By: SpenceVladimir Stemkovski honored with an IBM award
Securing a major international metropolis with text analytics
Recently, one of our own jStart team members was honored with an IBM Everyday Hero award. This award recognizes individuals within the company who have gone above and beyond in performing services for their groups and the company. Below is the text of the internal notice which was distributed internally to IBMers, worldwide:
Vladimir Stemkovski is an IBM Strategy & Technology everyday hero
A large government law enforcement agency in one of the world's most populous cities recently chose IBM in an end-to-end Text Analytics solution competition. Vladimir Stemkovski, an IT architect on Strategy and Technology's jStart team in Raleigh, North Carolina, in conjunction with the TAG (Text Analytics Group), led the successful proof-of-concept (PoC) in a scant three weeks, over numerous other competitors.
While IBM offers solid Natural Language Processing (NLP) and analytic capabilities, Vladimir took the lead to create an end-to-end solution, working across several Software Group teams to build a successful PoC. He ensured that the team had components that would architecturally fulfill what they hoped were customer requirements--the governmental agency necessarily kept the working scenarios highly secretive until the teams arrived on site.
This twist by the client was not a simple task and took months of preparation to put IBM in the winning position.
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| Language not a barrier To add to the challenge, the entire solution was in Spanish and thus the dictionaries' NLP models would need to understand Spanish. Vladimir's first language is Russian and second language is English. He worked with LanguageWare colleagues from Ireland to the local software sales team based in a major Central American city, who had Spanish language skills, to complete this aspect of the project. |
The law enforcement agency defined the criteria for a successful PoC based on the results from an unknown number of test cases that were released on an unpublished schedule. For example, PoC graders expected the system to detect the new information and send appropriate alerts to an e-mail inbox. Vladimir and the team worked for months on a solution that possibly met the rigorous, cryptic demands in order to earn admission to the client's three-week competition: one week of setup, plus two weeks of test cases ending with a final demo
On site, Vladimir quickly became recognized for his ability to quickly modify text analytic models, run the necessary extractions and find the entities of interest within the live scenarios.
His problem-solving skills and the team's expertise helped close a multi-million dollar win.
