MIcompany is delighted to announce it has received minority investment from growth capital specialists, MML Capital Partners (“MML”). MIcompany was founded by Marnix Bügel in 2006 and has grown strongly to become the leading artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) service provider in the Netherlands.

Testing the frontend of applications is easier said than done. And if you have built a frontend before, you have probably experienced this. While the testing of backends is typically more straightforward, frontend testing deals with additional challenges. One of those is dealing with user input. Sometimes this needs to be collected over multiple screens and through complex interactive flows. Instead of writing unit tests and testing single functions, we now need to mimic the behavior of a user and test if they can successfully perform a user story.

Today, after more than two years of work, the book “Dit is Kunstmatige Intelligentie” (“This is Artificial Intelligence’’) is launched to give an answer to the increasing need for AI knowledge in society. It serves as an introduction into Artificial Intelligence – the technology that is shaping our lives more and more. The book includes 40 inspiring stories to transfer AI knowledge to any professional who wants to understand AI better. With this book MIcompany further shapes its mission to unlock the positive value of AI.

For almost three years, we have been closely collaborating with our colleagues at UMCG to apply AI in medical research. On that account, we were recently asked to share our perspective on a Nature article about SARS-CoV-2 (by Stukalov et al., 2021) for the News & Views section of Nature Immunology.

Success stories of entrepreneurs are shared in De Barometer. Every week the focus is on a different industry within the entrepreneurial world. Which factors provide opportunities and ensure growth? Each episode a different theme with different success stories. Sunday, 14th of Feb, RTL-Z featured MIcompany in an episode of De Barometer, talking about the operationalization of AI models at scale.

Due to the growth of GAIn – an open standard for AI education – Helen Rijkes is appointed as a partner of MIcompany. She will lead the GAIn Academy and within this academy focus on the development of company-wide educational programs to accelerate AI transformations. Furthermore, she will join the Management Team of MIcompany.

Israeli credit company MAX changed its modeling approach for their retail credit portfolio in order to become more value-driven. It moved from the traditional segment-based default models, which focus on the probability of a loan not reaching its end date, to predicting different value drivers on a customer level.

Nowadays, they are everywhere. Netflix uses them to determine what your favorite series is. Facebook uses them to recognize and tag its users in images. Google uses them for their translators, to interpret spoken language and even to develop a chess-playing bot which can defeat any of its human or artificial predecessors. They are even used in hospitals, for example, to identify diseases based on medical images, and in the financial sector they have become indispensable. In recent years, they have become the most reputable as well as the most infamous algorithm within the realm of Artificial Intelligence: artificial neural networks. But what exactly are these ‘neural networks’?

In recent months, Dutch Detail Result Group (DRG) and Israeli Shufersal, signed multi-years contracts with MIcompany to use AIRPro to further optimize their promotion strategy. In both cases, this is a continuation of the partnership the retailers already had with MIcompany.

This week we hosted a training in one of our most promising new topics: Bayesian Networks – a method which shows how different variables together cause an event to occur. The strengths of the method lie in the fact that it can estimate and show the dependencies between all variables in the model and that prior field knowledge by the research team can be formally included in the model.

On October 25th, 2017, Sophia became a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Even though this country has millions of immigrants among its residents, Sophia’s citizenship became world news. She was unique due to the fact that she was not born, but built. Sophia is a robot developed in Hong Kong that traveled around the world after her unveiling in 2016. She not only spoke at the United Nations but also became the first robot in the world to acquire citizenship. She appeared on numerous talk shows, in magazines, and even in videos around the world. Although interviews with Sophia did not always go smoothly, she became world-famous and brought the lightning-fast developments in artificial intelligence back into the spotlight.

Machine learning and data analytics offer a unique opportunity to guide our business decisions to be as impactful as possible, whether it is for addressing churn, optimizing prices or preventing fraud. However, there are many cases where traditional modeling techniques do not offer the desired guidance.