CHF 100’000 Grants for ClearSky and Emissium

Building secure Edge AI Mobile Assistants

The EPFL Tech Launchpad has just granted an award of CHF 100,000 to ClearSky – a technology which will use Edge AI technology to transform the way our mobiles use our data.

People, businesses, and governments are always looking for new ways to make life easier and automation of processes and tasks is just one way of doing this. Edge AI is the use of artificial intelligence in the device where data is located (like a mobile phone) as opposed to through connection to the cloud or a data center. This has opened opportunities for AI-enabled smart applications to perform tasks in the real-world with real-time data, while ensuring full privacy and personalization.

Contacted by Startupticker.ch, Co-founder Hugo Flayac tells us more about the project: “ClearSky's mission is to transform the way our personal data are processed on our mobiles so that they work for us and only us. We build Private, Personalized and Proactive Ai assistants working at our exclusive service thanks to "Edge Ai" technology. In particular, we help users to easily delegate admin work to, what we call, a "digital self". They get the ownership and control over their data at the same time. Our first App focuses on extracting key information from our voice conversations.”

ClearSky is an ambitious Ai project requiring very specific skills and expertise in Deep Learning and Speech Processing. Indeed, "Edge Ai" means that the Ai engine has to run directly on-device without any assistance from cloud servers (a prerequisite for total privacy). The team therefore has to combine state-of-the-art algorithms with smart model optimization to fit into a phone memory while preserving the highest accuracy possible. The signal processing lab of EPFL and the speech processing lab at IDIAP expertises will be key to bring these ingredients together. 

The team is currently working on a first beta app which will be brought to the market by the end of the year. EPFL and IDIAP will work on more advanced and versatile state of the art-speech-models for the next evolution of ClearSky ecosystem. The team is currently made up of the 2 co-founders and a machine learning/mobile developer. It is expected to rapidly grow in the upcoming month especially as the Innogrant project kicks off.

Decabornizing energy consumption

Emissium, a blockchain-based technology which has a vision to speed up the transition to more sustainable living by decarbonizing energy consumption, has been granted an award of CHF 100,000 from the Tech Launchpad.

About 40% of global CO2 emissions come from the world’s need for electricity. By 2050, according to International Energy Agency (IEA), electricity generation will triple, making it crucial to reduce emissions related to power consumption. But do we really understand the share of renewable energy in the electricity delivered to us in every moment? And if we did, could we adapt our consumption habits to reduce our true carbon footprint?

Emissium’s technology will allow real time tracking of the electricity down to city districts, empowering each end user, from large companies to households, to understand and act on the true carbon footprint of their electricity use. The team coming from the Industrial Process and Energy Systems Engineering at EPFL will use their grant to undertake a pilot project in Valais and, following the results of that, release a beta version of their technology later in the year.

The Tech Launchpad support comes at a key moment for Emissium as team co-founder Luise Middelhauve explains to Startupticker.ch. “The innogrant supports us in a critical time in which we are going to develop our proof of concept and release a first version of our software. We are currently building our demonstrator in Valais with our partner oiken. The next steps are to expand outside Valais and Switzerland. Currently we are only 2 (Alessio Santecchia and myself) but we are looking for support for our team.”

(Press release - ES)