Smartvid.io is a Boston-based software company focused on leveraging machine learning to improve safety, productivity, and quality in the $10T global AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry. Their SmartTag Engine leverages deep learning to listen to (voice recognition) and watch (image recognition) what is seen in a video or photos and then automatically tags it according to defined terms and alert conditions. The platform results in significant risk reduction, saves time for field personnel, improves owner communication, tames the challenge of enterprise-wide media management, and creates an alert and analytics framework for key aspects of project delivery.
There are two key parts of their solution:
- One is the acquisition of photo and video content, and that's where the Autodesk Forge platform API, comes in really importantly.
- The other part is in the analytics and workflow that they do on top of that content.
Smartvid.io developers are leveraging the Forge platform for integration with the Autodesk BIM 360 family of products.
They have already integrated with BIM 360 Field, and now they are integrating (and announcing at AU Las Vegas) their connection to BIM 360 Docs, where they be pulling in both photo and video content and then using it to identify and alert on safety and related issues.
Smartvid.io customers are excited about the added support because:
- Smartvid.io customers have a high volume of BIM 360 content that is being captured but not being analyzed. It's certainly not being analyzed using machine learning for safety and other analytics.
- Customers want Smartvid.io to be the center of their photo and video management strategy. So, they're collecting photos and videos through Forge, from other products, from their on-site web cameras, from Box and Dropbox, and they're putting it all into their system, so they can analyze it and then use workflows on top of it.
The benefits of the analysis gets to the core of the safety analytics, where Smartvid.io has trained machine learning classifiers to be able to identify when people are being unsafe by simply looking at the pictures or listening to the videos. This allows Smartvid.io customers to take corrective action based on the analysis results. In addition, the results are predictive indicators of risk, so by staying on top of those, they can take preventative actions to reduce risk, reduce the chances of incidents, save money, and more importantly, save lives.
Smartvid.io customers benefit from the ease of integration and vastly streamlined data flow between applications as a result of Forge. The solution is plug and play. Customers have data in BIM, and then they use Smartvid.io, and they can get at the analytics without any extra effort. Because what Smartvid.io developers have enabled them to do is to get into Smartvid.io, hook up a BIM project, and that's it, and then things happen magically, because Smartvid.io automatically pulls content from Forge, automatically analyzes it, and then customers get safety analytics and all the other analytics. The Forge platform allows Smartvid.io to make the data submission and data collection really, really, really smooth.
By leveraging the Auth part and then the Data Management part of the APIs, we're able to hook up and set up the connections between our platform and Forge, and automatically synch the data on a periodic basis, and apply analytics to it. The Smartvid.io solution uses Forge in two key ways:
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Authentication
Customers don't want to do extra actions. They just want to consume the results. The Auth part of the API effectively allows Smartvid.io to establish a connection between their BIM project and Smartvid.io, and the project and BIM 360 Docs, on behalf of a particular user. For example: There's a user in BIM 360 Docs that has some data and wants the data to be analyzed. When they come into Smartvid.io, they'll are presented with the connection platform and connection workflow, that delegates to Forge the authentication part of it, and establish trust between the Smartvid.io platform and Forge.
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Data Management
Once trust is established, Smartvid.io uses Forge to pull in all the accounts that the user has access to, pull in all the projects that the user has access to, and enables the user to choose for which account in the project the user wants the data to be analyzed. Once a user chooses that, then Smartvid.io has a file browser that makes calls to the Forge APIs. Smartvid.io allows the user to choose a folder that the data is located in. Once the folder is chosen, the integration is enabled.
At that point, there are no more user actions required to do anything. Smartvid.io automatically starts synching data in the background, bringing it into the entire platform and analyzing it. Customers can come into Smartvid.io and use search and tagging capabilities to analyze and consume the results of the analytics. When customers come into Smartvid.io, they understand the data they are seeing because they see familiar names of accounts and familiar names of projects in the system. Once they see that, they see the folder structure that they have on the Forge side, and on the BIM 360 side. The relationship is one-to-one, and they are able to browse that and make the selections.
At its base, Smartvid.io integrates with BIM 360 Field, BIM 360 Docs, Egnyte, and OxBlue among others.
One of the best benefits of the Smartvid.io integration with Forge is ease of use. If it wasn't for the Forge APIs, then, for users to get the analytics, they would have to download data from BIM 360 and re-upload it Smartvid.io. Right now, everything happens behind the scenes and automatically. The benefits of shorter project schedules and costs savings are derived from that. But most importantly, using Smartvid.io results in safer projects.
Smartvid.io sees an explosion of data in the AEC industry. They want to change that from being a challenge to manage and organize to being an opportunity by leveraging the power of machine learning to extract value from that data. To develop your own solutions, check out Autodesk Forge today. For those attending Forge DevCon, you can talk to the Smartvid.io team in person.