OrangeScape has this new initiative called CTO Talks. I think it is a brilliant idea. “While there are a lot of conversations taking place at the software development level, there are none at the CTO level”, says Suresh. I agree. We need different levels of conversations on technology.
I enjoyed The talk on Technology at Walmart – a few Glimpses. I hope to see other more comprehensive blog posts. I was looking for the use of Machine Learning at Walmart, and I was not disappointed.
Here is a list of uses of Machine Learning (ML) at Walmart.
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- Competitive Intelligence and Analytics
- Crawl frequency prediction (how frequently you can crawl certain sites for price information – too many crawls, and you will be blocked. Too few and you an miss useful information. Different sites update information at different intervals)
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) of product catalogs
- Bossa Nova robots roaming the aisles at Walmart locations checking out of stock items mislabeled shelf tags, and incorrect prices.
- IOT at Walmart – Monitoring temperatures of Refrigerators in real time
- Visual inspection and Spoilage predictions
- Predictive analytics of future failure of equipment
- Predicting attrition (they have 2.3 million associates in over 11,000 locations)
- Predicting absenteeism based on weather patterns an HR application (and an important contributor to maintaining service levels in their stores)
- Hari briefly touched upon blockchain. They are looking at using it for tracing grocery items from source to customer.