Korea IT Times' Interview with Oh Sang-gyoon, CEO of BPU Holdings: 'ZimGo Polling' gains insight into people's feelings

NEW YORK, Sept. 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ZimGo Polling delivers accurate, actionable citizen sentiment as the cornerstone of successful campaigning. In the most recent South Korean presidential election, ZimGo Polling proved more accurate than six other polling services, including Gallup and CBS Realmeter. The U.S. version is now tracking elections using demographics and geography in national U.S. campaigns. 

Korea IT Times had an interview with Oh Sang-gyoon, CEO of BPU Holdings. He emphasized: "In today's connected world, data analytics must get smarter and faster to serve the real-time demands of election campaigning," and, "Next generation artificial intelligence must assess human emotional sentiment. People vote on emotion. ZimGo Polling gains insights into how people feel about real-time issues." 

Interview transcript

Q: For the Artificial Emotional Intelligence(AEI), can you elaborate on your updated technology for Political Forecasting and Healthcare?

BPU Holdings has been passionately developing state-of-the-art technology called Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) and sentiment analysis. BPU's advanced, AEI-driven NLP, Big Data and Machine Learning generate pioneering results that polling history has never witnessed before. Near real-time, ZimGo Polling estimates polling results for the elections and how people feel about the candidate's campaign and his/her political strategies. Whereas all pre-existing polling methods need to go through consecutive processes of modeling, sampling, panel creation, questionnaires and answers, ZimGo Polling requires none. It only requires the list of political candidates and keywords that the person wishes to analyze. In effect, ZimGo Polling eliminates all forms of human-induced bias surfaced during the steps typically taken in traditional polling and other alternative methods.

In an instant, all data can be analyzed in chronological order. The user (political candidate) can immediately learn about the public sentiment towards her/him and also about his competitors. In accordance with geolocation information, s/he in addition can closely trace the public's fluctuating preferences daily, periodically and even hourly. In short, ZimGo Polling provides its clients with the analysis on Tweet count, sentiment scores, and estimated voting rates to name a few metrics. Additionally, it delivers political preference analysis of the public, geo-location, rationale, age-group analysis, comparative analysis of political issues and respective advocacy rate of the candidates. On top of this, it spots the Social Media influencers and frequently-mentioned semantics of certain people, issues, and sentiments.

Another highlight is that ZimGo Polling removes the invasiveness and inaccuracy of telephone polls. ZimgGo Polling simply reads Social Media posts, where people are infinitely more honest and detailed about their political opinions. On Social Media, people look not just to vent their frustrations, but to obtain support from like-minded individuals; thus, sometimes these people manage to create the "network" effect when hitting a sensitive political nerve. Telephone polls are not able to get this level of honesty from respondents who may be more likely to answer with opinions they think are popular, or less abusive of someone else's opinion. Further, the decline of land telephones has massively disrupted the telephone polling industry with new regulations that prevent automated dialing, and telemarketing-style calls, where a land line might have insured that people would answer in the privacy of their home, with a cell phone they are just as likely to be in a public setting. Research shows that many cell phones also have blocking services preventing such calls. ZimGo Polling changes all that by revealing a new gold mine of information that is completely unobtrusive, unsolicited and highly accurate.

In Healthcare, we have a personalized, customized AEI to understand an individual's patterns and purposes. We try to bring light into recognizing their emotional patterns while providing tools to help overcome problems in accomplishing their goals. One of our products is aiMei Framework. She is also an emotionally intelligent automated assistant AI. She is based on Four Components of Emotional Intelligence:

1. Self-awareness
2. Social-awareness
3. Self-management
4. Relationship-management

Focusing on these four components, aiMei is able to proactively interact with the individual. In some instances, aiMei can communicate directly to monitoring devices to measure user activity and overall emotional and physical health. Coupled with biometric devices, she can measure pulse, vitals, step count, and even quality of sleep with digital precision, and health professionals can develop simple rules and models to make sure aiMei delivers an extremely intimate and personalized experience. The aiMei Framework goes beyond these measures and interacts with other AI's to communicate with users. Using expert developed dialogue, it links to other existing AI's like Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, and many other interactive AI's to be a 24-hour automated assistant. It can ask questions to determine mental or emotional states – even further, it can recognize potential scenarios of self-harm, even aid in the recognition of pattern-based ailments such as depression. With Component 3 and 4, we hope to provide solutions to help the user overcome areas they may lack in.

Q: Could you explain a competitive advantage you have on other AI and AEI companies? Can you provide an example on how BPU Holdings uses that advantage to support the individual and enterprise?

We focus on the individual. BPU does not provide one "single", global AEI service, rather, from many individually-focused AI's, we form one global AEI engine unilaterally. From a privacy perspective, when we evaluate each person individually, their data can be completely anonymized and even encrypted. In this sense each BPU service user will have their own customized AEI service against invasive attacks from massive "global" AI providers. Ultimately, an AEI is aware of the needs of their individual customers. By understating people individually, our AEI provides the easiest ways to launch service and products with ultratargeted audiences.

Q: What clients have used your technology in AI and AEI and what are their preferences?

Presently we have projects with the US National Science Foundation in partnership with the University of Arizona and the Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC). We are working with the Center for Autonomic Computing to develop an AEI Operating System called ZimOS as well as other AEI-related projects including a Medical Patient Assistant Bot based on our aiMei Framework. The bot framework will be used to pilot AEI applications in hospitals in Arizona. 

Our goal is to stimulate and perfect futures based on current personal choices that lead to better selections. What does that mean? By monitoring social media for political campaigns, the public is able to actually see the sway and movement of the public sentiment. If the public is divided in areas of sentiment, then the analysis shows these divisions. As a voter/constituent, this helps me see how my own personal contributions fit (or not) with the general public perception. This is powerful. We have worked with the government for the Korean Presidential Elections in 2017. We have also worked with several senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial races in the United States in 2018.

Q: Could you briefly explain how your applications and data are being developed to enhance: healthcare analytics, market assessment, consumer and voter sentiment, and delivering customized content in the Internet of Things?

The vision, the core of the ZimGo platform is to figure the system or meanings of every scene of our life or phenomena of nature by deep learning of patterns that humans don't have the ability to easily recognize. The data and knowledge we are collecting can be used to enhance the person's understanding of themselves, or their understanding and management of their relationships. By using the models being developed at BPU, applications can be more empathic, and more sympathetic to a human problem. As humans use or express their emotions for lots of reasons, BPU-powered technology can use these "synthetic" or simulated emotions to better help the person (synthetic because they come from a machine that cannot feel). At BPU, we are attempting to decipher the emotional DNA codes that we believed have been inherited; in part, thru emotion protocols from one generation to the next. That is very similar with generic information in DNA.

Q: What are your future plans for AEI technology as we enter into the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

As humans, we cannot control our heart beat and cannot sometimes understand our heart-motivated actions through our five senses. We think this is for a good reason. If we could feel our heart beats, we might be foolish to attempt to control our heart movement, which today is a complex orchestration, of chemical, physiological, and anatomical processes; thus, emotion is considered something we cannot deal with objectively. At BPU, we believe that understanding emotion will lead us to better data that will be used in a less obtrusive way; yet, lead to more effective communications – whether it's between candidates and constituents, or brands and buyers.

Q: What is the Impact of BPU Holdings technology on society and humanity?

Wow, that's a loaded question. We, of course, will change the world. It's a simple vision, really. By creating emotional models that can be used for many purposes, we are "teaching the machine to feel." In other words, if AI is the synthesis of how a human thinks, then AEI is the synthesis of how a human feels. Here's an analogy, the Tin Man wanted a heart, the Lion wanted to be brave, and Dorothy just wanted to go home; in the end we all want what is foreign to us; with AEI, we can give the Tin Man a way to understand emotion and to feel, and a way for the Lion to understand fear and overcome, and Dorothy, well, she has to figure out how to get home, but with the straw man getting smarter, she didn't have to solve the problem herself because … she had friends! Of course, AEI has nothing without relationships, but by understanding ourselves better, we can become more confident and we can improve our own lives by understanding our relationships. We can significantly improve our lives because we can communicate better. Better communication leads to better agreements; better agreements lead to trust; trust leads to great relationships. This is our technology map …first we will release software to help the person understand and manage
themselves, and through this we will teach the AI about human emotion. Then we will release software to help understand and manage relationships, increase awareness and develop trust. We will release API's and services from our ZimGo platform for those who want to take-part in our influence of change.

SOURCE Korea IT Times

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