. “What the [research] team discovered is that, after someone grabs a product and intends to steal it, the way they walk changes,” Metz said. By detecting these incidents using computer vision tech, he said “you can immediately dispatch security to intercept that would-be thief before he [or she] gets to the door. So this is going to bring a little bit of justice to retail.”
In addition, Metz showed an app that Cornell Tech students created called “Fresher,” which uses computer vision tech to detect the freshness of fruit. The Fresher app learns how close the fruit is to spoiling, and then allows store managers to rearrange the store’s perishable items according to this data.
At the TCS Pace Port NY hub, large retailers as well as startups will also use blockchain to verify the authenticity of products as they go through the supply chain. Ramakrishnan described how you can track the supply chain of a bottle of wine from when the grapes are grown to when they are sent to a brewery and bottled. You can verify, for example, if grapes were grown in Australia.
“Blockchain can actually help you to authenticate that entire supply chain,” Ramakrishnan said. “If you say that they were organic grapes and no pesticides were used, then can I authenticate that? And if you say that these were curated for five years, were they really ripened for five years?”
At the launch event, researchers also discussed projects in hospitality and travel. In preliminary research carried out before the official launch of the TCS Pace Port NY hub, recent Cornell Tech MBA program graduate Andrew Schaye helped develop an app called “Occupancy Data Information (ODIN).” The app, built for Carnival Cruise Line, tracks where people are on a ship. The Proof of Concept (PoC) showed how insights from data can help people on a cruise ship get to safety quickly, Schaye said. Data from people tracking also helps optimize the routes for housekeeping staff. Airlines such as JetBlue Airways Corporation also plan to use apps from the TCS Pace Port NY hub to help with siloed bookings, manage travel routes, and give customers a more connected experience.
Executives from TCS and Cornell Tech cut the ribbon to open the TCS Pace Port NY hub. (Image credit: TCS)
Collaboration for the Future
Academic institutions are often a central location at which businesses, vendors, and schools come together to foster an environment for innovation and to solve business problems. And according to Ramakrishnan, that’s what TCS and Cornell Tech want to do going forward: identify an inventory problem for a retailer and save that company money through collaboration and knowledge gained from data algorithms. It takes multiple parties—including professors, students, and technologists—to solve business problems that can’t be solved overnight.
“Of course, to build these algorithms, you can’t just do it in isolation,” Ramakrishnan said. “You need an ecosystem of partners like TCS, you need research and innovation to happen, and you need universities with which to collaborate.”
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