What if? What if you could anticipate the next issue, the next threat to face your business? What if you could predict which of your banking customers were likely engaged in money laundering? Or which of your hospital patients might be contemplating self-harm? What if you could predict and prevent the next school shooting or terrorist attack?
What if?
Those are the type of questions that we constantly ask ourselves at Lumina Analytics, LLC. We're a business dedicated to using data and technology as a force for good - namely, keeping people, businesses and places safe and secure. And in pursuit of that goal, we developed our Radiance solution.
Forewarned is forearmed
Radiance is an open-sourced search engine that uses machine learning and AI to gather, consolidate and analyze indexed information from across the internet. We've built the system to add to our portfolio of tools that empower businesses and communities to solve really large problems. As a result of automation, Radiance can perform thousands of searches in just a matter of minutes.
Do you need to thoroughly vet last-minute airline passengers without delaying takeoffs? Would it be helpful to know before you hire a candidate that they may not be able to meet the requirements for a security clearance? Can you identify risks to help protect the things that matter?
With the initation of a single query - typically using an individual's name - Radiance will search the entire internet to gather the publicly available information related to the search and compare those results against behaviors identified in our proprietary Behavior Affinity Models (BAMs).
These BAMs are collections of terms, phrases and other details that relate to risk factors shared by specific affinity groups that can vary between industries and use cases. For example, if you examine active shooters, they often display common online traits and actions before they turn violent. With Radiance, law enforcement could search through large population sets of publicly available data to identify individuals displaying these same behavioral anomalies.
Similarly, banks need to conduct in-depth searches for Know Your Customer due diligence. Government agencies need to perform background checks before granting contractors access to certain installations. And commercial companies have a constant need to monitor for the behavioral indicators that lead to reputational risk or indicate an insider threat.
Right partner, right platform
Businesses have benefited from the Radiance solution for several years, but we recently made the choice to move it to the IBM Cloud to help elevate the offering's speed and accuracy.
Our co-founder, Dr. Morten Middelfart, has long been interested in the advances in data science and technology that IBM has pioneered, and in June 2020, we chose to perform a proof of concept (POC) for Radiance on the IBM Cloud.
We immediately knew we had something great - Radiance performance on the IBM Cloud far exceeded what was possible in the previous environment. On IBM Cloud, our algorithms are operating closer to the bare metal, boosting speed and yielding fewer inherent communication errors.
For an instance of Radiance, we configure it to run across 300 virtual servers, and if an error were to occur during communication between the servers, system performance slows down. When we were looking for possible cloud providers, the acceptance test we designed required a platform to meet a minimum testing benchmark of processing 2,000 names in 24 hours with fewer than 100 errors.
During the POC, Radiance, operating on the IBM Cloud, was able to process 3,900 names with only six errors. And as we continue to enhance our platform and work to improve the its speed and accuracy, a recent test processed nearly 8,000 names in 24 hours with zero errors.
Choosing to become an IBM Business Partner, we also signed an IBM Embedded Solution Agreement (ESA) that offers a unique opportunity where we can go to market together with IBM. With our previous cloud provider, support was often a concern. With the ESA, we are approaching our customers with a single agreement for the total solution. In turn, we know that when we need support, we'll be talking to an IBMer, not a contractor.
Even better, as we've prepared to return to the market with our hardened, strengthened version of Radiance, IBM also invited us to participate in the IBM Cloud for Financial Services program, making Radiance available to a wider audience of other IBM Business Partners.
We will never stop pursuing our mission to utilize technology as a force for good, and moving forward we're looking to further integrate IBM services to continue to strengthen the capabilities of Radiance and what we offer our clients. These advances will put our customers in a better position to prioritize their risks and protect the people and things that really matter.