Vancouver - The Thirty-Eighth annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24) kicked off on February 20 at the Vancouver Convention Center. During the conference, Harex InfoTech and Kyung Hee University received the Innovative Applications of AI Award (IAAI). Harex InfoTech’s General Commerce Intelligence (GCI) engine is a unique technology that provides the highest level of AI services while safeguarding consumer and merchant data. Prof. Kyoung Jun Lee’s research team at Harex InfoTech was recognized at AAAI-2024 as one of the world’s 14 winning deployed AI applications, delivering measurable benefits to real-world users.
AAAI is the world’s most prestigious organization in the field of artificial intelligence. Its annual conference brings together leading researchers from around the world to present and discuss the latest research and applications. During the conference, more than 6,000 attendees discussed trends and the future of AI. The event featured keynote addresses by global authorities in AI, including Yann LeCun, Professor at New York University and Meta AI, Francesca Rossi (current president of AAAI) from IBM Research, USA, Milind Tambe, Professor from Harvard University and Google Research, etc.
LeCun talked about objective-driven AI, which uses predictive world models and self-supervised learning to create machines that can learn, reason, and plan. Tambe talked about AI for social impact, which uses machine learning and optimization to address challenges in public health and conservation. Both speakers showed the potential and impact of AI for humanity, as well as the open problems and challenges.
Prof. Kyoung Jun Lee of Kyung Hee University, who leads the User Centric AI Research Institute at Harex InfoTech, presented the winning paper titled “General Commerce Intelligence: Glocally Federated NLP-Based Engine for Privacy-Preserving and Sustainable Personalized Services of Multi-Merchants.” This paper garnered significant attention as the first presentation of the entire conference.
Kyung Yang Park, CEO of Harex InfoTech, stated, “The GCI engine is an AI engine that predicts what products or services consumers will buy next. It utilizes cutting-edge AI technology and transformer models.” The development of this system began in September 2020, focusing on receipt data. Individual receipts and company sales contain valuable information that no one willingly shares. Consumers are reluctant to disclose their purchase details, and sellers risk exploitation by competitors if they reveal their sales status. Consequently, obtaining data for AI system development becomes challenging.
Harex InfoTech's UB platform addresses this issue through federated learning technology. Federated learning, pioneered by Google and Microsoft in 2017, is a new approach to AI learning. With federated learning, individuals, small businesses, and SMEs can develop AI without sharing their own data, and share and federate AI with others to create more powerful AI. By sharing and federating their AI models, they collectively create more robust AI solutions. Through the GCI engine, small businesses and SMEs gain access to intelligent services for various marketing and production needs, including product recommendations, targeted marketing, product bundling, new product ideation, trend analysis, and predictive insights.
The GCI engine represents a groundbreaking innovation that combines federated learning and natural language processing. It delivers personalized and privacy-preserving AI services to multi-merchant environments. By analyzing receipt data, it generates valuable insights and recommendations for both consumers and merchants, all while maintaining robust data security. Recognized as one of the world’s premier AI applications at the prestigious AAAI-24 conference, this platform has the potential to revolutionize the commerce industry and benefit millions of users.
