Vasupradha Ramachandran
Imagine having a digital version of yourself that can represent you and your thoughts in the real as well as in the virtual world. Fascinating, right?
The advancement in the field of artificial intelligence has resulted in the emergence of a new technology called “Digital Me” (DM). Digital Me is an AI agent or a digital avatar that can digitize the knowledge of each person. This digital avatar of a person could take part in certain activities (digital or real-life activities) to improve the productivity of the person.
Since all the data or knowledge (in this case) of a person is stored digitally, it becomes practically immortal. The learning process of a DM depends on artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence (HI) to transfer data from a carbon-based environment (human brain) to a silicon-based environment (System/machine storage). The combination of AI and HI enables the DM agent to constantly learn from the actions of people and update its knowledge. The information stored digitally can be used for various applications.
What makes a Digital Me agent unique?
In the current state of AI technology and applications, the people who access or use the AI applications are called “users”. Whereas, every person who uses digital me technology is called a “contributor”. This is because the person could build his own avatar that could read and learn from his actions and behavioral aspects.
In terms of AI-powered service-based applications such as chatbots, there are either predefined answers or no answers depending on the queries or service requested. For instance, AI cannot tackle medical queries as different symptoms can lead to different medical scenarios. In this case, a DM agent can provide information by browsing based on personal opinions from various people.
A DM agent can not only learn from open-source documents but can also actively learn from human beings and the surrounding environment. These specific characteristics of the digital me technology could make it multiple times more powerful than ordinary AI while also making it a very unique technology.
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Applications and use cases of Digital Me technology
Digital Me agent can store, process and statistically analyze the collected data which could be effectively used in increasing the productivity of a person. With the help of a DM agent, a person can be assisted in the following ways to improve productivity.
- Assist in performing common tasks.
- Take over repetitive tasks and reduce the efforts of a person.
- Reduce the cost of communication.
As mentioned above, a DM agent collects and stores the knowledge of a person in a digital format. These massive amounts of digital information can be analyzed to gain insights into a person’s behavior, preference, needs and even predict future actions based on analyzing the collected information. Below are some of the applications of Digital Me.
Quick data access
The information collected by the DM agent can be displayed in a graphical timeline format. This can help call specific events to gather necessary information from a particular timeline. Even if the user can remember partial information only, the DM agent can provide clues from collected data to recall the event. This data is also accessible from practically anywhere at any time, which makes it available for use in realtime across the globe. Any other DM agent that needs to make use of another’s intelligence can greatly benefit from this, as DM are never practically offline.
Dynamic data search
By analyzing the user’s DM history, the DM agent can automatically provide the necessary information based on the task that is being performed by the user. Rather than querying the information, the DM agent will use the previously collected information as the source to provide the user with the required information.
Intelligent data storage
Users can store all the data in DM agents rather than remembering it all by themselves. For instance, a meeting can be consistently stored in DM. Here, the DM collects and stores all the data provided by the individual participants of the meeting. These data can later be accessed by the user during the next meeting to recall the events of the previous meeting.
Data and performance tracking
With the help of a DM agent, the user can keep track of his work. Information such as the number of hours worked and the tasks undertaken can be recorded by the DM agent. This can help the user in allocating his time more effectively.
In a workspace environment, provided that the employees allow access to their DM agents, the employer can keep a track of the number of working hours, tasks completed and other related information about the employees.
Design, implementation of digital me technology
A Digital Me system is an intelligent database server with an API (Application Programmable Interface) interface for recording data and utilizing the recorded data.
The components that record the data are called loggers. These loggers record data such as the user’s actions or the surrounding environment and send the collected record into the person’s own DM server.
The records stored in a DM server are called events. These events could be any activity that is being performed by the user such as reading documents or contents from a computer screen or measurements of heart rate from a smartwatch.
The loggers have to be explicitly installed by the user. This enables the user to keep track of the events that are being recorded by the DM system by checking the dashboard of the web interface of the system.
The events recorded by the loggers are then utilized by the software components called applications. The application provides the user with a graphical user interface (GUI) where the data can be viewed and manipulated.
Applications are of two types namely the local application and connected applications. Local application run on user’s machines while connected applications run on servers and connects information from various DM servers.
Implementation of Digital Me server
The implementation of a DM server involves a lot of complex technical processes. The DM server is programmed in java using spring frameworks and the core components of DM software include API interface, database and search engine functionalities.
The function of the API is to support the addition of new data and viewing, modifying and deleting existing data. The API also supports filtering data. That is, to retrieve data from the specific timeline. The data filtering/extraction feature is to extract data by identifying important phrases from documents and visual factors from images. This enables the user to access the required data seamlessly.
The DM database is focused on running locally (on users’ laptops/computers)and the search engine functionality is to identify events and elements with textual contents.
Challenges associated with Digital Me Technology
The core concepts of digital me technology are data mining, deep learning, reinforcement learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Cloud technology. The challenges of these technologies are considered to be the challenges in adopting digital me technology.
Job and Career Opportunities in Digital Me Technology
Since the very foundation of digital me is very technical and has deeper concepts like deep learning, machine learning, big data analysis and so on, the job roles associated with this technology are very complex and require detailed knowledge in all of the above-mentioned fields. Some of the job roles are mentioned below:
- Big data engineer
- Data scientist
- Machine learning engineer
- Research scientist
- Data analyst
- Big data solution architect
- Deep learning research engineer
Digital me technology is very much in its beginning stages. There are still no details about various aspects of this technology. But as far as we know, this technology is really going to bring massive changes to the digital world. Similar to this technology, Gartner predicted few other technologies such as composite architecture, algorithmic trust, formative AI and the evolution of new advanced materials will also play a major part in shaping the future of the digital world, thus improving the real world that we live in.
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