OCI Process Automation and Oracle Artificial Intelligence in Action

It’s very interesting feature what recently delivered with OCI Process Automation.

It’s possible now to upload in your workflow a document such a passport, driver license, … documents from where it’s possible to automatically extract data.

No more manual procedures but everything managed by the solution to automate business processes.

This is a meaningful improvement of the OCI offering highlighting synergies and native integration among the big number of OCI services available in each OCI region of the world.

Artificial Intelligence is today the most relevant technology from which we can take advantage in simplifying our lifestyle, reducing time with bureaucracy, and getting a benefit from other several new services before unimaginable.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Document Understanding, what natively integrated in Oracle Process Automation, is an Oracle AI service that enables developers to extract text, tables, and other key data from document files through APIs and command line interface tools. With OCI Document Understanding, you can automate tedious business processing tasks with prebuilt AI models and customize document extraction to fit your industry-specific needs.

You can easily identity this service navigating the OCI Console in the Analytics & AI section.  

With this service, you can upload documents to detect and classify text and objects in them. You can process individual files or batches of documents using the ProcessorJob API endpoint.

The following pre-trained models are supported and offering support for different pre-trained model like:

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Text extraction
  • Key-value extraction
  • Table extraction
  • Document classification
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) PDF

In your daily life, how many times you need to show your passport, your driver license, or your health insurance card to start a new request?

Some examples are:

  • Renting a car
  • Accessing the hospital to do triage
  • Medical checkup in healthcare
  • Hotel check-in

This is the reason why today Oracle can offer this added value in his Cloud offering… to simplify your daily activity, to make your life better.

A simple process, as I said before, can be that one about the “Car Rental”. Trying to imagine a human workflow behind, we can think about a BPMN process used to manage every step where for example an approval is required.

We can also imagine, not necessarily a process behind but simply the need to upload some info or data which need to be sent to other applications or database so that OPA can be used to easily configure a webpage from where it’s possible to upload data into an Oracle Database using its REST adapter or leveraging the DB adapter included in Oracle Integration Cloud Enterprise Edition (which includes OCI Process Automation).

I have tried to imagine a “Car Rental” process designing a step by step process for example when a long term rental is requested and its acceptance needs to be approved

As you can see below, when you design your WebForm from OCI OPA Console you can find on the right side, included in the activities section, the new icon about the AI Document Understanding.

This icon can be dragged & dropped into your canvas to model the web UI as you prefer and need.

It’s a pre-built integration, so you don’t need to think about REST invocation or similar. Everything is pre-configured for you and then you can easily use it without coding or similar stuff.

Once the process is implemented (here a quick overview how to do it), you can enable this one for production purposes

The operator can use the web UI to start a new request, clicking on the pre-defined process and/or including the new application in a web portal or into the Oracle SaaS springboard in according to the specific process.

Once the operator has identified the right process, clicking on the “Nuova Richiesta di Noleggio”, the webform appears to accept the required info.

If, AI Document understanding, has been properly configured, the end user can upload the image of the passport, or other provided documentation, so to start the automatic data acquisition

In a while, you can see how automatically all personal data appear on the right side of the page, filling the right field.

You can, of course, add other info to enrich the information required … something like below included. The web UI is highly customizable, and you can build your own web page as the business requires.

In this way, the desk operator can scan your documents and with a simple click, uploading the image, it’s possible to collect all the required information without huge effort taking advantage of:

  • Less time for data entry
  • Less errors for manual activities (i.e. reading passport and typing them)
  • Better and quicker customer experience

I encourage you to test it by yourself to personally understand how much it’s easy to do it. A very low effort to improve processes introducing in your business innovation, efficiency, and automation.

Helpful resources:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/user-process-automation/implement-intelligent-document-processing-forms.html#GUID-1C3EF754-8BAC-410E-B915-5A63F3EA786C

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/document-understanding/using/pretrained_doc_document_class.htm

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/post/intelligent-document-processing-in-oci-process-automation

#FormulaAI Hack – In Review

(With more to come with the winners being announced)

On Friday 18 March 03:00 PST | 06:00 EST | 10:00 GMT | 15:30 IST | 21:00 AEDT, Hackmakers will announce the winners of the #FormulaAI Hackathon 2022. It will be an exciting moment to conclude the event. Stay tuned at https://www.formulaaihack.com/ to watch the public live stream.

It’s been an immense learning experience for many people (including myself). Here’s a snapshot of some of those learnings when I look back in review. Please note that the content below does not contain any spoilers about winners and solutions delivered.

Continue reading “#FormulaAI Hack – In Review”

#BuildWithAI 2021 Team Tribute

#BuildWithAI Hackathon 2021 comes at a different point in time. Last year it was a little of an unknown. This is the second year that this event has been run and there was more of an understanding about what to expect and who might be participating.

As like last time, it is a privilege to write this article as there has been significant effort to get to these outcomes. If all I do is to highlight those that have been generous with their time, knowledge and willingness to participate, then it is a service that I will do every time. Here is a recount of some of the teams that participated at the #BuildWithAI Hackathon 2021 (and who were the winners).

This is a tribute.

The one ask that I do have for those is to connect. Connect with the problem; connect with the team and make this tribute more than an article but a way to #BuildWithAI.

Continue reading “#BuildWithAI 2021 Team Tribute”

#BuildWithAI 2021 – Another Step

Last weekend (from Friday 29th Oct to Tuesday 2nd Nov), was the #BuildWithAI Hackathon 2021 where participants, mentors, sponsors and organisers gathered together to solve real world challenges with AI. This event does not standalone. In a world full of change, this (from my perspective) started last year in the #BuildWithAI Hackathon 2020 and continued to build.

This article is about the event but the event itself is just “Another Step”.

Continue reading “#BuildWithAI 2021 – Another Step”

#WorldInnovationDay Tech Showcase

April 16-19 saw people from across the world come together to focus on three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon. This blog highlights the technologies used to help accelerate the team’s execution. If you want to read more about the event itself – check out this previous blog (here).

Over the course of the weekend, Oracle Cloud tenancies with $500 USD credits were provided to each participant to use. It was not mandated that they use Oracle Cloud nor was it given to participants automatically. It was encouraging to see people open to explore and learn with Oracle Cloud. I want to thank the Oracle mentors supported the participants ensuring that whilst the teams explored, they could confidently execute and deliver. Here are the common requests from teams and the cloud services that they used over the weekend.

Continue reading “#WorldInnovationDay Tech Showcase”

#WorldInnovationDay Hack Information Pack

We are providing to each participant access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for the hackathon. The following resources are to make you effective with OCI.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

From past hackathons, we noticed a trend of what technologies and services are being used by the winning teams. Here are the top resources with some additional references.

  • For a single platform to store JSON, Graph & Spatial, perform ML or deliver Low-Code Apps, use Autonomous Database (here)
  • For establishing infrastructure with your OS of choice, use OCI Compute (here)
  • For Jupyter notebooks and ML packages, use Data Science Cloud (here)
  • For quick self-service and data visualisation, use Analytics Cloud (here)
  • For making sure everything is secured, use Oracle Security (here)
  • For most things you need for #AppDev, use Oracle AppDev (here)
Live Labs

You will need to learn quickly. These hands-on workshops will help you learn more about the services available.

  • For those who are interested in a single platform to store data (here)
  • For those who want to #lowcode (here)
  • For adding Blockchain to your datasets (here)
  • For those who are interested in data science (here)
  • For ML on datasets in the database (here)
  • For data storytelling with data visualisation (here)
  • For building microservices applications (here)
Next Steps

There will be a series of workshops where we will be present on different OCI topics in the week leading up to the hackathon. Make sure you have these in your calendar so you don’t miss out.

And reach out on the #WorldInnovationDay Hack 2021 Slack workspace if you need anything from the team.

Each Little Bit Helps …

If you had come here because of the link in the information pack, great. If you have come here because you found this page through other means – read on and if you are inspired to contribute (on April 16-19) – head to the Hackmakers site (here) to register for this event.

Continue reading “Each Little Bit Helps …”

#DigitalDefence Hackathon … The Why?

Head to https://hackmakers.com to register as a competitor or to showcase your project / product.

It’s almost 9 days before the event launches on the Friday night. Even before that, there are a series of workshops / webinars that we are hosting as part of the event in the days leading up to the event. Even then we are:

a/ Making sure that we have people, mentors, marketing, product managers, executives lined up to help where they can.
b/ Making sure that we have ideas, platforms, trials, programs, education material lined up to help where it’s feasible.
c/ Making sure that we help promote, advocate, market the event so those who would benefit would know about the event and attend.

All this effort for what outcome?

This says it all. And even though this is about #anomalydetection #deepfake #cybersecurity, much of this comes down to data – where the data can be sourced, how the data can be analysed, is the data reliable and can it be trusted.

Over the coming days leading up to the event – there will be plenty of chatter around it. Follow the event on LinkedIn. Some easy ways to follow are:

1/ Follow #DigitalDefence at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=digitaldefence
2/ Follow Hackmakers at https://www.linkedin.com/company/hackmakers
3/ Follow me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lowe-jason/

I’ll be writing more about it here as we go and as new content is available. If you are interested to know or more if you want to join a team or showcase a project or product – head to the Hackmakers website https://hackmakers.com/ to learn more and register.

#BuildWithAI Announces Winners

I’ll keep this one short as we have done a specific writeup about this event. If you hasn’t seen it – check out this previous article #BuildWithAI – A Hackathon Experience. The winners have been announced and published … Here’s a quick summary of who won what.

Continue reading “#BuildWithAI Announces Winners”

#BuildWithAI – A Hackathon Experience

On August 17th, we’ll be announcing winners of the #BuildWithAI hackathon and it will be live-streamed on youtube – https://youtu.be/URuB0FtBIJo (note – set your reminder). Cassie Kozyrkov (Chief Decision Scientist, Google), Steve Nouri (Board Member, Hackmakers), Cherie Ryan (Regional MD of ANZ and VP, Oracle) as well as an all-star judging line-up will be there.

Before we get to that, lets rewind, fast-forward and bring together some of the interesting points of the #BuildWithAI hackathon – an event that was truly global in its nature hosted by Hackmakers (https://hackmakers.com/).

July 24th 11:45am AEST – I received a calendar alert for the Leader Mentor Zoom session for the #BuildWithAI hackathon. Trying to finish as many of the things that I needed to get done before I joined this call. This will be interesting. Watching the number of competitors join the event’s slack workspace climbing from a hundred users when I first joined, to now over 3,500 users in the #introductions channel, it was an unique experience. I’m thinking about lots of different things from past hackathons that I’ve participated, mentored, sponsored, hosted – how will this one be any different. I’ll just have to wait and see. And better yet, give to the community and the competitors as much as I can in the time we have.

This moment was not the beginning nor the end of this experience. It was somewhere in between. I’ll give you some background.

Continue reading “#BuildWithAI – A Hackathon Experience”