Wisers signed an agreement with the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) of the HKSAR Government in May 2019, under which the company will get funding support from the Enterprise Support Scheme (ESS) of the ITF to embark on the research and development  of a smart marketing consultancy system based on multimodal media and big data, leveraging innovative AI technology and big data to mine and analyze the vast diversity of multi-modality data covering texts, images, videos and social media contents. The system will then predict market trends and make recommendation on executable strategies for successful marketing campaigns to help companies rise above their marketing challenges amidst increasingly fierce competition.

The Enterprise Support Scheme (ESS) is a major funding initiative under the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), which is designed to encourage the private sector to invest in research and development (R&D). Project period should generally not be longer than two years, and the funding recipients will own all intellectual property rights arising from the project. Funding approval will be processed according to the following criteria: Innovation and technology component; technical and management capability; financial considerations; commercial viability of project deliverables; and relevance with government policies or in overall interest of the community.

Sponsored by SSE, Wisers' project called Smart Marketing Consulting System Based On Multimodal Media Big Data is scheduled for R&D completion in 24 months with a timeline for launch by four phases. Our team consists of 27 researchers and developers with 9 of them having a doctoral degree and 10 having a master’s degree. The project is headed by Dr Chao He, Director and Chief Research Officer of Wisers AI Lab, with Dr Leung Wing-ki, Research Manager at Wisers AI Lab, serving as the project assistant.

Established in Hong Kong in July 2014, Wisers AI Lab is dedicated to the research and development of innovative AI technologies for addressing challenges in automated analysis and mining of diversified real-world open-domain cross-media big data. After five years of research and development, it has developed a number of proprietary text-based AI technologies with industry-leading accuracy for large-scale commercial use, including entity recognition, relation extraction, event discovery, disambiguation, topic classification, knowledge graph and sentiment analysis. It ranked NO.1 in the category of Single Document Summarisation in the 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2018).

New digital and social media marketing strategies have emerged thanks to the rapid development of social media, information technology and artificial intelligence as well as the changing consumers' lifestyle, their forms of interactions and communications. All these have changed how companies and brands make decision on leveraging technologies to market their products.

Various attempts have been made in using advanced information technology to address challenges in marketing, such as marketing campaign monitoring, competitor analysis, customer satisfaction surveys and personalized digital marketing. However, most of them could not provide decision makers with concrete and action-oriented advice on marketing and promotion. By riding on the advantages of AI and big data technology, our brand-new smart marketing consultancy system can come to the rescue. Through the system, marketing executives will have more clarity about their own and competitors’ positioning and strategies and customers’ demands, as well as the interrelationship between the three. More importantly, our system can project and recommend executable action plans to help businesses to design successful marketing campaigns and rise above their challenges.

The project will develop a novel algorithm for the analysis, and develop the necessary underlying AI technology to make predictive marketing possible. In addition, different new algorithms and tool solutions will be developed to address the technological challenges such as text understanding, computer vision, multimodal data mining and multidimensional analysis.

With Wisers' core competencies in the field of AI, its dedication to mining unstructured text and image data, and its years of experiences in serving customers from different industries in Greater China, the smart marketing consultancy system will provide original market insights and advise on marketing strategies to help corporate customers address the daunting marketing tasks in an increasingly competitive business landscape.