Conversational AI Prototype for Media Company 

Sometimes you find yourself in countries where services in languages other than their own are scarce. This is especially frustrating when the service is customer support and you can't chat; the customer service only takes phone calls. 

We – a team of 3 Conversational AI experts from the Accenture Baltics – were issued a challenge: how might we build a automated call center where customers can speak whichever language they want, but the client needs only an English-speaking customer support?

Our answer was built in less than a month. It does the usual magic: a polyglot, able to talk on the phone, and – if the tricks don't work well – an agent can intercept the call. 

The innovation, however, was allowing the customer to speak, for example, Latvian but delivering the message to the agent via chat in English. The agent can type an answer (or use any of the NLU-powered suggestions with the click of a button) in English which the customer will then hear in Latvian again. 

I developed the integrations for this prototype, including the aforementioned translation feature and a sentiment analysis feature that passes the customer to an agent if they express dissatisfaction.

From what I hear, the client who ordered this prototype was impressed, and we might just get to add even more cool features. 

AI Meeting Mind Mapper

If you've ever missed a meeting, there three things you can do to catch up. 

Firstly, someone might be nice enough to share their notes, but their quality can vary because the scribe's domain of knowledge lies elsewhere.

There might be a recording somewhere, but let's be honest: that hour-long .wav file will never meet a listener. Even if you opt for a speech-to-text solution, this wall of text will be riddled with mistakes and/or banter.  

Lastly, you can do absolutely nothing and just wing it in the next meeting. 

I led a team of 5 people in Accenture and filled a full-stack developer role building an AI Meeting Mind Mapper. Using GPT-3, we came up with a solution which transcribes meetings, provides notes, and generates a topic map. 

My role was planning the project from discovery until the prototype, carrying out DevOps tasks for the AI developers, and building the frontend.

Global Technology Innovation Contest Second Place in EU Finale

Aleksandra, a lovely colleague and a mother, wanted to watch her favorite film with her daughter but they didn't even get to the middle. The young daughter's English skills weren't quite there yet and she couldn't read fast enough for the subtitles. They ended up doing something else. 

We came up with a solution of how to stream video (e.g., on YouTube) with an AI-generated overdub. 

We submitted this idea – to an internal Accenture competition. In fact, I helped about 20 – 30 teams generate, formulate, and submit their ideas, but competition was stiff. In that category, Aleksandra's idea one was the one of 8 shortlisted ideas out of about 200 from across Europe. 

She presented, I supported. I not only found the business value for the solution, but developed the possible architecture and developed a small proof-of-concept prototype for the contest pitch. 

We ended up getting silver! 

Tandeems

Creative competitions are a good way for freelancers to find jobs and organizations to get ideas. The customers are governmental institutions and NGOs on the one hand and creative freelancers on the other. 

In this start-up we've created a service where primarily governmental institutions can organize open competitions to foster social innovation and involve citizens into the ideation process.

We aim to service quality being foregone due to nepotism or a push to select only the cheapest solution. For participants who can offer such services it will also be a helpful way to show off their chops to organizations making such commissions. 

2ANNAS ISFF Guest Page

Who's here? Who's who? Browse through the 2ANNAS ISFF guest list to find out more. 

The 2ANNAS International Short Film Festival had two challenges. First, the organizers wanted to facilitate networking. Second, the festival wanted to have a VIP pass system.

Using Flutter, Google Cloud Functions, and MongoDB, I built this guest list. It shows conseting participants' contacts. Additionally, I wrote a Python script that automatically creates branded VIP passes completed with QR codes overlaid with personalized users' pictures. 

This guest list helped the festival become more ecological and facilitated multiple interviews with the media, putting the festival in the limelight.

Ukraine SOS

Built mere days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a Ukrainian activist Anna and I built this collection of charities supporting Ukrainians. 

I took care of the technical part by building a custom quiz with Flutter. Anna shortlisted and investigated the NGOs, helped craft the message, and created the actual quiz content. 

During the first two weeks about 500 people visited the page, and about 1 in 3 people visited the most fitting charity.

If you aren't on the front line, it doesn't mean you can't or aren't helping. We built this quiz to make sure their donations go to a cause they support. 

Twitter Bot Against Homophobia

Part of a school project for a Liepaja University New Media Studies, Adelina Kalnina and I developed a Twitter bot that reads Tweets and reacts to them based on the sentiment of the message. 

It retrieved messages using the Twitter stream API and then sent each to an the Azure Azure Sentiment analysis API. The initial results were quite often wrong, so a separate request was made for each sentence, and an average sentiment of all the messages was found. 

I learned quite a lot about NLU – which is a nice way of saying that the proof-of-concept totally levelled our Twitter feeds by programmatically reacting to a plethora of NSFW content.

Nonetheless, Adelina's research ended up being presented in other universities as a case study on how to use computer science for research in humanities subjects and interact with the world around us. 

HiddenBias.eu

Hidden Bias is international Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure unconscious biases of citizens from 7 countries in the Baltic, Nordic, and German regions. 

We participants' implicit attitudes towards LGB communities, male and female gender roles, as well as different religions, and compared these results with their conscious attitudes. 

There were approximately 4500 valid tests and discussions about these topics on a national level. 

The Latvian NGO "Safe Space" published an article about their findings in September 2021. It was used to emphasize the importance of their social action. 

Cognitive tests for neurology

As people age, their cognitive abilities tend to decline, impairing a variety of skills we take for granted.

Kaspars Eglitis digitalized a series of tests that were used in Neurology research at Riga Stradins University. It is a series of tests to evaluate a patient’s spatial reasoning, working memory, and ability to detect objects in distorted images. To make these digital tests as accessible as possible, instead of typing answers, patients may record their answer with a microphone.

The tests are based on previously existing ones, but had only been carried out in-person. Digital tests are easier to use especially when test subjects and researchers must collaborate digitally. Lastly, data is much more precise and it is easier to analyze.

Design Thinking for Busy People

Design thinking sessions in large organizations are extremely difficult to carry out. It's not easy to block a couple of hours in a consulting company even if it has been done weeks in advance.

As a part of getting my Design Thinking Certification, I developed a novel approach to running design thinking sessions as remotely as possible. It mainly relies on knowledge about habits. 

I'm currently conducting personal research on this to determine what are the best use cases for this approach, but so far it seems that it is a superior method for generating ideas. 

Žurnāls "Ir" Technology School

For 3 years in a row, in tandem with the Latvian News portal "Ir", we at DF LAB organize a summer camp for students aged 14 – 17. 

In this camp we employ the methods from Jake Knapp's Design Sprint to develop public health innovations. Every year the projects become more and more ambitious, and we support them throughout the year afterwards. 

Here are a few highlight projects:

• LightQ, a tool for physical therapists to help rehabilitate children and diagnose neurological disorders, 

• Raimonds, a smart teddy bear that talks to children waiting for surgery and helps them calm down before the procedures,

• Students developed a PoC for an app that estimates the size of your palm using Computer Vision and creates a 3D printable file of an ergonomic mouse.

DF LAB Admin

Founded by Emil Syundyukov in 2017, DF LAB is a MedTech makerspace in University of Latvia Faculty of Computing. It's the first makerspace run entirely by students of the faculty. 

I joined shortly after its founding to help students develop physical prototypes of their university projects and research. For example, our team participated in the national research program in 2020 that focused on understanding and mitigating the impact of COVID-19. We have also organized several events and workshops, such as TEDMED, hackathons, and design thinking sessions.

Of the businesses founded, most notable are: 

• NEAT, a design product startup that used 3D printed templates to create silicon moulds for pouring concrete – NEAT Conrete Design,

• VReach, a startup that uses virtual reality to help rehabilitate children with special needs was founded during a course run in DF LAB,

• I was a Co-Founder of XR Latvia, a local Extended Reality community, which organized monthly meetups until the pandemic in 2020,