AI – Airport Benchmarking

Sinocloud Wisdom unveils new AI check-in robot

Karima Kouidri — Tue, 08 May 2018 10:25:24 +0000

At the 18th Dubai Airport Show, Sinocloud Wisdom (Beijing) Technology has unveiled its market-ready product, a brand new check-in and baggage drop-off robot featuring artificial intelligence technology.

The robot supports fully automated check-in and baggage drop-off. Using AGV technology, the robot will avoid obstacles and transport the bags to the baggage handling area. All the passengers need to do is to scan the passport, put their bags in the robot, and go straight to the passenger security checkpoint. If any bag is spotted suspicious, the security inspection staff will be automatically alarmed and informed of the owner’s information which is collected when the passport is scanned.

Instead of looking for the check-in desk, passengers can check in and drop their bags off from anywhere in the airport with the robot. It will speed up the check-in process and reduce workload of the check-in staff at airports.

The company is also presenting an Intelligent Check-in Counter at the Dubai Airport Show. Compared with traditional check-in counters, the innovative counter integrates many practical functions including facial recognition, automatic acquisition of baggage weighing information, height-adjustable desk, advertisement display and intelligent notification. The counter is designed for the purpose of reducing workload as well as improving efficiency, service and security level of the airport.

Li Xin, CEO of Sinocloud Wisdom, said: “Using AI technology, we present our Smart Airport Solution to improve the service of the airport. We keep focusing on optimising customer experience by creating a convenient, non-interference check-in environment. Our smart airport equipments help the airport to adapt to a growing number of passengers as well as to upgrade their performance.”

TradeArabia News Service

source AI check in robot–

Getting an artificial intelligence bot to work for your Airport

Karima Kouidri — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 14:22:12 +0000

Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time.

However recent advances in machine learning and access to cloud computing have allowed organisations to implement effective AI solutions.
In 2016, Dan Olley, famed CTO of Elsevier said: “If CIOs invested in machine learning three years ago, they would have wasted their money. But if they wait another three years, they will never catch up.”
In the airport sector AI bots have a wide variety of valuable uses from reserving and paying for parking, to delivering micro-targeted marketing messages. Download ebo’s whitepaper to discover how AI Bots can revolutionise customer communications, cut costs and drive growth for airports.

Download now from source : https://tinyurl.com/yaa5gexw

Munich Airport trials AI-enabled robot in Terminal 2

Karima Kouidri — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 12:45:59 +0000

Munich Airport is testing a humanoid robot equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) in its Terminal 2.

The robot, named Josie Pepper, welcomed passengers in the non-public area of the terminal. For her first deployment, the robot speaks English and waits near the departure for the shuttle to the satellite building. Here, it welcomes passengers and answers their questions about shops, restaurants and air traffic.
The computer is connected to the Internet via WLAN so has access to a cloud in which spoken information is processed, interpreted and linked to the data of the airport. The type of robot does not speak finished text, but answers individually to a question through its ability to learn.
The 1.2m-tall robot was developed by the French company SoftBank Robotics and it powered by artificial intelligence and Watson Internet of Things technology from the IBM cloud. When the robot speaks, it lights up green around its eyes. Its hands and fingers are human-like, and it moves on rollers.
The pilot phase will analyze how Josie Pepper reacts with passengers and how they receive the robot.

Written by Kirstie Pickering
March 6, 2018

source : https://tinyurl.com/y7daj36t

This company plans to use AI to reduce baggage mishandling at airports

Karima Kouidri — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 12:24:05 +0000

Geneva-based IT and telecommunications services firm SITA will employ artificial intelligence (AI)

and other new technologies to solve issues around baggage movement in airports in order to save time and cost of operations.

According to a white paper by the company, more than 4.5 billion bags are handled by industry baggage systems each year but airlines and airports will have to cope with twice that number as passenger numbers are set to double over the next 20 years. Though the air transport sector has brought down the annual mishandling cost from $4.22 billion to $2.1 billion, the industry is still looking at ways to bring down the number.

“SITA has a unique role to play in realizing the potential of data, and baggage management is one area that will benefit. It is an area we are strongly focused on, collaborating across the industry to innovate,” Ilya Gutlin, president of SITA Air Travel Solutions, said.

According to SITA, the industry’s immediate focus should be on implementing the International Air Transport Association’s Resolution 753. This resolution requires member airlines keep track of each bag, share that tracking information with all incumbents involved, and deliver those bags back to passengers at their destination.

“The bag tracking data that will be generated and collected under Resolution 753 will provide the air transport industry with a rich stream of data. This can be enhanced with AI tools to create greater efficiencies in baggage operations and, ultimately, to improve our experience as passengers,” Gutlin explained.

From an operations point of view, AI will allow airports and airlines to learn what baggage routes cause the most stress on their systems and what factors are most likely to cause them, he said. These systems could also generate insight into the patterns of baggage movements that would enable airlines to deliver bags more effectively, Gutlin added.

“In this vision of the future, autonomous loaders could be used to transport bags between the terminal and aircraft. Baggage data will also allow airlines and airports to provide passengers more relevant information on their baggage as it makes its journey from departure to destination,” SITA explained in the paper.

source : https://tinyurl.com/y7r7sby6

AI taking off at airports today?

Karima Kouidri — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 17:58:19 +0000

By utilising AI, airlines can provide passengers with a more seamless and personal experience.

The term “Artificial Intelligence” is applied broadly to many diverse types of computing problems and solutions. Today’s technology, combined with immense data feeds, means we have reached a tipping point that enables new types of AI applications, such as autonomous vehicles and secure, biometric verification systems. It is these technologies that have the potential to have the biggest impact on how people get on and off planes, and how airlines get planes in and out of airports, within the next couple of decades.

Imagine arriving at the airport in your self-drive car, having your bag collected by a robot, presenting your biometric (probably your face) to a camera to get yourself through all the check points and boarding a plane. The planes are already pretty much flown by computer (fly-by-wire), in many ways the future is now.

SITA, the global IT and communications provider to the air transport industry, revealed some interesting research on artificial intelligence in a recent report: SITA 2017 Air Transport IT Trends Insights. Predictive tools using artificial intelligence and cognitive computing are likely to be adopted by half of airlines and airports over the coming five to ten years. Specifically, over the next three years, 52% of airlines plan major AI programs or R&D, and 45% of airports will invest in R&D in the next five years. However, a few front runners are already trialing predictive modeling, machine learning and data mining. These efforts are mainly focused on initiatives that will provide passengers with more relevant information about their journey to create more seamless and personal experiences.

On time

One area of real interest is flight disruption. This is a huge cost for the air transport industry – estimated at US$25 billion – so there is a strong desire to remove as much uncertainty as possible. The causes are many, with weather being a major culprit. Airlines and airports are focusing on technologies that will make them more responsive when faced with issues in their operations. This will enable them to improve their performance and customer services.

Airlines in particular are looking at how technology can help minimize the impact of disruption on the passenger experience and their business. Over the next three years, 80% of them plan to invest in major programs or R&D into prediction and warning systems, which rely heavily on AI.

On line

Another technology that is catching the attention of the industry is chatbots. Today, 14% of airlines and 9% of airports use chatbots, for example KLM, British Airways and Avianca. The SITA 2017 Air Transport IT Trends Insights shows however, that there is significant appetite among air transport CIOs to embrace this technology over the next three years. By 2020, 68% of airlines and 42% of airports plan to adopt AI-driven chatbot services.

These computer programs, that mimic human conversation, can help with customer queries, do check-ins and book flights. A machine taking your reservation via voice commands has already landed.

In fact, AI is already embedded into all kinds of different areas and aspects of the airport operation and experience, from the new biometric systems using facial recognition, to cameras that can “see” and tell you things like queue times or detect operational incidents that need attention.

And more AI is coming as the air transport industry faces the challenge of significant growth. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), passenger demand is expected to double over the next 20 years resulting in 7.2 billion passengers traveling in 2035. To manage this growth, the industry will rely on technology and AI will become more prevalent. It will be part of the fabric of the industry, from building smarter planes, to using autonomous vehicles at the airport, smarter air traffic control and flight operations, and recovery from disruption. It will be in the hands of both staff and passengers, with bots and APIs feeding apps on smartphones. It will be in the airport’s infrastructure to analyze video in real time for issues, for biometric screening and for boarding systems.

On the ground

At the airport, AI can be used to manage robots for a wide range of functions from information/guidance robots, to check-in, immigration and porter robots, to airport operations and security. They can be equipped with face recognition, they can understand spoken language, print or show information on screens, scan passports and boarding pass, process visas, and show people the way. And they can be used to integrate airport, airline, government and security systems.

SITA has already taken steps in this direction with the creation of two passenger service robots. One challenge facing airports is the management of peaks and troughs in passenger flows, especially when passengers arrive at the airport. KATE, SITA’s robotic check-in kiosk, makes use of both WiFi and geo-location technology to navigate autonomously to busy areas of the departure hall, without the need for cabling or other fixed attachments. These robotic kiosks will also automatically return to their docking stations when they are low on power or need to be resupplied with boarding passes or bag tags. These abilities enable airport staff to focus on customer relationship management rather than spending time on procedural checkpoints, creating potential to smooth the passenger journey.

Leo is SITA’s self-service baggage robot that can check in and collect passengers’ bags when they arrive at the airport and process them for flight. It is a very easy process for passengers: a simple scan of a boarding pass and Leo will look after the rest.

AI, augmented by robots, can also support flight operations, facility management, baggage handling and cargo operations, while also being present behind the scenes in airport operations. Robotic arms already work with humans to increase efficiency and reduce chronic injuries in many sectors. There is no reason why air transport should be any different. Autonomous dollies, for example, can transfer bags and equipment between the terminal building and aircraft. AI can also reassign gates when necessary, and co-ordinate ground crew to accommodate schedule variance and service interruptions.

Working Together

Across the air transport industry, there is a need to retain, store, clean, process, curate and make accessible all possible data. This brings us to the concept of collaboration and sharing data. Progress will be made if everyone involved is prepared to share. SITA, which is owned by the air transport industry, is in the unique position at the center of the airline and airport community and has the potential to leverage this data for the benefit of all stakeholders. Already SITA’s research teams are exploring new ways of using and managing data.

AI has a great future as a key enabler for air transport, to make it more efficient and improve the passenger journey. With the global shift towards self-service and the increase in passenger demand, AI in at airlines and airports can only take off further.

Jim Peters, CTO, SITA

Image Credit: Robert Stearns / Pexels

source : https://tinyurl.com/yb2at6cy

Sustainable growth in the age of artificial intelligence

Karima Kouidri — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 18:12:19 +0000

Allow me to posit that travel is truly one of the first non-necessary activities that we humans indulged in – after all, there was no pressing need for our ancestors to venture beyond the comforts of home and hearth and potentially embrace hardship and danger while seeking out uncharted seas and lands. As such, travel is a fundamental expression of human curiosity and as enablers of billions of journeys each year, Amadeus is uniquely positioned to shape the future of travel in many ways.

One of those ways is enabling the increasing growth in world-wide travel in a sustainable and responsible way. Lucas Bobes and I recently attended the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York. The WEF engages leading political, business and civic leaders to promote private-public cooperation to look for various actionable ways to improve the state of the world. The participants leading these discussions were quite impressive, including prime ministers and presidents of countries around the world, business leaders of major global corporations, and thought leaders in civic life.

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a core objective for businesses and countries today. Former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, and Governor Jerry Brown of California, both in their intellectually provocative styles were arguably the most articulate speakers to underscore the point that while climate change is a continuing concern, the bigger challenge now seems to have shifted (once again) to uniting the world to fight climate change. As another speaker put it, “we know how to reduce emissions, but we are simply not doing it”.

However, much of the discussion around sustainability this year was also around how technology is both going to drive sustainable development, but can also widen the arc of inequality if we are not careful. Marc Benioff, CEO of SalesForce was a vocal proponent in making sure that while the technology industry rapidly adopts Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are also simultaneously addressing issues that may arise with the concentration of power in countries that lead development of AI or the societal impacts by the potential loss of several jobs for humans. Emerging AI techniques applied to food production, healthcare or education can allow citizens to live better but can also drive a “crisis of equality” if the benefits accrue to a narrow section of society.

The emergence of Blockchain and Digital Identity were other topics discussed that are very relevant to travel. We at Amadeus are leading the adoption of several of these advances in technologies for the travel industry. Our recently launched paper discusses the application of blockchain, and we are implementing several AI methodologies across the spectrum, from developing intelligent chatbots to improving our core algorithms and running more efficient operations.

Amadeus has just celebrated its 30^th birthday and sustainable development has always been a core operating philosophy through the years. We practice the basics of environmental sustainability, like continuously reducing power consumption in our offices across 190+ countries, and efficiently managing power consumption in our world-class data center infrastructures. Our technology also helps our customers to do the same – as an example, our flight management software can help airlines reduce taxi times and optimize fuel consumption needed for flight plans, thus reducing their carbon footprint.

We measure and benchmark our sustainability practices, and this year, for the sixth year in a row Amadeus has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the World and for Europe. Sustainable development is a goal for the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, and sustainable profitable growth is also the guiding principle of how we continue to deliver value to our investors and customers.

source : https://tinyurl.com/y7m6noyk

4 ways AI could make airports more tolerable

Karima Kouidri — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:46:38 +0000

Is it possible that a combination of computer vision and AI could make airports more tolerable?

Above: People waiting in queue at arrival immigration of Singapore’s Changi Airport.

Image Credit: joyfull / Shutterstock

Implementing these technologies won’t build larger airports or reduce the number of passengers, but it could offer a unique solution to airport wait times.

The impact of AI on our lives is going to be profound in coming years, and the same is true of computer vision. When you combine the two technologies, you get a real recipe for improving the airport experience.

A lot of the issues we see with air travel today are a direct result of our inability to compute all the potential combinations and permutations. We have multiple security stops at airports because we believe that every step makes us safer. But it’s not necessarily true that the more checks and balances we add, the more likely we are to catch the bad guys. The problem isn’t the number of steps in a security check — it’s human error.

AI has the ability to process information at a staggering rate and to correlate data that even the most intuitive TSA agent might not see.

The airport experience is going to change dramatically over the next decade. Every step of the journey will be affected — from security to queuing to baggage claim. Here are four ways we will likely see AI and computer vision transform air travel in the future.

1. Predictable flight delays

We spend a large portion of our time in airports waiting on delayed flights. Anything from bad weather to a mechanical issue can hold a plane up for hours. When you use big data and machine learning to approach the problem, you have the ability to replace on-the-spot analysis with highly correlative pattern analysis to better prepare the airport for setbacks. This would allow airlines to route delayed passengers dynamically before they even made it to the airport.

Maintaining and analyzing maintenance logs with supervised learning could also protect airlines from sudden failures. This technology could flag planes that are in need of maintenance and dynamically reallocate aircraft accordingly.

2. Automated security checks

Human TSA agents will never be better at performing security checks than a supervised learning algorithm would be. If machines can look at your passport photo and take a picture of you, they can access your social graph (linked to your ID of course), which could remove many unnecessary human checks. Some of this would not even require a complex AI solution.

3. Fewer unnecessary bag searches

Have you ever had to wait in the security queue behind that person with two handbags full of every possible 50ml liquid you can think of? Even worse, each false alarm increases the likelihood a security agent will overlook actual threats later on.

Computers can photograph, analyze, and identify items in a bag much faster than a human can, without even opening the bag. This is a classic use-case for a supervised learning algorithm. After collecting substantial training data, AI could identify which objects need to be checked in more detail.

If we then added a clustering algorithm that could flag any passengers who fell into “orange” or “red” zones, those passengers could be autonomously routed for a more detailed search. The technology could even assess an individual’s social media activity and use mass attribution to identify potential threats. Some of the things this technology would consider might include:

Did the individual make a lot of phone calls to countries on a watch list?
Do they take an extreme position on religion?
Who have they been photographed with?
Do they have no social footprint in comparison to the average person?

People who are likely to do bad things are a statistical anomaly. This means they’re easy to spot using statistical evaluation.

4. Streamlined screening processes

We’ve already created advanced camera technology that can see your heat signature from a distance. So what’s the point of having you queue up, take off your shoes, and walk through an old metal detector?

Background thermal imaging cameras can analyze passengers walking or running through the airport. When you couple this technology with facial recognition and the data we have from points one and two, we could easily flag individuals carrying banned items before they even reach the coffee shop.

Friendlier skies

Whether you are focusing on deterrence or apprehension, the simplest solution is to remove human error from the equation. As we implement available technologies and benefit from new advancements, we will likely build a more pleasant future for airport patrons.

Sachin Dev Duggal is the CEO, Engineer.ai an autonomous software development and cloud ops company.