Chimes AI – A Leading AI Start-Up Reshapes the Environment, Society and Governance

“The essence of Chimes AI stems from sustainability, efficiency and democracy, building up a Smart Manufacturing AI for top tier enterprises.“

ESG has been a hot topic for at least a decade. Yet, some barriers exist which have given rise to the difficulty of business adoption. Emissions, Waste and By-products are massively released from manufacturing production line every second throughout the world. Conventional process, equipment and theory have restricted the way towards Carbon Neutral. On top, the manufacturing society and governance have been relatively isolated and undisciplined which impede the transparency of data, process history and value. Our mission is to integrate the environmental, social issues through our Chimes AI projects, with decent data scientists, governing the brand new ESG scopes.

However, most enterprises need coding masters, AI professionals and domain experts in order to embark an AI project. Chimes AI sees the No-Code trend as the most potential AI tool to resolve ESG matters. The company now releases a product – Tukey which is dedicated to building Code-free AI constructions, coupled with user-friendly, management platforms and smart manufacturing concepts to rule the ESG. With its vast experience in smart manufacturing, Chimes AI has developed Tukey, an AI modeling and management platform that helps companies to regulate ESG.

Johnson Hsieh, CEO of Chimes AI, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review on how he and his company are shortening AI processing time and creating business benefits such as Carbon Neutral for their clients.

Interview Highlights

Q. What makes your company unique, and what are its focus areas?

Chimes AI values the accessibility, sustainability and integrity which are the elements of humanity. We envision our future not only an AI for social good, but also a genuine democratic community.

The area that we focus now is accessibility. Our product Tukey offers four main features: a Code-free platform, Simple data cleansing, Fast and Easy AI model deployment, as well as Continuous update. First, Code-free Platform and Simple Data Cleansing are our product's biggest hits, and both features are done by drag and drop modules. Secondly, from CEO, Managers, engineers, professionals to operators, all can build their own Model Deployment easily with little time. After the model has been built with our powerful AutoML technology, a detailed analysis will be presented to help our targeted users analyze the model. Users can also compare the performance of models; easily handle model deployment and updates. Last, model APIs are provided so customers can use them in different situations, such as prediction dashboards, equipment monitoring, marketing analysis, and many more. We also provide customized services for API applications. In addition, Tukey accepts both cloud and on-premise annual subscriptions.

Tukey is adept at processing factory IoT, ERP, and CRM data. Our platform is compatible with every database system. We always have solutions to none csv, xlsx data formats. As for our model output, we use API to do requests and calls, which is the same standard operating process as Google.

Chimes AI's main product Tukey has been successfully introduced into Taiwan's top fields, including Formosa Plastics Group, Taiwan  Artificial Intelligence Academy (Taiwan's most representative artificial intelligence talent training field). In the Artificial Intelligence Academy, we deploy a hundred cloud users at the same time and perform machine learning operations. Ten workshops in the past year have all worked perfectly. Regarding the on-premise server, we deployed 500 sets of models in Formosa Plastics Group and allowed engineers and managers using them simultaneously. No matter cloud or on-premise, we have vast experiences maintaining the product's stability.

The operational process of Tukey software is not only a standard operating process in the top field of smart manufacturing but also a standard teaching material for AI talent cultivation.

Q. What do you understand by intelligent manufacturing? And how does Chimes AI come into play when it comes to this?

From our perspective, smart manufacturing is the overall optimization of the company. We are helping the enterprises achieve higher output, less losses, and higher profit without hardware equipment renovation.

Our primary aim is to optimize everyone, from managers to section chiefs to machine operators, as they face various roadblocks in implementing the optimization process.

Let's share what Chimes AI has done so far. Last year, the solutions provided by Chimes AI can easily solve the ESG issues such as moderating VOC, GHG and Carbon emissions reduction that enterprises urgently need to face. Our solutions can as well be used in equipment warranty, production optimization, and energy management. On the other hand, we helped Formosa Plastics Group generate roughly 20% production efficiency with easy access platform. Besides, we have helped enterprises reserve the experiences from talented workers which could help them pass on to the next generation.

Q. What methodology does Chimes AI implement to exceed customer expectations?

There are no shortcuts to exceeding customer expectations. Many optimization problems are often mixed with different levels of difficulties, and Chimes AI will not only provide tools when negotiating with customers but also allow users to solve problems when they have faced with none technical aspects – environment, society and governance.

As for the software itself, there are many advantages while comparing Chimes AI to other AutoML platform providers. We provide a friendly interface for data cleansing. Anyone who has done an ML project would know the importance of data quality. Users can do data cleaning easily by using simple filtering commands, combined with univariate and bivariate charts with drag and drop functions. Next, we provide full support to MLOps. Model Life Cycle Management Module and Model Operation Status Monitoring Module provide users high flexibility while facing different situations.

Besides, since we highly collaborate with the advanced manufacturing, wind power and petroleum industries, we provide a prosperous experience while solving ESG solutions, especially optimizing the manufacturing process. For example, we optimize the use of the distillation tower fuel in one of our clients, hinged on the perspective of saving energy, building community and trusted self-governing.

Last, we collaborate with various SI, BI, and ISV providers; Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, PI Vision and QlikView etc., are all available to connect with Chimes AI Tukey. Users can facilitate the flexibility of their projects while using our products, which help them transition to their familiar tools.

Q. How does your software—'Tukey'—benefit your clients?

A Table is worth a thousand words. Chimes AI's customers are mainly in the manufacturing, chemical, petroleum, semiconductor and education industries. The way we help them is through accessibility, simplicity and manageability.

The work we have done in the Formosa Plastic Group, for instance, they use Tukey in their server to solve Equipment Performance Maintenance problems. Tukey gives alerts of the equipment failure 14 days before human eyes can detect. Besides, it withdraws the false alarms. In the other case, we dealt with another top chemical company who shall be remain anonymous, helping them optimize the entire process. The chemical reaction recipe has been pitched with our Tukey, improving the production up to 20%. The yield has significantly enhanced through AI optimization, not to mention the by-product – 8-15% energy saving has been seen during the project. It has been about eight months since we fully launched this new product - Tukey, and it now serves 50 factories in Taiwan with more than 500 equipment such as compressors, distillation, absorption, pumps, extraction fans, etc.

The result was revolutionary, with a five percent increase in utilization rate. Hundreds of AI models are running behind the predictive maintenance system and supporting their intelligent decisions. 15 on-site workers with no programming skills did all these by themselves.

Our primary target in the Artificial Intelligence Academy is to empower managers with AI leadership. The basic knowledge of data science and innovative practices can also be generated in various workplaces. By doing so, we deploy a hundred cloud users at the same time and perform machine learning operations. Ten workshops in the past year have all worked perfectly.

Q. Will your company be expanding, bringing on any new services that we should be aware of?

Our business is growing fastly, and we are expanding our territories to oversea chemical enterprises, equipment manufactures and semiconductor industry.

We are now updating two major parts of Tukey, firstly, the expansion of the dashboard functions, and second, promoting scalable systems.

As to the new service, we have been creating a dashboard which could assist operators, managers and CEO to make decision with one-click. In order to correspond with current trend, we are combining different BI tools such as PowerBI and Tableau into our community in order to allow users to do modifications. Dashboards for professional use such as Distillation Tower, Absorption Tower and Compressor will also be established as standard versions with different modules. Users can obtain the information on dashboard in a peak of time. Simultaneously, they have a certain degree of modification ability.

In the second part, we decided to commercialize our experience. This year, we are on the verge of establishing five systems: Process Optimization, Equipment Performance Monitoring, Synthesis Formula Recommendation, and Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction.

The data collection procedure usually takes time and resources.  However, since we have hands-on experiences of past industrial AI services, which could help our clients transition to AI driven enterprises within a day. The data extracted from a new production line, our systems receive feedback on the prediction accuracy and automatically transfer the initial model by Auto-retraining to fit the real scenario. As a result, we can deploy our AI services at full speed with only one pre-trained initial model and let the models self-tuned by themselves along with the data streams of different production lines.

Q. No doubt Chimes AI is charting new territories in this segment. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future?

In the near future, we are heading to the territories of Semiconductor, IC design and PCB industries. We believe that we can strengthen the semiconductor technology even better. On top of this, we are building up bridges with top consulting firms, SI and Cloud providers as we foresee that one day we will be expanding our products to them and their users. With that being said, having done the market research, we have partnered up with multiple automation suppliers. We can help them to construct a solid AI engine, boosting up their quality, efficiency as well as revenue. If we see it on a bigger picture, this could not only help them and their users reliably using the automation machines, but also link their customer with our Tukey together – the integration of AIoT.

Q. Where do you see Chimes AI a couple of years from now?

We hope to build more AI technologies for ESG model. At present, what we have already practiced in Taiwan is used in places like Energy, Electricity, KPI, Inventory, Equipment management, Process, Production line and delivery optimization. These encounters are the main direction of Chimes AI's efforts in the next few years.

Q. What is your final message to The Silicon Review readers, your current and future clients, and partners?

Chimes AI uses AI tools to empower global enterprises regulating ESG with transparency. We integrate into the production environment of the manufacturing industry through the AI system Tukey and truly solve problems for the assembly line personnel, thereby improving the efficiency. The ideal aim of Chimes AI is to use AI technology to enable global enterprises to embark on the journey of sustainable development at the most economic cost. We welcome anyone who is interested in Tukey to contact us.

The Pre-Eminent Leader

Johnson Hsieh is the Chief Executive Officer of Chimes AI. Over the course of 10 years, Johnson has been a noteworthy leader in data science and artificial intelligence. He hopes to fulfill his dream to “democratize AI so that it can be accessible to everyone” through Chimes AI’s innovative initiatives.

“Tukey can establish AI models accurately, which greatly reduces the learning process of machine learning and data science, making it easy to operate no matter R&Ds, operators, and managers without AI backgrounds.”

“Tukey’s workflow and specialized modeling services can be done by making adjustments. In addition, Tukey accepts both cloud and on-premise annual subscriptions.”