ARM Hub and DKE collaborate on Data and AI-as-a-Service

The ARM Hub has announced an official collaboration with Australian software company Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE) to deliver its Data and AI-as-a-Service initiative. Data and AI-as-a-Service is scalable and secure data and AI infrastructure designed to help companies to maximise their data to make informed business decisions.

The ARM Hub has been working with its manufacturing clients and university partners on data and AI since 2022. One of the key challenges faced by manufacturers is data management — a necessity for companies committed to digital transformation.

An initial service to clients through five voluntary digital advisors was replaced with the Data and AI-as-a-Service in 2023 as industry sought to harness the value of GenAI following the release of ChatGPT.

DKE, led by Dr Roozbeh Derakhshan, was appointed following a public tender process to collaborate on the delivery of the service.

Data and AI-as-a-Service is designed to help companies to grow their business using AI.

Every business collects data, whether from operations, sales or customers. Unfortunately, many miss out on valuable intelligence because they do not have the ability to bring the data from its many sources into one platform. This is particularly true for small and medium-sized companies (93% of all Australian business) because they cannot afford to build and maintain internal data management infrastructure.

A solution is the tailoring of AI tools for each business, such as chatbots and synthetic data generation.

DKE has played a significant role in helping the ARM Hub to partner with Databricks, which is supporting its Data and AI-as-a-Service.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform combines capabilities in data engineering, data science, analytics and machine learning. It is designed to streamline the process of turning big data into actionable insights by providing tools for managing data workflows, collaborative project environments and robust analytics.

In mid-2024, the ARM Hub hosted an industry seminar to showcase the application of the Data and AI-as-a-Service with Databricks and DKE. A key aspect was the demonstration of ARMBot by ARM Hub AI Engineer Callum Elder.

Developed with DKE, ARMBot is a Retrieval Augmented Generation-based Large Language Model (LLM) for ARM Hub. Like ChatGPT, ARMBot is a query and response-based model; however, ARMBot stores selected LLMs locally, only drawing on ARM Hub data.

DKE is also helping the ARM Hub to deliver the AI Adopt Centre for the Australian Government.

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