Dynamind Labs

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Taxonomist and Arthropod Collections Manager of Ecdysis Foundation

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Our company promotes and supports regenerative agricultural practices through extensive monitoring of soil, plant and animal metrics on farms.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Dynamind Labs to accomplish?

• Develop a machine-learning algorithm for identifying insects from photos.
• Integrate the algorithm with our existing data-management software

SOLUTION

How did you find Dynamind Labs?

Other

Why did you select Dynamind Labs over others?

High ratings, Great culture fit, Other

What was the size of Dynamind Labs’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We hired Dynamind Labs to improve on an existing software program that we use to manage entomological data. Our program incorporates a machine learning algorithm to suggest identifications for arthropods from images, but our ML had a number of fatal flaws in it. They delivered a working ML with better performance metrics, with an automated training module to keep it updated; and they made some further alterations to our database to improve our workflow.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The ML achieved 70%+ success rate on test samples

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Dynamind was great to work with. They are knowledgeable on all aspects of our project, and they responded positively and productively to all of my queries and concerns. They are very organized, they communicate goals and deadlines clearly, and meetings are always a productive use of time. We ended up needing to extend our contract to deal with issues beyond their control, but they regularly delivered results in a timely manner.

What was your primary form of communication with Dynamind Labs?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Dynamind are very effective communicators. They provided regular written plans and summaries that were very thorough and professional. We always knew what they were doing, and had a good idea of how long it would take.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Dynamind Labs could have done differently?

We had a little confusion about the pay schedule at the outset, but we sorted it out easily enough, and they were accommodating. The confusion certainly wasn't only on their end.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the co-founder of a startup that is developing a technology to detect wildfires more quickly and cost-effective than currently used methods, using AI and IoT.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Dynamind Labs, and what were your goals?

We had a in-house trained AI model for wildfire detections and wanted to improve the quality of it. Our main goal was to have a more reliable AI model.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found them through a referral. Being able to tackle our work right away and in a cost effective manner was our priority.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They developed and tested a new AI model for wildfire detection. Deliverables where the trained model, local setup for further iterations and a step by step guide on how to execute and understand results.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were mainly 3 people, all of them developers with great expertise.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Timelines where met and the results where great. They performed as told and deliverables where as expected.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The project management was great and mostly done through google meet and slack. Having by-weekly meetings scheduled and being easily accesible for meeting at any time.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their involvement in the project, they where constantly suggesting improvements to further push the project in the right direction.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I run my own company, am founder/ceo.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Dynamind Labs, and what were your goals?

I was looking for a bright team to help with a project in which I was looking to use artificial intelligence to map all of the basketball hoops on the street in Portland Oregon. Doing it by walking the streets or even using Google Street View was not feasible, so I was looking for an automated solution.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

In our correspondence it felt like they had a strong grasp of the problem and had many solutions they were going to try.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They first identified the best way to collect the data, then it came to interpretation – in which the bulk of the work came in, in that they had to train a model for this specific use case. And finally the synthesis of the results.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I worked directly with Ignacio who I believe is one of the owners.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

This project was a complete success and I'm happy with the result. As it was a personal project, I didn't have any measure-able outcomes other than my satisfaction on it.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Very communicative, prompt on timelines and always around to answer questions.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their ability to think outside the box and come up with unique solutions was impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No, I was quite happy.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a relationship wellness tech company

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Dynamind Labs, and what were your goals?

We hired Dynamind to build a custom engine to use natural language understanding to return an analysis on sentences within milliseconds the assesses toxicity and aggression in sentences

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We interviewed several potential vendors. Ignacio and Dynamind stood out for their professionalism, know how and reasonable pricing

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

First we scoped the project in a call between me and Ignacio. Ignacio then did a review and analysis of available databases that can be used to train the model. He returned with a thoughtful PowerPoint detailing the potential paths we could choose, recommended a path that was not necessarily the most expensive and reduced risk for us. Key deliverables included a working prototype that has the ability to scale and improve. The deliverables were produced on time, on budget, and in every parameter met or exceeded expectations.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I worked directly with Ignacio but I was aware of two other members of the team

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project will lead to a productized end result that meets of exceeds my goals for the project in every parameter

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Ignacio uses email, conference and video calls, PowerPoint and excel, and Delivered the product on a server less database. He communicates very well in English both writing, reading and speaking. All communication was timely, professional, polite and productive

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

For a tiny shop, all suggested work was very professionally SOW’ed, thoughtfully considered and extremely well delivered. I’m very impressed

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Sincerely, no. Great work, great team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a CEO of Valoro software solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Dynamind Labs, and what were your goals?

Generating realistic voice in Spanish.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Tacotron2 model modified to the Spanish language and trained on an openly available dataset to be able to generate realistic Spanish audio.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

1. Test with already available Tacotron1 model in Spanish
2. Finetune model with custom tagged data
3. Modify Tacotron2 to work with Arabic as Tacotron1 model providing bad performance
4. Trained Tacotron2 model on openly available Spanish dataset

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 2 persons in the vendor's team, both helped in the development, but only one did some project management free of charge.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We were able to generate realistic audio from an excel with input text in the target language using a google collab.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The team described the next steps accordingly. There were some changes required but we discussed through the upwork chat.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They were able to modify the model for the language at hand and train a model from scratch for that language.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Faster responses in terms of updates, we discussed this with the project manager and they are working on it.