Dr. Mike Flaxman is presently the VP of Product at HEAVY.AI, having beforehand served as Product Supervisor and led the Spatial Information Science follow in Skilled Providers. He has spent the final 20 years working in spatial environmental planning. Previous to HEAVY.AI, he based Geodesign Technolgoies, Inc and cofounded GeoAdaptive LLC, two startups making use of spatial evaluation applied sciences to planning. Earlier than startup life, he was a professor of planning at MIT and Business Supervisor at ESRI.
HEAVY.AI is a hardware-accelerated platform for real-time, high-impact knowledge analytics. It leverages each GPU and CPU processing to question huge datasets rapidly, with assist for SQL and geospatial knowledge. The platform contains visible analytics instruments for interactive dashboards, cross-filtering, and scalable knowledge visualizations, enabling environment friendly huge knowledge evaluation throughout varied industries.
Are you able to inform us about your skilled background and what led you to affix HEAVY.AI?
Earlier than becoming a member of HEAVY.AI, I spent years in academia, finally educating spatial analytics at MIT. I additionally ran a small consulting agency, with a wide range of public sector shoppers. I’ve been concerned in GIS initiatives throughout 17 nations. My work has taken me from advising organizations just like the Inter American Growth Financial institution to managing GIS know-how for structure, engineering and building at ESRI, the world’s largest GIS developer
I keep in mind vividly my first encounter with what’s now HEAVY.AI, which was when as a guide I used to be chargeable for state of affairs planning for the Florida Seashores Habitat Conservation Program. My colleagues and I had been struggling to mannequin sea turtle habitat utilizing 30m Landsat knowledge and a buddy pointed me to some model new and really related knowledge – 5cm LiDAR. It was precisely what we wanted scientifically, however one thing like 3600 instances bigger than what we’d deliberate to make use of. Evidently, nobody was going to extend my funds by even a fraction of that quantity. In order that day I put down the instruments I’d been utilizing and educating for a number of a long time and went searching for one thing new. HEAVY.AI sliced by means of and rendered that knowledge so easily and effortlessly that I used to be immediately hooked.
Quick ahead just a few years, and I nonetheless suppose what HEAVY.AI does is fairly distinctive and its early wager on GPU-analytics was precisely the place the business nonetheless must go. HEAVY.AI is firmly focussed on democratizing entry to huge knowledge. This has the information quantity and processing velocity part after all, basically giving everybody their very own supercomputer. However an more and more vital side with the arrival of huge language fashions is in making spatial modeling accessible to many extra individuals. Today, moderately than spending years studying a posh interface with 1000’s of instruments, you possibly can simply begin a dialog with HEAVY.AI within the human language of your selection. This system not solely generates the instructions required, but additionally presents related visualizations.
Behind the scenes, delivering ease of use is after all very troublesome. At the moment, because the VP of Product Administration at HEAVY.AI, I am closely concerned in figuring out which options and capabilities we prioritize for our merchandise. My in depth background in GIS permits me to essentially perceive the wants of our prospects and information our growth roadmap accordingly.
How has your earlier expertise in spatial environmental planning and startups influenced your work at HEAVY.AI?
Environmental planning is a very difficult area in that you have to account for each completely different units of human wants and the pure world. The final resolution I realized early was to pair a way generally known as participatory planning, with the applied sciences of distant sensing and GIS. Earlier than selecting a plan of motion, we’d make a number of eventualities and simulate their constructive and unfavorable impacts within the pc utilizing visualizations. Utilizing participatory processes allow us to mix varied types of experience and clear up very complicated issues.
Whereas we don’t usually do environmental planning at HEAVY.AI, this sample nonetheless works very properly in enterprise settings. So we assist prospects assemble digital twins of key components of their enterprise, and we allow them to create and consider enterprise eventualities rapidly.
I suppose my educating expertise has given me deep empathy for software program customers, notably of complicated software program techniques. The place one pupil stumbles in a single spot is random, however the place dozens or lots of of individuals make related errors, you realize you’ve received a design subject. Maybe my favourite a part of software program design is taking these learnings and making use of them in designing new generations of techniques.
Are you able to clarify how HeavyIQ leverages pure language processing to facilitate knowledge exploration and visualization?
Today it appears everybody and their brother is touting a brand new genAI mannequin, most of them forgettable clones of one another. We’ve taken a really completely different path. We consider that accuracy, reproducibility and privateness are important traits for any enterprise analytics instruments, together with these generated with massive language fashions (LLMs). So we’ve got constructed these into our providing at a basic stage. For instance, we constrain mannequin inputs strictly to enterprise databases and to supply paperwork inside an enterprise safety perimeter. We additionally constrain outputs to the most recent HeavySQL and Charts. That implies that no matter query you ask, we are going to attempt to reply along with your knowledge, and we are going to present you precisely how we derived that reply.
With these ensures in place, it issues much less to our prospects precisely how we course of the queries. However behind the scenes, one other vital distinction relative to shopper genAI is that we superb tune fashions extensively towards the precise kinds of questions enterprise customers ask of enterprise knowledge, together with spatial knowledge. So for instance our mannequin is great at performing spatial and time sequence joins, which aren’t in classical SQL benchmarks however our customers use each day.
We package deal these core capabilities right into a Pocket book interface we name HeavyIQ. IQ is about making knowledge exploration and visualization as intuitive as doable through the use of pure language processing (NLP). You ask a query in English—like, “What had been the climate patterns in California final week?”—and HeavyIQ interprets that into SQL queries that our GPU-accelerated database processes rapidly. The outcomes are introduced not simply as knowledge however as visualizations—maps, charts, no matter’s most related. It’s about enabling quick, interactive querying, particularly when coping with massive or fast-moving datasets. What’s key right here is that it’s typically not the primary query you ask, however maybe the third, that basically will get to the core perception, and HeavyIQ is designed to facilitate that deeper exploration.
What are the first advantages of utilizing HeavyIQ over conventional BI instruments for telcos, utilities, and authorities businesses?
HeavyIQ excels in environments the place you are coping with large-scale, high-velocity knowledge—precisely the form of knowledge telcos, utilities, and authorities businesses deal with. Conventional enterprise intelligence instruments typically battle with the quantity and velocity of this knowledge. For example, in telecommunications, you may need billions of name information, however it’s the tiny fraction of dropped calls that you have to deal with. HeavyIQ permits you to sift by means of that knowledge 10 to 100 instances quicker due to our GPU infrastructure. This velocity, mixed with the flexibility to interactively question and visualize knowledge, makes it invaluable for threat analytics in utilities or real-time state of affairs planning for presidency businesses.
The opposite benefit already alluded to above, is that spatial and temporal SQL queries are extraordinarily highly effective analytically – however will be sluggish or troublesome to put in writing by hand. When a system operates at what we name “the velocity of curiosity” customers can ask each extra questions and extra nuanced questions. So for instance a telco engineer may discover a temporal spike in gear failures from a monitoring system, have the instinct that one thing goes fallacious at a specific facility, and verify this with a spatial question returning a map.
What measures are in place to forestall metadata leakage when utilizing HeavyIQ?
As described above, we’ve constructed HeavyIQ with privateness and safety at its core. This contains not solely knowledge but additionally a number of sorts of metadata. We use column and table-level metadata extensively in figuring out which tables and columns include the data wanted to reply a question. We additionally use inside firm paperwork the place offered to help in what is called retrieval-augmented technology (RAG). Lastly, the language fashions themselves generate additional metadata. All of those, however particularly the latter two will be of excessive enterprise sensitivity.
Not like third-party fashions the place your knowledge is usually despatched off to exterior servers, HeavyIQ runs regionally on the identical GPU infrastructure as the remainder of our platform. This ensures that your knowledge and metadata stay beneath your management, with no threat of leakage. For organizations that require the best ranges of safety, HeavyIQ may even be deployed in a very air-gapped atmosphere, making certain that delicate data by no means leaves particular gear.
How does HEAVY.AI obtain excessive efficiency and scalability with huge datasets utilizing GPU infrastructure?
The key sauce is actually in avoiding the information motion prevalent in different techniques. At its core, this begins with a purpose-built database that is designed from the bottom as much as run on NVIDIA GPUs. We have been engaged on this for over 10 years now, and we actually consider we’ve got the best-in-class resolution in the case of GPU-accelerated analytics.
Even the perfect CPU-based techniques run out of steam properly earlier than a middling GPU. The technique as soon as this occurs on CPU requires distributing knowledge throughout a number of cores after which a number of techniques (so-called ‘horizontal scaling’). This works properly in some contexts the place issues are much less time-critical, however usually begins getting bottlenecked on community efficiency.
Along with avoiding all of this knowledge motion on queries, we additionally keep away from it on many different widespread duties. The primary is that we will render graphics with out transferring the information. Then in order for you ML inference modeling, we once more do this with out knowledge motion. And if you happen to interrogate the information with a big language mannequin, we but once more do that with out knowledge motion. Even if you’re an information scientist and wish to interrogate the information from Python, we once more present strategies to do that on GPU with out knowledge motion.
What meaning in follow is that we will carry out not solely queries but additionally rendering 10 to 100 instances quicker than conventional CPU-based databases and map servers. Whenever you’re coping with the huge, high-velocity datasets that our prospects work with – issues like climate fashions, telecom name information, or satellite tv for pc imagery – that form of efficiency enhance is totally important.
How does HEAVY.AI keep its aggressive edge within the fast-evolving panorama of huge knowledge analytics and AI?
That is an excellent query, and it is one thing we take into consideration always. The panorama of huge knowledge analytics and AI is evolving at an extremely fast tempo, with new breakthroughs and improvements taking place on a regular basis. It definitely doesn’t harm that we’ve got a ten 12 months headstart on GPU database know-how. .
I feel the important thing for us is to remain laser-focused on our core mission – democratizing entry to huge, geospatial knowledge. Which means frequently pushing the boundaries of what is doable with GPU-accelerated analytics, and making certain our merchandise ship unparalleled efficiency and capabilities on this area. An enormous a part of that’s our ongoing funding in creating customized, fine-tuned language fashions that actually perceive the nuances of spatial SQL and geospatial evaluation.
We have constructed up an in depth library of coaching knowledge, going properly past generic benchmarks, to make sure our conversational analytics instruments can interact with customers in a pure, intuitive manner. However we additionally know that know-how alone is not sufficient. We now have to remain deeply linked to our prospects and their evolving wants. On the finish of the day, our aggressive edge comes all the way down to our relentless deal with delivering transformative worth to our customers. We’re not simply maintaining tempo with the market – we’re pushing the boundaries of what is doable with huge knowledge and AI. And we’ll proceed to take action, irrespective of how rapidly the panorama evolves.
How does HEAVY.AI assist emergency response efforts by means of HeavyEco?
We constructed HeavyEco once we noticed a few of our largest utility prospects having important challenges merely ingesting right now’s climate mannequin outputs, in addition to visualizing them for joint comparisons. It was taking one buyer as much as 4 hours simply to load knowledge, and when you’re up towards fast-moving excessive climate situations like fires…that’s simply not adequate.
HeavyEco is designed to supply real-time insights in high-consequence conditions, like throughout a wildfire or flood. In such eventualities, you have to make choices rapidly and based mostly on the absolute best knowledge. So HeavyEco serves firstly as a professionally-managed knowledge pipeline for authoritative fashions akin to these from NOAA and USGS. On high of these, HeavyEco permits you to run eventualities, mannequin building-level impacts, and visualize knowledge in actual time. This provides first responders the vital data they want when it issues most. It’s about turning complicated, large-scale datasets into actionable intelligence that may information quick decision-making.
Finally, our objective is to provide our customers the flexibility to discover their knowledge on the velocity of thought. Whether or not they’re operating complicated spatial fashions, evaluating climate forecasts, or making an attempt to determine patterns in geospatial time sequence, we wish them to have the ability to do it seamlessly, with none technical limitations getting of their manner.
What distinguishes HEAVY.AI’s proprietary LLM from different third-party LLMs when it comes to accuracy and efficiency?
Our proprietary LLM is particularly tuned for the kinds of analytics we deal with—like text-to-SQL and text-to-visualization. We initially tried conventional third-party fashions, however discovered they didn’t meet the excessive accuracy necessities of our customers, who are sometimes making vital choices. So, we fine-tuned a spread of open-source fashions and examined them towards business benchmarks.
Our LLM is far more correct for the superior SQL ideas our customers want, notably in geospatial and temporal knowledge. Moreover, as a result of it runs on our GPU infrastructure, it’s additionally safer.
Along with the built-in mannequin capabilities, we additionally present a full interactive consumer interface for directors and customers so as to add area or business-relevant metadata. For instance, if the bottom mannequin doesn’t carry out as anticipated, you possibly can import or tweak column-level metadata, or add steering data and instantly get suggestions.
How does HEAVY.AI envision the position of geospatial and temporal knowledge analytics in shaping the way forward for varied industries?
We consider geospatial and temporal knowledge analytics are going to be vital for the way forward for many industries. What we’re actually targeted on helps our prospects make higher choices, quicker. Whether or not you are in telecom, utilities, or authorities, or different – being able to investigate and visualize knowledge in real-time could be a game-changer.
Our mission is to make this sort of highly effective analytics accessible to everybody, not simply the large gamers with huge assets. We wish to be certain that our prospects can make the most of the information they’ve, to remain forward and clear up issues as they come up. As knowledge continues to develop and turn out to be extra complicated, we see our position as ensuring our instruments evolve proper alongside it, so our prospects are all the time ready for what’s subsequent.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to HEAVY.AI.
