The business announcement, made at the Commercial UAV Expo, will also be discussed at the joint Skanska USA Building and Smartvid.io presentation, New Age “Reality Capture”: Leveraging Machine Learning and BIM to Organize Field Data. The business relationship is made possible by the Skanska Innovation Grant Program, which has been designed to foster applications of new technology to unlock value for Skanska and its clients. The pilot program will support the use of the Smartvid.io platform at select Skanska project sites around the U.S. to test and deploy machine-learning software for organizing field data such as photography and videos.
According to Oliver Smith, VDC Director in Skanska’s Innovative Construction Solutions group, “Construction jobs provide many unique challenges on a daily basis. The implementation of drone technology and other data capturing technologies can provide enhanced solutions to the areas of safety, quality control, logistics and planning, visual communication, and security to name a few. We’re excited to work with Smartvid.io to add valuable analysis to the ever increasing amounts of photo and video data we’re collecting via these methods.”
“After preliminary trials together, we’re excited to collaborate with Skanska to take the implementation of the Smartvid.io platform to the next phase with more project sites taking advantage of the tool,” said Smartvid.io Founder & CEO, Josh Kanner. “The areas of speech and image recognition have significant benefits in the AEC industry for everything from progress tracking, to safety, quality and even productivity analysis. In results from Skanska projects, we’ve already seen benefits from analytics of field photo and video data, whether from UAVs (drones) or the mobile devices of field personnel. We’re just getting started and see great potential going forward.”
The collaboration between Skanska USA Building and Smartvid.io has also been profiled recently by Commercial UAV News, in the article Drones in Construction: Organizing Field Data and Enabling Machine Learning.
About Smartvid.io
Smartvid.io, Inc. is a Boston-based software company focused on solving the management, collaboration, search and analysis challenges associated with industrial videos and photos. Its SmartTag Engine leverages machine learning to listen to (voice recognition) and watch (image recognition) what is seen in a video or photo and then automatically tag content according to defined terms. The platform saves significant time for teams, provides a better way to communicate with clients, tames the challenge of enterprise-wide media management, and provides a photo and/or video “insurance policy” which allows for easy retrieval of key imagery.
Smartvid.io’s founding team has worked together in various software companies for over 15 years, helping to change the way people work. Most recently, the team started Vela Systems which pioneered the use of mobile technology in the AEC industry (architecture, engineering and construction), growing to tens of thousands of deployments all over the world before being acquired by Autodesk®. Visit us at www.smartvid.io.
About Skanska USA
Skanska USA is one of the largest, most financially sound construction and development companies in the U.S., serving a broad range of clients including those in transportation, power, industrial, water/wastewater, healthcare, education, sports, data centers, government, aviation and commercial. Headquartered in New York with offices in 31 metro areas, we have more than 11,000 employees committed to being leaders in safety, project execution, sustainability, ethics and people development. In 2015, our work in building construction, civil and power/industrial construction, commercial development and infrastructure development (public-private partnerships) generated $7.1 billion in revenue. Global revenue of parent company Skanska AB, headquartered in Stockholm and listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, totaled $18.4 billion in 2015. Skanska shares are publicly traded in the U.S. on the OTC market under the symbol SKBSY through a Level I American Depository Receipt program.
